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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • What exactly does Valve stand to gain at all from funding a CUDA compatibility layer targetting mainly machine learning software? They’re a video game company. Arguably the most gaming-centric thing CUDA is used for was explicitly discarded in the blog post (“Raytracing is gone”).

    Machine learning is massive now and there are many companies who could be interested in funding this kind of project. I’m pretty skeptical it’s possible to make any good guesses with what little info we have.


  • History:

    1. ZLUDA starts as a project to make CUDA work on Intel GPUs, with funding from Intel.
    2. Intel pulls funding, author manages to get funding from AMD instead.
    3. Development of a new version targetting AMD GPUs happens under closed doors with the informal agreement that the source code will be publicly released if AMD pulls funding.
    4. After a couple of years, AMD pulls funding and the source code for the new version is released.
    5. Development continues in the open for a few months, albeit at a slowed pace.
    6. AMD goes back on their word, claims previous agreement wasn’t legally binding and asks that ZLUDA source code be taken down.
    7. Author reverts codebase to its pre-AMD state, looks for new source of funding.
    8. ZLUDA’s Third Life
    9. Anything regarding NVIDIA involvement is pure speculation and should be treated as such.



  • Unless they changed it, mobile Firefox is locked to a limited set of extensions unless you:

    1. Use Nightly.
    2. Create a Mozilla account.
    3. Log in to that account on the Add-Ons site and create an add-on collection with all the extensions you want to install.
    4. Set that collection as your source of add-ons in the Firefox settings.

    You’re also unable to use about:config unless you’re using Nightly (or maybe Beta). So Nightly is really the only version worth using since it doesn’t have nearly as many artificial restrictions as the stable version does. This is also true to a lesser extent on desktop where you have to use Nightly to install unsigned extensions.

    You also can’t open any offline HTML files for whatever reason and on devices with very little RAM (like 2GB) Firefox isn’t viable, but Chrome-based browsers work mostly fine. Firefox is still the best mobile browser though, mostly because it supports extensions at all.




  • This entire thing is just idealism vs pragmatism for the trillionth time. The idealists are mad because they think all ads are bad and we shouldn’t try to work with advertisers in any capacity. They do not believe reducing the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach, because that would be an acknowledgement of ads. Common talking points there are about how this is technically working with advertisers and how the internet shouldn’t have ads in the first place.

    The pragmatics also think ads are bad, but believe that an Internet without ads is very unlikely to happen, so they believe attempting to reduce the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach. Common talking points there are about how this isn’t giving advertisers anything they don’t already have and about how this doesn’t matter if you’re using an adblocker.

    Like all other debates of this type, this probably isn’t ever going to be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction and we’ve really just been seeing the same talking points over and over again since the beginning. So I hope y’all have fun duking it out, I don’t think I’m gonna bother looking at these pointless PPA threads anymore.