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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • When I was around 12, I was learning about overclocking, and accidentally killed my dad’s graphic card, an Nvidia FX 5900.

    I vividly remember launching The Sims 2 to test my overclock, when suddenly the screen started turning on and off (the video driver was probably crashing and restarting), and after I reset the PC, there were 2 green lines on the screen and XP was stuck in 640x480 16 colors because not even the basic display driver was able to load.

    My dad was mad obviously because it was an expensive card, the damage wasn’t covered by the warranty, and he was into gaming too at the time. I was stuck with integrated graphics for about a month while we waited for the geforce 6000 series to come out.

    I was so scared of overclocking after this happened, I didn’t try it again until a few years later years later when I had my own computer (and killed another card, a 9800GX2).



    • Can’t use my phone for more than 10 minutes because it makes my eyes hurt
    • Understanding the mechanics of new games feels harder than it used to be
    • Can’t easily remember the names of characters in a game/movie I’m watching
    • Can’t remember the names of functions for programming languages I’ve learned recently, always need to keep the documentation handy
    • I find it absolutely counterintuitive to use “modern” functions in programming like lambdas (and functional programming in general can’t get into my head)
    • I almost always HATE changes in the OS and programs I use, while I used to love beta-testing stuff
    • Can’t get into new hobbies and interests
    • Still listen to the same genres I used to listen to 10 years ago
    • 2019 feels like a few months ago, not half a decade ago
    • Getting worse and worse at rhythm games

    I’m 33.



  • I may be partially responsible for this lazy ass implementation.

    3 months ago I was playing around with stable diffusion a lot and because I sleep in the same room where my PC is, I used to lower the TDP of the GPU during the night to 150w to keep it quiet. One day while SD was running, I lowered the TDP in LACT and pressed Apply but instead of getting quieter, the fans ramped up and I was shocked seeing that the card was in fact pulling 420w instead of its rated 293w (6900xt).

    I tracked down the issue to the driver incorrectly applying the power limit, basically if you set a TDP that’s too low for the current power state, the driver would disable the power limit entirely until the card entered a lower power state, after which, your new TDP would be correctly applied.

    Running a modern GPU without power limits is bad and potentially dangerous for everything involved: the GPU, the VRMs, even the power supply cables may melt as we’ve seen with nVidia cards. So I reported the issue immediately to the AMDGPU developers (my issue is linked in the article).

    They quickly came up with a fix, which I tested, which wouldn’t allow you to set a TDP lower than the lowest valid TDP for the highest power state. This gets the job done but it’s a kludge more than a fix, ideally the driver should realize that the new TDP is too low for the current power state and switch to a lower power state, and I don’t know why AMD implemented such a shitty solution in their official kernel driver.








  • It gets better bro.

    I’m 33 and I was in a worse situation:

    • Started getting depressed in 2011 at the age of 20
    • Graduated in CS in 2016, super late, but with top grades
    • Started working as a software developer, hated it
    • For a few years I switched between working in a local computer shop and uni to get a master’s degree
    • Again, I graduated super late in 2021 but with top grades
    • Still hated working as a developer and now hated working as a technician too
    • At the end of 2021, I got a call from my old high school, they needed someone to teach programming
    • Decide to give it a try, absolutely love it
    • Suddenly, depression is gone and I have a reason to get up in the morning
    • A 10 year old nightmare is over, still single though






  • Various reasons over the years:

    • Don’t want to risk making the workplace unpleasant (twice)
    • Wrong race that would upset my parents (twice)
    • Lives too far away (twice)
    • Age gap (once)
    • Me being exposed to porn at a very young age (first time I was 3 or 4, and I grew up with unsupervised internet access) gave me a completely broken sexuality and I don’t want to bring other people into this mess
    • Feeling inadequate, ugly or uninteresting (I used to be very fat so you can imagine how I grew up)
    • Feeling that my interest in the other person is not genuine and that I only see her as a sexual object

    In the end, I’m 32 and single, my friends are getting married and starting their own families and I have this dreadful feeling that I missed out on something important in life, I drown this feeling in work, video games and all sorts of projects, but when I’m alone and I can’t think of anything to do and I start thinking about the future, I want to kill myself.


  • AI is to computer science what black magic is to science.

    Seriously, what do you get after you’ve spent days and days to train a model? An inscrutable blob that may as well be proprietary software written for an alien CPU; studying it is damn near impossible, understanding how it works would require several lifespans, and yet it works, and we trust these models and use them to get solutions to problems that would normally be impossible to handle by computers using “real” computer science. And one day, this trust will bite us in the ass, not in the form of an “AI rebellion” but with every system that uses AI becoming unreliable because of situations outside its training.