Time for the forever wars to stop. To quote TOOL,
Angels on the sideline
Baffled and confused
Father blessed them all with reason
And this is what they choose
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the groundSilly monkeys give them thumbs
They forge a blade, and where there’s one they’re bound to divide it
Right in two
Right in two
Tell that to the emus
Userbenchmark shows there is wild variability in the CPU’s performance, which is very hard to explain without differences in the way it’s installed and configured by the end-user. Interestingly, it’s a camel-back distribution with two humps, which means there is a single binary variable that shifts the CPU’s performance by ~10% which is wild. I would guess it’s the difference between air cooling and water cooling, which usually impacts performance 10-20%. RAM standard can also have a big impact. Benchmarking reports a maximum of +7% with high frequency ram which isn’t large enough to explain this effect (x3d chips will perform better on worse ram, in theory).
What this data shows is that how the CPU is installed is more important than what CPU you choose, since installation practices can shift the performance by massive margins while a 7950x is only 3% faster than a 7950x3d.
When it comes to air cooling, there isn’t much an end user can optimize. About the only thing you can really upgrade is the flowrate of the fans. There are entire youtube channels dedicated to optimizing fan flow rate. Upgrading from a pusher or puller fan setup to a push-pull double-fan with higher flowrate fans is probably the best you can do. I think the real bottleneck will be in the design of the air cooler, specifically the number of cooling pipes, number of cooling fins, thickness of the cooling fins, and their interface with the cooling pipes. A lot of cheap CPU coolers won’t bother to solder the fins to the heat pipes, will use 4 heatpipes instead of 6 or 8, will use thin fins with very low heat transfer, and fins that are made of aluminum instead of copper.
The quality of air coolers will be directly proportional to cost since heat transfer is a function of surface area and surface area requires more heat pipes and more fins, which is more money. Since copper is so pricey, fin density and heat pipe number are going to be the biggest factor in the cost of the cooler. By the time you buy a cooler capable of handling a high end cpu with overclocking, it probably would’ve been cheaper to go for water cooling & you’d net +10% performance in addition to that.
One of the big costs of water cooling is the radiator. Radiators sold for pc building tend to be drastically over priced. You can get radiators meant for other things , like cars, for a fraction of the cost and with higher heat transfer. Combined with an 80 watt double-fan, totaling 160 watts, it will absolutely trounce any radiator meant for PC building (most CPU cooling fans are usually <1 watt). Combined, the two of these are cheaper than most premium PC radiators excluding the fans. A high end PC radiators require 8 at $20/pop, which means this entire setup is about the same cost as merely the fans of a normal radiator build, meanwhile you are netting somewhere in the ballpark of 20x the air flowrate and probably 5x the fin surface area. Additionally, the standard for PC radiators is a dual-pass, which means the water passes through the radiator twice. This radiator is an eight-pass radiator, which means the water will get much closer to air temp than a dual pass ever could. The downside is obviously it’s more work, and has a different look. I am sure with some spray paint and clever mounting could make it look pretty good. If you are a woodworker or 3d printer, you could absolutely make it look cool if you put in some effort.
The take way from this is that how you build the PC has a big impact on cost and performance. It’s very possible to spend a lot of money and get garbo-tier performance, while it’s possible to spend very little money and get incredible performance.
If you are scared of building something on your own, you have to remember that the only way to learn is to try and fail. In failing, you learn what not to do. Empiricists, philosophers in history who argued that reality is defined by properties that can be measured and quantified, ran into a paradox in the 1960’s which they called the raven paradox. It isn’t really a paradox there isn’t a contradiction. But it goes something like this. I have a theory that all ravens are black. To test this theory, we could look at ravens and each time I observe no raven which is not black it makes my conclusion more likely to be true. In logic there is a thing called a contraposition, where you invert the statement and it should remain true. If something is not black, then it is non raven. This seems like a contradiction because you can look at a white sock and learn something about the color of ravens. There isn’t a contradiction here because it’s true. If you could observe every non black thing in the universe, and see that not a single one of them was a raven, then you would prove all ravens are black, and you did this without seeing a single raven.
Well the way this fits back into learning how to problem solve is because it’s an analogous scenario. You learn what actions are mistakes by observing their inability to produce the result you care about. You are looking at a white sock and learning about the color of ravens. It’s fundamentally how problem solving works, which is why it’s so absurd to call the raven paradox a paradox at all. We don’t know what the right answer is, but by avoiding the wrong answers we will eventually stumble upon the right one. Welcome to problem solving.
Linux tech tips did a car radiator build awhile back, but they messed it up big time. They mounted a bunch of PC fans to it, which will probably struggle to move the air through the higher density radiator. Additionally, they maximized the cost because each of those fans runs about 20 bucks. A radiator fan by contrast is 50 bucks for 2 and nets somewhere close to 20x the flowrate. So they maximized cost and minimized flow rate, which is a big screw up. But watching people screw up is good because it means you don’t have to be the one to screw up. You get that data point for the cost of watching some ads on youtube. Another big screw up is that they went for a radiator instead of a transmission cooler, which uses much larger tubing. The tubing size is obviously going to be an obstacle. Transmission coolers by contrast can be bought with similar tubing sizes to what would be used on a PC build which means you can just use vinyl tubing and a clamp, guaranteed a leak free seal, with no fuss and no mess.
Also, they had issues getting any flowrate with their pump and this is, again, the size of the tubing. It’s likely that the tubing simply flexes to allow a pulse of water from the pump, but promptly pushes it back. This means the water will pulsate instead of flowing. So you’d need tubing that is more rigid (vinyl) and/or smaller diameter. Yet another giga-screw up by linus tech tips.
The claim that DRUMPF is a “threat to democracy” has to be one of the lowest IQ takes on political science that I have ever heard. It’s actually very similar to how blueflame hellion builds operate in SC2. Democracy is popular vote, republic is vote by proxy. Popular voting has an issue in that average citizens don’t know enough to pick the correct answers. Vote by representative fixes this because you send a competent representative whose job it is to be an expert on these issues, but the issue is that it’s easy to buy-off the representatives through various corrupt schemes. Both systems suck, so the US splits the difference. The laws are written by proxy vote, but enforced by direct vote. This allows the US to have the advantages of vote by representative, but with the added bonus of preventing the representatives from becoming corrupt. This makes the president elected by the popular vote, which means he is beholden through political mechanisms to kiss butt to the average voter, and he is given powers to absolutely wreck any of the representative class who have become corrupt. The average citizen benefits from this because the corrupt representative class loot the average voter of wealth. And so the president exists the very specific purpose of preventing corruption in the other branches. The constitution provides him with crazy powers to this, including presidential immunity. Interestingly, presidential immunity was recently hit with a buff because it was clear the president wasn’t powerful enough to fight the corrupt representative class (look at what they did to DRUMPF with Russiagate, impeachment 1, impeachment 2, hoax after hoax during re-election campaigns, using state funds to benefit institutionally-friendly politicians and bureaucrats, etc).
The problem the corrupt establishment has is that they underestimated the power of free speech. The free speech protections allow presidential candidates to get out their message despite all the nonsense, which means the popular vote is then decided by the free speech process and is not a process the elite can corrupt and control. This guarantees the people elect a president beholden to them, and not the corrupt establishment, and that means he gets to use his powers to wreck the corrupt establishment. This is why free speech is absolutely required for a modern day, first world, free society. The governments who refuse to support free speech do so for the very specific purpose that they don’t want any checks or balances on the representative-class’ corruption. The only reason they’d want that is if they plan to be corrupt. It’s the same thing in starcraft when someone goes out of their way to hide their second factory. The moment you see a second factory, you know it’s a blueflame hellion build. The moment the people saw the USAID books, they knew it was a money laundering scheme to buy off corrupt representatives. Have you ever wondered how someone making $174k/year somehow leap in wealth to be worth hundreds of millions? Yeah, exactly: they send money to a foreign country for some cover story, call it “save the wildcats of the jumbian forest” or whatever, the local government there takes a cut and sends the rest back to the politicians and bureaucrats in DC. That’s how the money laundering works to buy corrupt representatives.
If Europe refuses to embrace free speech, it’s because they are planning on looting the taxpayers until they are so poor they are stuck in the poverty trap. Once in the poverty trap, they will use “socialism” to give them a small percentage back, barely enough to survive, while they use and abuse their citizens for what basically amounts to slave labor. If the voters refuse to vote for this, they import citizens from other countries and make them sympathetic to the elite by providing them with welfare (welfare that, with a wink and a nod, doesn’t happen unless you vote for us). And so western democracies are under attack by communists who abuse open border policies to undermine democracy, loot the taxpayers, and will ultimately lead to lennin style socialist take over. They are trying to repeat the soviet experiment, but with modern day surveillance and AI tech, because they believe they are gods, they know what is right and what is wrong, and you, the poor ignorant citizen, are nothing but an uneducated rube who is too stupid to understand anything of any importance. You don’t need that money, anyway, you’d probably waste it on something useless while we, the communist planners, with our great intellect, will use it to save you from [insert boogeyman here / climate change / russia / etc].
Socialism is unstable and always trends back to free markets or communism. The elites who leave the free market system will never cede control, and so they will pick communism. Communism doesn’t respect investors’ private property, private investors stop investing in your economy, your growth slows and eventually goes negative, people start to starve, the government collapses and a the cycle repeats (unless of course you find a way to break the cycle, like America did, using free speech and Article II powers).
There is another way that communism causes economic collapse, and it specifically relates to the free speech issue. Speech represents ideas so the concept of speech is to share ideas. Free speech allows innovation to thrive because anyone can share any idea with anyone – with a constant discussion on ideas, we find and implement the best ideas. The communist doesn’t respect speech, which means he doesn’t want ideas to be shared, which means he hates innovation. He believes that mankind should only innovate towards ideas that he approves. He believes he gets to approve what is good and what is bad because on a fundamental level he has a god complex. Anyone with even an iota of intelligence knows that the more you know the more you realize you know nothing. Anyone who believes they have all the answers is nothing more than a power tripping narcissist. So communism puts 80 IQ narcissists in control of the government and gives them power to grind innovation to an absolute halt by criminalizing the sharing of ideas (speech). It’s obvious why this causes economic collapse. Any idea that will improve the lives of citizens is an idea the communist cannot tolerate because the communist requires a boogeyman to keep its slave class of citizens in the production lines at the steel factory. If an idea fixes a problem, it undermines the power of the ruling class. Ideas cannot be tolerated because they interfere with the power of the ruling class, and that’s why they criminalize speech.
A similar issue impacts the SC2 community, by the way. There is a small minority of hyper vocal protoss whiners who can control what you can or can’t say by reporting you to the moderators. Over time, their abuse of the moderation system has caused anyone to be banned EXCEPT those that march in lockstep with the protoss whiner’s narrative. Since they now control the flow of ideas in the community, they control what happens to the game through developer feedback. Their ideas begin to shape the game, giving protoss a small advantage at the start which grows and grows. We’re now on year 6 of protoss imbalance, protoss are 70-80% of the top 20 worldwide, and they are still crying about lurkers and want even more nerfs to zerg and terran. This is a remarkably similar mechanic to how communism causes economic collapse. The whiners control speech, speech represents ideas about the game, ideas then shape the game in a way that is beneficial to the protoss whiner, the game is terrible for everyone else and so private investors stop investing their time into a terrible game. With investors leaving, the only investors left are those OK with the protoss advantage, skewing speech further towards the protoss narrative. This spirals out of control until the game collapses. It all starts with terrible speech policies that prevent the sharing of ideas.
Hey Adventurer, whatcha doing this president’s day?
“Raging against the machine.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ
This will affect CPU benchmarks for SC2 since many of the machines, and parts for those machines, are manufactured in Europe. What’s going to happen to the chip industry as EU regresses hundreds of years of social development? At a bare minimum, innovation will stop, but in all reality it will probably degrade. So we’d expect the quality of the chip manufacturing machines to degrade over time as the people become scared to share improvements that might make their bosses look bad (who then promptly searches your facebook and reports you to the police for something you said in 2012). America needs much less reliance on technologies that the EU has monopolies on. I’d say it’s a national security issue because we absolutely need chips and the machines that manufacture them and so if EU is going to regress then we need to stop being dependent on them for these technologies. We can’t rely on people with the social development similar to that of dark age religious nuts to manufacture the world’s most complex and important machines.
In order to keep CPU benchmarks high for Starcraft, it will be important to ensure the safety of the technology of chip manufacturing by building some plants in the US. Otherwise, chip technology will degrade, the best chips will eventually burn out from their decades of service, everyone will be forced to buy the new but worse chips, and we will be back to lagging inside SC2.
Dissertation much? at least 20
Clearly someone has not read Ender’s Game. Does Demosthenes ring a bell.
Ender’s Game is actually remarkably similar to the current situation with regards to world politics. Ender becomes a master of war strategy through a complete understanding of his enemies and their biases, which allows him to predict their exact actions. Understanding them causes him to gain sympathy for them. Eventually his sympathy leads to suspicion and he discovers that he wasn’t playing a game but was commanding an actual war to dominate actual enemies. This shatters his world view because he realizes his actions have real consequences.
This is comparable to the US’s industrial military complex which uses propaganda and deception to make the general population engage in pro war rhetoric, playing the “war games”, which are then simulated out in other countries (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Vietnam, etc). The general population has come to the shocking realization that their discussions about these topics, online and elsewhere, have real world impact on actual human lives. To them, it was just a game of yelling online, but to Ukraine those words translated into actual war, much like Ender’s actions did.
The US’s population comes to an understanding of their enemies, through this online strategical discussion, much like Ender, and discover sympathy for all those involved as a product of understanding them. And so anti war sentiments grow, with the nation trending towards peace and diplomacy. Ender goes on to be a healer, by the way, as he tries to atone for his atrocity against the Formics.
Demosthenes is Ender’s older sister. Demosthenes is her pseudonym that she uses to sow discord between Russia and the US and which causes the public to focus their attention on a fake problem while the military carried out their war games operation against the Formics, which is where the population really should’ve had their attention. Valentine was then an accomplice, which Ender interpreted as a deep betrayal. Valentine was always looking out for Ender in the real world, which is why her actions as Demosthenes were so reprehensible. Ultimately he did forgive her, understanding that she had been manipulated by the system much like he, Ender, had been.
Unlike his forgiveness of Valentine, Ender never forgives the military leaders who mislead him during the war games. The club and the axe are the cave man’s solution to problems because he can’t solve problems using more sophisticated tools like politics, diplomacy, and economics. The generals weren’t smart enough to win the war themselves, which is why they tricked Ender into doing it for them. Ender was smart enough to find other solutions, which is why it’s a shame that he was used and abused for the purposes of war.
So too DRUMPF will use diplomacy and economics and tariffs and politics to solve world problems – problems the “cave men” leaders of America instead solved with missiles and bombs. Why is it that they are so scared of tariffs? Is it because they aren’t smart enough to play the game of chess, and are only capable of winning through brute force? What does “winning” even mean? How do you define it, measure it, and know it’s been accomplished? Winning with the axe is very easy to know when you’ve won – you’re the last one standing – and so the definition and measurement challenges are easy. It’s obvious why the cave men prefer the club and the axe, since they understand it. But when you are dealing with complicated systems, how do you even define what winning is? The cave man has no clue, and so he shrieks, mindlessly, over tarrifs, because the only way to win is to dominate, and if he isn’t dominating then he thinks he is losing.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a natsee dissident who publicly criticized them and ended up dying in a camp. He spent significant time in jail where he pondered on the natsee problem and he came to the conclusion that stupidity was the issue. What’s remarkable about Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity is that it’s not about individual stupidity, but emergent stupidity that occurs when large groups of people engage in group think. On their own, isolated, the individuals in the group can be quite intelligent, but as a group they drive themselves crazy with their own rhetoric until the herd stampedes off a cliff. He realized that reasoning with these people is not effective because what’s going on here is fundamentally not a rational process. It was a religious purity process where members of the group compete to be the most pure, and this breeds extremism that causes the group to act very foolishly. What’s remarkable about this form of stupidity is that the individuals in the group still retain their mental faculties, so they charge after stupid goals but they do it very intelligently which is super bad because a bad goal is the exact kind of goal you don’t want to do well. Doing a bad goal well maximizes the damage, which in the case of Germany ended up being catastrophic for all of Europe.
Now let’s contrast this to the free speech discussion in America. There was a clip on the internet recently where a woman said WWII happened because of free speech, which is absurd because the natsees threw anyone who criticized them into prison or camps, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others. The criticisms of free speech, in America and EU, are quite obviously illogical, they make no sense, which begs the question of what motivates it. It sounds a lot like a purity test where someone takes an extreme position to signal they are the most pure in the group. In this case, they are signalling how much they disagree with “hate speech”, and to signal just how pure they are they take totally absurd and illogical positions, aka “WWII was caused by free speech”, which is the emergent stupidity that Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in his letters. The people saying free speech caused WWII seem to be, quite ironically, engaged in the exact process Dietrich Bonhoeffer theorized caused the rise of Natseeism. Like Valentine, they promote false problems which shift the public’s eye from the actual threats, making them accomplices and enablers of the actual problems. Much like Natseeism, they are trying start a war in eastern europe. They ironically shriek that everyone else are the natsees. This is obviously not a rational process and is quite obviously emergent stupidity because there is absolutely nothing logical about it.
The issue has always been that the ego has a desperate need for validation from others, which causes them to seek not just purity, but more purity than others in their group. This is the fundamental mechanism behind 99% of society’s problems. Everything from woke to natseeism is motivated by this mechanism. It’s rooted in the ego and the need for purity to satisfy the ego.
How is this solved? By feeding their egos with the purity they desperately crave in a way that doesn’t cause wars. When was the last time a wokester cleaned dishes at the shelter for the poor? Time for them to stop worrying about Ukraine and instead to give out bread and soup to homeless veterans. There need to be programs that feed the psychological needs of the citizens in productive ways so that they don’t go crazy and start world wars. You’d think one world war was enough, but then mankind did two, and you’d think two was two to many, but now they’re trying to start a third and it’s like what on Earth is going on here. These people are psycho. Luckily we can lean on the knowledge passed to us from the observers of the previous world wars and use it to thwart the cave men and their obsessions with the axe and the club. There are economic and political solutions to these problems. To fix the domestic emergent stupidity issue, the country needs to focus inwardly on helping solve the drug and homelessness problems, which will fuel the individual’s desire for purity in a way that doesn’t cause world wars.
To quote TOOL:
Free fall through our midnight
This epilogue of our own fable
Heedless in our slumber
Floating nescient we
Free fall through this boundlessness
This madness
Of our own making
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crI1ApHQXO0
Dissertation volume 2
May I introduce you to a skateboard. “What’s a skateboard!” you ask! Well, it’s a device that generates great fun. What is fun? What is that word. Never heard of it. Too busy spamming apm in starcraft, I see. Don’t worry, today you learn what a skateboard is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NPBIwQyPWE
You can find them at walmart for about 30 bucks. Trust me, it will be the best money you’ll ever spend. After you master it, you can move on to the ripstick. After that, roller blades. I broke an arm on those. Don’t worry, it will put hair on your chest. After that, you can move on to normal skates. I have a buddy who broke an ankle with those. Don’t worry, it will be over in a pinch and you’ll realize you’re a lot tougher than you thought. Suddenly you will see all the possibilities of things you can now do but that you thought were out of reach. Trust me, spamming apm in starcraft is probably the most boring thing a person could possibly do with their life. Buy a skateboard and don’t look back. Soon enough you’ll be riding a motorcycle and the pent-up nerd-rage will be lost in a sea of adrenaline. Just wait until your girlfriend, yes, you will get one of those, hops on the back and wraps her arms around you. It will feel like you died and went to heaven. But it all starts with a skateboard. Do you know what kind of trust it takes for a woman to hop on a motorcycle with you? It takes a real connection, you know what I mean, a human connection on an emotional level. You’ve got the nerd rage emotion down pretty well, but to get the babes you’ll need a whole arsenal of emotions. You gotta set aside the ego, go out there and biff it on your skateboard, feel the emotion, let it wash over you – the shock, the embarrassment, the pain, then, finally, the will and and resolve to do better next time – let power you forward into the future.
I think Adventurer is just an AI bot that makes lengthy posts on here.
