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>Most of the privacy claims (of all type of apps) are essentially garbage... True. Everything has backdoored CPUs as its foundation. Consider, for starters: (I
by The_Goonies1985 6mo ago
>Most of the privacy claims (of all type of apps) are essentially garbage...
True. Everything has backdoored CPUs as its foundation. Consider, for starters: (Intel's 'Management' Engine); AMD's (PSP); Apple/Arm (black-box hardware).
You can layer as much theater as you like on top of the hardware-surveillance-layer in modern computers; it still won't grant you privacy.
- badgersnake 6mo agoPower is open. But nobody wants to build power devices for some reason.
- ricardobeat 6mo agoPower?
- supermatt 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA
- ricardobeat 6mo agoRISC-V is also open. That “some reason” is likely to be power/performance levels being quite far from ARM & Intel for consumer devices.
- vrganj 6mo agoChina is building out RISC-V, just like they are leading actually-open AI. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3347684/alibaba-debuts-its-latest-risc-v-based-chip-amid-shift-ai-agents https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3347684/alibaba-d... Weirdly, the authoritarian state is the one saving us from our own digital authoritarians.
- NitpickLawyer 6mo ago> they are leading actually-open AI. How are they leading? If I parse this correctly, "actually" open would mean fully open data training and weights? Then, by this definition, I'm only aware of Olmo (AllenAI - Seattle), Apertus (Swiss) and to some degree (unclear what data was actually published) Nemotron (Nvda, US). What are some examples of chinese similar models? (I'm not aware of any).
- badgersnake 6mo agoRISC-V is slow though
- snvzz 6mo agoRISC-V is an ISA. There's nothing inherently slow about it, anymore than there is anything inherently slow about x86 or ARM. High performance microarchitecture implementations are definitely possible. Some of them are available for licensing. At least one of them (Tenstorrent Ascalon) has been tapped out into a chip and will show up in development boards later this year.
- badgersnake 6mo agoIf you can’t buy a fast one, then it’s slow. It might not be slow forever, but it’s slow now. I’d love to see an open ISA that is fast. But I don’t understand why the industry decided to start over with RISC-V when the compilers and toolchains and chips already existed in power land.
- snvzz 6mo ago>If you can’t buy a fast one, then it’s slow. Shrug. The first RVA23-compliant chips are coming soon. spacemiT K3 imminent (likely shipping boards this month) and Tenstorrent Ascalon (via Atlantis SoC devboard) this summer. These won't be the fastest CPUs available, but they'll meet the "fast enough" criteria for many uses and users. Multiple parties including Tenstorrent expect performance parity with the ARM and x86 offerings available at the same time by 2028. Note performance is mainly gated by access to latest fab nodes, which comes with costs that necessitate serious volume. They expect to be there by then. >But I don’t understand why the industry decided to start over with RISC-V when the compilers and toolchains and chips already existed in power land. The rationale was documented in the "Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V" paper[0]. Note OpenPOWER is mentioned but is not in the comparison. The reason for that is simple: RISC-V predates OpenPOWER. It was an obvious reaction to RISC-V, and they were too late, as RISC-V already had the industry's attention. Furthermore, Open is a lie; payment to IBM is required in practice. 0. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.pdf https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jagged-chisel 6mo agoThat’s no guarantee that a Power implementation isn’t compromised.
- UltraSane 6mo agoThey are very expensive. Cheapest Power9 system Raptor Systems has is $6,794.99 and it has only 4 cores and 8GB DDR4 RAM and 128GB SSD. Reminds me of Sun Sparc pricing. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1SD1/intro.html https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1SD1/intro.html
- badgersnake 6mo agoYeah, that’s because nobody is building them so they have to use IBM server chips.
- UltraSane 6mo agoWhy is the motherboard so expensive?
- badgersnake 6mo agoSame problem, low volume
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- fsflover 6mo agoThis is security nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
- txrx0000 6mo agoCounter-surveillance is not a binary switch. We can win by forcing the government to use increasingly expensive backdoors and exploits (>$10k per capita per year, beyond which mass surveillance is impractical even with a $1T budget). Hardware backdoor capabilities are costlier to maintain and use than something at the app level. Encrypting content and leaving metadata exposed is still better than encrypting nothing because they'll have less info to work with which means more effort. The point of all this is not to make it impossible for the gov and corps to surveil a targeted individual (of course they'd be able to if they expend enough resources). The point is to ensure that they only have enough resources to do targeted operations rather than blanket mass surveillance. The former is fine for a democracy, but the latter destroys it.