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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • That’s quite a rosy outlook.

    https://sofrep.com/news/how-global-internet-access-relies-on-a-few-hundred-vulnerable-undersea-cables/

    If this is accurate, 97% of global internet data is carried through undersea cables.

    Satellite systems for general, consumer (non military) internet purposes do exist, but their total bandwidth is essentially negligible in this scenario.

    What would happen is:

    First, everything on the internet would dramatically slow down and/or 404 due to built in auto timeout failures.

    As BGP kicks in, this may lessen very slightly, but systems that mirror data across servers on different continents would basically be unable to synchronize.

    Systems with servers in only one location would basically be unnaccessible to anyone more than … ballpark, a few hundred miles away.

    International banking and transactions and would be forced to stop, otherwise they’d be getting massively out of date info, wrecking the legitimacy of their balance sheets.

    International video calls stop working.

    International voice only calls and email may work, but with great delay for emails, and a roulette wheel spin for your call going through and being intelligble and not dropping.

    You’re basically looking at the Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, maybe not quite as bad in certain areas that effectively prioritize certain kinds of traffic and rapidly enact effective mitigation strategies…

    But best case, for probably a very long time, you’re looking at an internet that is mostly fragmented and highly geographically localized.

    … and thats assuming the world’s highly globalized and interdependent economy doesn’t just collapse and never really come back.

    Almost all modern logistics is now impossible, and almost all modern logistics runs on the Just In Time paradigm… ot is very fragile, very reliant on things working on time, with very little margin of error and stored emergency reserves.

    Remember when the Evergrande EDIT:(lol wrong name) Ever Given blocked the Suez, and this caused logistics nightmares around the world that persisted for years?

    Imagine that multiplied by about 10,000 or 100,000.



  • You’re talking about the study where they introduced currency into a contaiment with capuchins.

    For some reason, a lot of people must have heard the story as involving bonobos, but anyway:

    https://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-monkeys-the-concept-of-money-not-long-after-the-first-prostitute-monkey-appeared/

    They gave them little silver disks, just randomly, for a while.

    Eventually the monkeys figured out the ‘money’ could be exchanged for grapes, from the researchers.

    They kept giving the monkeys ‘money’ randomly, and for doing various tasks.

    Then they gave them different kinds of fruit for different prices.

    Then they introduced them to gambling, random amount of fruit for a certain price.

    Then a monkey stole another monkey’s ‘money’, which caused basically a a free for all monkey riot that involved almost all the monkeys.

    … And then shortly after that, the monkeys invented monetarily compensated prostitution, with a male paying a female for sex, which the female immediately afterward purchased a grape with.


  • Basically, the ROPs are in charge of the final stage of rendering a frame.

    They are discrete, physical components of the GPU.

    GPUs at this point are quite complex boards of many specialized kinds of processors passing information to and from each other.

    Tensor cores, RT cores, CUDA cores, ROPs, etc… these are all specialized processors, specializing in different kinds of computations.

    ROPs, Raster Output Processors, do varying kinds of postprocessing on the almost final stage of a rendered frame, assemble the data from other parts of the GPU and then push the finalized, rastered pixels to the frame buffer.

    A rough analogy would that ROPs are in charge of the final editing pass on a paper or article before it’s published, with the analagous ‘research’, ‘fact verifying’, and ‘rough draft’ having already been done by other parts of the GPU first.

    Maybe another analogy would be that ROPs are the ‘final assembly’ of a frame, if constructing a frame was like building a car or aircraft.

    A simpler, more literal explanation is that the ROPs perform the final stage of rendering a frame before the GPU actually pushes it out for you to see.

    So… if the GPU is missing 8 ROPs… the GPU is basically bottlenecking itself, internally.