The1Dickens

It feels nice though. Big job done. Almost 2 decades of bad habits forcefully resolved. 

It's been a while since I've done my writeup on memory hierarchy back in... 2017? Wow time flies by fast. A lot has changed since then: I've gotten a Master's degree, gotten a job as a R&D compiler engineer, and I've learned a lot more about hardware and software in general. And I'm still bored so here I am.
 
Alright, onwards to the topic at hand. Some of us have probably heard of, or seen marketing on some CPU's, regarding features like AVX (Advanced Vector eXtension), SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions), MMX (Multi-Media eXtension) and such. These can all be categorized into what's called SIMD Extensions.
Extension in this context refers to extra instructions and features added to the CPU that is separate from the main instruction set (x86, ARM, etc). 
 
SIMD: What is it?
It stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data, and units inside the processors doing this are sometimes referred to as vector processor/co-processors. 
 
SIMD instructions operate on vector registers (See below for explanation if you don't know what that is), and they can hold multiple pieces of data at once. Think of a vector as just a one-dimensional array of data. For example, if the vector length is 128-bits, it can hold 4x single precision float values (fp32), 2x double precision float values (fp64), 16x int8's, etc. SIMD instructions would take these vector registers and operate on all of them in a single instruction. (Single-value registers/instructions are referred to as Scalar register/instructions).
 
Vector register sizes range between 128-bits to 2048-bits for ARM SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) (Although nobody that I know of was crazy enough to implement anything that big... yet), AVX2 uses 256-bit vector registers, and AVX-512 uses 512-bits. So, the more data you process at once, the faster a program can run!
 
Registers:
Did you know?
HOWEVER
Before you get too excited, SIMD is not being used for many, many, many programs. Most of the programs we use daily does not utilize SIMD instructions, or their usage does not gain a noticeable speed increase. 
 
Why? Well, as always, it comes down to software.
For one, in order to use SIMD instructions, there are often times restrictions on the layout of the data in memory. Sometimes, in order to get the data in the format the vector processors can handle, you're better off using scalar operations anyway.  Secondly, not all programs can benefit from vectorization. Sometimes you just need to do calculations with a single value. Sometimes your values need different operations (e.g. adding one, subtracting another). If you can't consistently fill up your vector registers, they're not worth the trouble.  Finally, in order to use SIMD instructions, the programmer often times need to embed SIMD instructions into the program they're writing directly. This is similar to embedding assembly code (basically "human readable" machine code) directly into C. It's also very hardware specific, older processors may only support MMX, or SSE... or maybe AVX-2. But typically only server parts have support for AVX-512.   
So what are they used for?
On the consumer side, SIMD is typically used for multimedia - software video encoding/decoding (Hence the Multi Media eXtension). Also, in recent years - AI. Some neural networks, for example, are not large enough to warrant transferring data to the GPU to process (remember, getting data to and from GPU takes time), and they are often times handled by the CPU, utilizing SIMD instructions. 
 
By the way:
Also, SIMD is an essential part to HPC (High performance computing, basically supercomputers) applications. For example, the processor making up the fastest supercomputer in the world (last I checked), was the A64FX, powering Japan's Fugaku supercomputer. These are ARM processors with SVE, with a vector length of 512-bits. 
 
 
So that's about it. That's all I can come up regarding SIMD without going too much into the details... This lockdown is making me spend my time on things like this :v 
 

Can do this for starters, maybe? Sets TEMP and TMP files to a new location, which I would guess is what is filling up when you do your work.

Today in "things I never thought I'd see on the LTT forums": The title of this thread.

Its working, i can see as the folder compressing my new temp drive is using space, now i will be able to burn 25 gb blu rays and compress large files and not constantly get storage warnings, and when i install more ssds i will use one of them as temp for faster temporary storage. 

That's because it is too good to be true. For Bitcoin, you should have got in on it back in 2013. There are dozens of alt coins on the market these days that would be better choices for mining. But that's a whole 'nother other discussion... that I am ill equipped to have.
 
As for finding a reason to do it: You already said it yourself, it pays for your hobby/ies. I mean, why mine: you shouldn't, in my opinion. But like... I'm just a string of text on the interwebz. Someone like @Moonzy (who I'm surprised hasn't popped in here yet) will give you 12 thousand reasons why it's a worthwhile hobby. And from what I have seen them post, it's allowed them to upgrade their PC pretty consistently..

Lmao, I am busy setting up my 3070s, sorry to disappoint
 
But in short, if your parents are against it and you're in their house, it's in your best interest not to do it
 
The way mining gets money is by processing transactions and getting paid for the "work"
You may just be plugging in your PC and it's earning money, but you still pay for pc parts and electricity so it's not entirely free (and risk free, if you invest in hardware dedicated to mining)
 
Do your research, find out how the mining ecosystem work and explain it to your parents, if you already own a decently modern gaming rig then you can pretty much pretend it's just utilising your PC to get more out of it while you own it.
Make sure you're mining more than the electric fee and you actually fork up cash for the electricity.
 
I take it as a hobby because I love tinkering with hardware, and as I said before I'm actually sitting infront of my mining rig tweaking my GPUs now, for several hours
 
If you do want to mine, make sure you do it right is all I'm gonna say.
 
-goes back to fiddling with hardware-

That's because it is too good to be true. For Bitcoin, you should have got in on it back in 2013. There are dozens of alt coins on the market these days that would be better choices for mining. But that's a whole 'nother other discussion... that I am ill equipped to have.
 
As for finding a reason to do it: You already said it yourself, it pays for your hobby/ies. I mean, why mine: you shouldn't, in my opinion. But like... I'm just a string of text on the interwebz. Someone like @Moonzy (who I'm surprised hasn't popped in here yet) will give you 12 thousand reasons why it's a worthwhile hobby. And from what I have seen them post, it's allowed them to upgrade their PC pretty consistently..

That's after i managed to import it into SketchUp,merge the meshes and lower the polygon count
 

Yeh, I also have 16GB, so was gonna do a test and see if I could get Blender to take in large things. But that poly count is pretty low... I managed to import a whole level and I forget how many character models from a Soul Reaver thing and it was a couple million polys and managed to load up fine. Wasn't the smoothest to navigate, but ~25 fps-esque frame rate. Also I had a Sculptris model up to over 20M at one point, but Sculptris handles high-poly models different I guess and it didn't even hardly hiccup while I swept over the model with the poly reduction tool thing.
 
I am still kinda curious how large the pre-fixed models were now. 😅

It's a success,i have managed to significantly lower the polygon count and merge meshes.
The model is now 300,000 polygons and 28 meshes.

This is something where I'd argue it depends on how far you want to take your scan. For my scans, they tend to stay relatively accurate to the colors of the actual cover art, maybe slightly off, but most people wouldn't notice. All I'd really argue here is to make sure that your monitor can represent colors accurately enough unless you really need an extremely accurate color presentation. Can it help? It depends. I've done more than a few scans at 1200 and 2400dpi (which is, to say, my scanner tops out at 2400dpi) and, to be honest, lots of them turn out better at 600dpi. It's less work to deal with, plus it's quicker and it tends to turn out better, especially in anything that needs descreening.

NOTE: This is very much something where your mileage may vary with equipment, software and overall photo editing abilities, so please use this as a reference rather than as a bible for scanning.
 
So you want to scan some cover art? Some people come to that predicament for various reasons: some because it's their only option for, say, album art, and others because they're sadistic and they enjoy wasting hard drive space like me. But whatever your reason is, it's never a bad idea to learn this skill if the need ever arises.
 
Prerequisites:
Scanner (of course) Cover art source (preferably of something in good shape) Your preferred scan software (preferably one with descreening functions; I'll cover descreening in a photo editor here) Your preferred photo editor (I use GIMP so that's what's being used here)  
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Setting Up the Scan
Making sure you can scan something optimally is always a good idea. Make sure your scanner is as dust-free as you can rationally get it so that as little dust as possible creeps up in the scan. I'll split this into two parts after this, though: one where you only have a basic scan to go off of and one where you have a scanner and scanner software to do some heavy lifting for you.
For my example, I'll be scanning the cover art for the PlayStation 2 version of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie with an Epson Perfection V30, because of course I am. I'd also recommend straightening out the art in question, as it'll make editing it a little easier.

Here's the preview of the scan I'll be presenting for a reference.
 
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Scan Recommendations:
I strongly recommend scanning at 600dpi, especially if you plan on downscaling your scan. If descreening and dust removal are options in your scanner's software, please use them. As suggested above, it lets you remove some of the heavy work in art scanning. I'll be showing how you can work with basic scans and scans that have been descreened and dusted. From there, you're ready to scan! I recommend scanning your image either as a high quality JPEG or in PNG. I personally scan as a 100 quality JPEG as I like to go the PNG route for my finished scans rather than wasting that effort on a scan that's going to be edited anyways, but you do you here.
 
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Editing an Unaltered Scan
If you went the route of editing an unaltered scan (which, there are legitimate reasons for doing so), then this is the area for you. I personally use GIMP here.

This... won't cut it if you want a scan to be presentable. It's overly bright and dim at the same time. It lacks contrast... plus the colors are a little off. So how do we go about fixing that? Well, it's not as hard as it looks.
First, let's fix the issue of the scan not being correctly cropped. This is simple: just rotate and crop the scan as you see fit. No need for an example here but you'll know how you like it there. Try to crop off as much of the white area as possible and as much background imagery that isn't part of your targeted area as possible.
But how do we go about fixing the colors and the contrast? Well... you see the Brightness and Contrast tool in GIMP? Using it helps in fixing the contrast. While I can't say what you should specifically look for here, try to compare what you're editing with the actual cover art paper you have and use that as a reference. Here's a before and after with the contrast and color editing I'll do, using the aforementioned Brightness and Contrast tool, the Hue tool and the Curves tool.
Now the colors and the contrast are fixed! But this still isn't good enough: you still have dust and descreening artifacts.
Actually attempting to descreening can be tough without dedicated descreening plugins, but there's efficient enough ways to fake it... such as using the NL filter and the Selective Gaussian Blur options.
This is what I tend to use for the NL filter in terms of settings:

It's strong, but that's fine. This is what I tend to target for my Selective Gaussian Blur settings:

After doing that...
Just look at how much better Patrick looks specifically.
 
Now, if the dust in the actual scan doesn't bother you too much, you can stop here. But some of it bothers me, so I'm gonna go a step deeper: I'm gonna use some pieces of the image to clean up other, blemished parts of the image, like so:

Which is, to say, at this point, I'm finished with the scan and hopefully you are, too! We went from a grainy, grey and ugly mess to something that actually looks presentable, if not attractive! If you don't care to see the shortcut half of my scan exposé, then you've reached the end of this thread as relevant to you. And hey, it only took me 30 minutes to do this, so it should be easily doable for you in under an hour.
 
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Editing a Descreened and Dusted Scan
What if you're a bit lazier, like me, and would rather have software automate itself to do some work for you? Well you're in luck, because that makes scanning a whole lot easier... and more fun... But the starting point still isn't pretty, as we suffer the same issues from above concerning color and contrast:

So how do you go from here? Simple: do what I've described above with Brightness and Contrast, Hue and Curves: adjust them to your liking until they match the cover art in question.
Besides the slight adjustment to the image tilt from the Before image to the After image, it already looks way better. Now from here, all I recommend is just doing some extra dust cleanup, things that the scanner either missed or misconstrued.

Which is, to say, you're pretty much done there, too! Check out the full-resolution completed scans here (for the full cleanup version) and here (for the already descreened and dusted version)!
 
If you've got any questions about anything, just respond to them and I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.

as a fan of serious sam I'm hurt. But as someone who can see reason I'm not going to say your wrong.

Check out The Imposter.
Turns out there's a few movies about it.
 
The amazing true story of Frédéric Bourdin, who after having plundered all the centers for runaway minors and deliquents in Europe, even thought he has come of age, now passes himself off as Nicholas Barclay, a 13-year-old American who had vanished three years ago. To his astonishment, Nicholas's family welcomes him like their son, leaving Interpol and the FBI aghast. It is the beginning of a race against time for the investigators, family and Bourdin. But who is manipulating whom? And who is Frederic Bourdin in reality?

As of right now, neither the SEC nor the clearing houses have come forward to say they directed Robinhood to take these actions.
 
I’ve worked for hedge funds and know a little finance dealing with liquidity tests. Many hedge funds including Melvin Capital and Citron shorted GME. They’d call it “a crowded trade” which to me sometimes sounds like a coordinated effort to move a stock in a certain direction because multiple funds always seem to have the same exact opinion on a company. They go on TV and to the press to promote their views too to get others on board with their ideas. They have been doing exactly what WallStreetBets did for years.
 
At some point the GME short interest reached over 500% of the float. For those who don’t understand what what means, it means the hedge funds agreed to deliver 500% the number of stocks that are available for trading. It’s a common thing in finance. And those hedge funds have to pay whatever price they can to deliver those shares or go bankrupt if they can’t.
 
As a matter of fact George Soros became famous for doing this to the Bank of England. BoE wanted to fix the GBP to USD exchange rate. For this to happen, they need to have USD reserves so when the GBP falls, they can sell USD and buy GBP to increase the value of GBP. Soros found out BoE didn’t have a large USD reserve, so he shorted over $10bn worth of GBP, which meant once the BoE reserves were depleted, the GBP would fall and Soros could buy the GBP for much cheaper and deliver what he had sold. That’s exactly what happened. Only if the Bank of England knew they could have the brokers stop his trades. Then ask all negative reviews to be removed!
 
Another thing people say is that Robinhood only restricted buying of the GME stock. Well, what do you think happens to the price when nobody is allowed to buy?! The price falls. Basic economic demand and supply. If you remove demand with market manipulation, prices plummet. So what Robinhood did wasn’t harmless at all. They manipulated the market. And only retail was cut out of the this trade, hedge funds and other institutions were still trading GME just fine.
 
Clearing houses and the SEC have rules for liquidity and margin that were known beforehand. It’s ok for Robinhood to ask for 100% margin to buy or hold a security, then they have no liquidity or collateral liability. So their excuses are just dead on arrival. Either the entire Robinhood platform is flawed and they can’t manage liquidity and settlements or they manipulated the market. I’m not sure which is worse.
 
Robinhood changed their terms of service after this debacle. And it’s not clear how much of what was posted here was actually the TOS that people had agreed to.
 
 

You might do better maybe looking at ergonomic style keyboards or reviews?
This is objectively and inarguably incorrect. Everyone knows Cherry MX Blues with RGBs are the best keyboards in crowded office cubicles. It's how your boss knows you are actually working and not watching the YouberTubes.

*laughs in Warframe*
 
It's pretty much been covered, but yeh. Consumers had too many experiences where something is presented as free up front, then it turns out the cost is just tacked on to the back end of the deal. And because it's usually done with smaller packages, its less noticeable as you spend the money. After all, what is $5, for a game you are enjoying that you didn't have to spend $60 on? Oh, wait, this is your 17th time spending $5? Well, now that game that didn't cost you anything, really cost you a lot more than an initial investment...

Vortex, the tool for NM has a great feature to clone your current save and test mods. Of course that only protects you against anything immediately visible but I have found it invaluable in getting mods working before applying to my main saves.
 
I also like that it allows me to have various builds playing variously modded games, so I don’t need to add all mods to all saves. If a mod is just relevant to one then it only gets installed on one save!
 
I use a few mod sites, sourceforge, NM and a few others. Perfectly safe and used by millions every day.

Both Steam and GoG allow you re-download if you remove it for whatever reason, and GoG even allows you to download an offline installer. I would be wary of any service that required a re-buy. I guess a physical version may have this issue?
 
The rest is interesting, and very helpful to be mindful of, regardless.
 
It is quite legit. They even use a side-loader app/launcher now (Vortex) that allows you set priority/order of mods (huge deal for some instances). The premium version is nice, because it removes the download speed limit (1MB) and one-at-a-time-ness, and if you plan on getting very many mods, it might be worth it to pay it for a month.
 
I have/had quite a few Witcher 3 mods, all from NexusMods.
 
Can always take a look at number of downloads and time it's been uploaded. That usually tells you that it's a good mod and not something that will brick your PC or be malware. But take the regular precautions you would when downloading anything.

You might do better maybe looking at ergonomic style keyboards or reviews?
This is objectively and inarguably incorrect. Everyone knows Cherry MX Blues with RGBs are the best keyboards in crowded office cubicles. It's how your boss knows you are actually working and not watching the YouberTubes.

Well there's no "best" keyboard for programmers.
Some like it soft, some like it clicky, some like it silent.
If you want silent keyboards, try Apple keyboards or other non apple low profile keys.

The problem is that it's an entirely personal thing. Some people like quiet membrane-keyboards, some like loud mechanical ones, some like something in-between -- there is no keyboard that's "best" for everyone.

Check the community (the game's and the NexusMods one) to see if the MODS you are thinking of adding have any conflicts with the Witcher 3 patches. Some MODS are not reversible even if you roll back to a previous save-point. And you may have to install the game again from your back-up. Which brings me to 'back-up' your game before installing any MODS, so you do not have to purchase the game again (worst case scenario).
Fallout has its own community that does bug fixes and they say that they are compatible with some MODS and not others, so perhaps look for a Witcher 3 community that does a similar thing?
Hope this helps
Cheers Steve

Absolutely, I would want to know. I would just head to the Winchester, grab a pint, and wait until it just blows over.