ngomez · HackerTrans

18 giorni fadiscuss

You can grind some of the raw silicon out of a finished wafer but I don't think it'd be suitable to use in another batch of product. So instead of having the weights on the wafer like OOP was suggesting, hardware inference has been trending toward having a wafer of lots and lots of smaller cores with fast SRAM.

ngomez

18 giorni fadiscuss

Using the space of an entire wafer for one chip would result in extremely low manufacturing yields. Even with state of the art silicon cleanrooms, there will still be defects in parts of the output.

With CPUs and GPUs, chip makers can disable faulty cores and bin them as lower SKUs to get some yield out of it. But if you're using an entire wafer to embed weights, and a speck of dust causes a printing defect that makes the weights wrong, the entire wafer is worthless.

ngomez

2 mesi fadiscuss

The CloudFlare blog discusses that idea when they talk about having an "agent process" to hold cryptographic material, but they list drawbacks like having to develop two processes, implement a well-defined interface, and enforce ACLs. I'm not convinced that "developing two processes" is a reason not to do it, since the kernel is effectively just the second process now, but everything else makes sense.

It's unfortunate though since this is one thing I think Windows does decently well. The Windows crypto and TLS APIs do use a key isolation process by default (LSASS) and have a stable interface for other processes to use it [0]. I imagine systemd could implement something similar, but I also know that there are very strong opinions about adding more surface area to systemd.

[0] https://blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Kambic-Cunni...

ngomez

3 mesi fadiscuss

Interestingly, Microsoft has been trying to get ahead of this for a couple of years now with their National Partner Clouds program [0], which they describe as:

> designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is required

In France's case, Capgemini and Orange have a joint venture to operate datacenters that Microsoft runs Azure and Office on top of [1]. Moving away from Windows and Teams would still reduce their dependence on Microsoft substantially. But if the core goal is to reduce dependence on non-European suppliers, I would be wary of the French government buying services from "Bleu" when it's mainly Microsoft and a couple of consultancies in a trenchcoat.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sovereign-clou...

[1] https://www.capgemini.com/news/press-releases/capgemini-and-...

ngomez

anno scorsodiscuss

I've been trying uBO Lite myself for a few months, and anyone who uses YouTube will absolutely notice that it's worse at blocking. Lite tends to delay playback at the start of a video for as long as the blocked ads would've been, making the site feel slower, and once in a while an ad will slip past the blocker anyway.

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