> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.
I don't know about your friends, but as we're on HN, I'm sure others here have friends like mine, who absolutely have conversations about how the low level shit that facilitates our world works.
1. Start building stuff that is hard to build that requires touching these niche topics. Especially stuff you don't know how to build
2. As you encounter problems, you'll have to scour for solutions (AI doesn't know these things due to lack of training data). In the process you will find people who are also working on these problems. Ask these people well-formed, intelligent questions.
By 'talk' I suspect he means discord and by friends he means display names. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I catch myself saying 'talk' when I'm talking about something a friend told me over chat.
>> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.
> As do we all.
I think they interpreted “as do we all” as pointing out humorously that this is an unusual friend group. So, speculation that it might have formed online makes sense, because online spaces can sometimes facilitate that sort of thing.
They are two different situations but why is the distinction meaningful here? I rarely even remember the venue of most conversations, just that it happened.
Because for a lot of us it’s hard to imagine finding a half dozen or so people who can talk in person like that outside of a conference or workplace. Discord facilitates that because it assembles people based on interests and such. You’re just going to more easily have that kind of conversation than you would “out in the real world.”
My guess is they are functionally saying “this probably happened on discord if anybody is wondering how this is even possible and not made up for effect” but I might be interpreting too much
My friends and I share interests but they can’t all talk about the relative pros/cons of full frame vs. cropped sensors in digital cinema with me. That’s kind of the framing here if that makes sense. We share a lot of interest and can talk in depth about certain topics, but there are plenty of topics that I am interested in or just know a lot more about that none of them can really discuss with me, so I have to find those communities elsewhere
Presumably because they all traveled there for a temporary part of their lives. And after university, they presumably scattered to the places where they built their careers and families.
> so, to test, one of us took a heavily PBO'd 9700X and changed /proc/cpuinfo to be a "9700X3D" and ran a Passmark run to see if the software would be fooled...
The two articles I saw about this both emphasized that the high clock speed (from the PBO) was inconsistent with the name of the CPU that implied it would be lower performance than the 9800X3D.
Most of the sites I check regularly have been pretty good about calling out inconsistent leaks or rumors, contrary to the “all journalism is trash” comments down below. On the other hand, if you were following someone who presented this singular benchmark result as proof of something without looking at the details, it might be a good time to reconsider the quality of your sources. I did see some lazy Twitter personalities parroting the result without any actual thought.
This is all extra confusing (as to why people republished this) because a 9850X3D was already rumored a couple weeks ago as a higher binned 9800X3D, which would actually make sense, as well as a 9950X3D2 with dual X3D CCDs.
A major takeaway from this is that the news media can easily be misled and report false information. Everyone sees this whenever there's a news article in a field they are an expert in, but then they trust all of the other articles in fields they are not.
I agree, but I get very worry every time I see a news about a scientific even where they just copy the press release of the university that has a lot of unsupported hype (and sometimes errors). (And sometimes, the journalist add more errors or cut critical parts.)
Eh. I think the idea of journalism as a career or distinct field is less important with the advent of social media. People are either reliable or they aren't, and "journalist" was never a strong signal. And investigative journalism seems pretty dead in traditionally-reputable outlets; the good investigative journalism seems to be done by independent people and sold to publishers.
Even the people I like/trust at newspapers I prefer to consume via social media without passing through the editor.
Tech/Game/Movie journalism is mostly trash because they are like a external Spokesperson for the paying business, often they even get the text that they should publish.
However calling all journalists "trash" i wildly unfair for people like Scott Horton, Patrik Baab or David Talbot....and manymany more.
> I feel badly for all of the people who may have held off on a 9800X3D purchase because of this Passmark that we thought wouldn't work.
I'm considering a new build soon, but RAM prices are out of control, like they've more than doubled since June! (Damn AI bubble...) I guess I'll have to get by with my Ryzen 1800X a bit longer.
I’m rocking an AM4 build still and very happy with the bump I got from going to a 5800X and maxing out the RAM (primarily for productivity use rather than gaming).
I was hoping for a slightly budgetier X3D chip but I went and got a plain 9700 a few months ago. I realized I probably don't need the performance and the extra power budget/efficiency of using a 65W chip was nice.
I sometimes use lwn.net as an exemplary showcase of things non-tech journalists should learn (e.g.: add references whenever paraphrasing material some or all readers might have direct access to)
If a tech journalist actually understood their subject matter at a competent level, they wouldn't be a journo and go out and get a job in that subject matter dramatically increasing their salary. Those that can't do, teach. Those that can't teach, become journalists???
> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.
As do we all.
I don't know about your friends, but as we're on HN, I'm sure others here have friends like mine, who absolutely have conversations about how the low level shit that facilitates our world works.
How do I join yall
In my experience:
1. Start building stuff that is hard to build that requires touching these niche topics. Especially stuff you don't know how to build
2. As you encounter problems, you'll have to scour for solutions (AI doesn't know these things due to lack of training data). In the process you will find people who are also working on these problems. Ask these people well-formed, intelligent questions.
Idk all my friends are alcoholics and we only talk about stupid stuff
This is exactly the kind of conversation I can have with some coworkers and in some Discord channels. Aren't people awesome?
Where do you think this stuff [1] is cooked up? To be fair, we mostly use Signal though.
[1] https://github.com/AngryUEFI/ZenUtils
God forbid people have hobbies
By 'talk' I suspect he means discord and by friends he means display names. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I catch myself saying 'talk' when I'm talking about something a friend told me over chat.
Have you ever been in a hackspace? That's where you'll usually find such discussions IRL.
Other examples include "let's build a submarine" https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11828-how_to_build_a_submarine_a..., creating your own 2000s style phone ringtone/wallpaper subscription service https://blamba.de/ or running toslink audio over regular long-distance fiber links https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/sfp-experiment-ultra-long-ra...
How does that distinction matter here?
>> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.
> As do we all.
I think they interpreted “as do we all” as pointing out humorously that this is an unusual friend group. So, speculation that it might have formed online makes sense, because online spaces can sometimes facilitate that sort of thing.
It’s a different situation if you are researching something and chatting about that vs talking about something while in a bar for example
They are two different situations but why is the distinction meaningful here? I rarely even remember the venue of most conversations, just that it happened.
Because for a lot of us it’s hard to imagine finding a half dozen or so people who can talk in person like that outside of a conference or workplace. Discord facilitates that because it assembles people based on interests and such. You’re just going to more easily have that kind of conversation than you would “out in the real world.”
My guess is they are functionally saying “this probably happened on discord if anybody is wondering how this is even possible and not made up for effect” but I might be interpreting too much
Well it’s not so far fetched if the friends are people you studied with and have common interests with, but don’t currently work together with.
I have good friends that love to discuss highly technical topics over a beer or whiskey.
> I have good friends
Ahhh, I see, I see...
My friends and I share interests but they can’t all talk about the relative pros/cons of full frame vs. cropped sensors in digital cinema with me. That’s kind of the framing here if that makes sense. We share a lot of interest and can talk in depth about certain topics, but there are plenty of topics that I am interested in or just know a lot more about that none of them can really discuss with me, so I have to find those communities elsewhere
It’s easier to have very specialized friends of they are geographically far away.
I don't see what distance has to do with it. I had a number of specialized friends in close proximity at university.
Presumably because they all traveled there for a temporary part of their lives. And after university, they presumably scattered to the places where they built their careers and families.
"at university"
Clearly proximity is involved
> so, to test, one of us took a heavily PBO'd 9700X and changed /proc/cpuinfo to be a "9700X3D" and ran a Passmark run to see if the software would be fooled...
The two articles I saw about this both emphasized that the high clock speed (from the PBO) was inconsistent with the name of the CPU that implied it would be lower performance than the 9800X3D.
Most of the sites I check regularly have been pretty good about calling out inconsistent leaks or rumors, contrary to the “all journalism is trash” comments down below. On the other hand, if you were following someone who presented this singular benchmark result as proof of something without looking at the details, it might be a good time to reconsider the quality of your sources. I did see some lazy Twitter personalities parroting the result without any actual thought.
This is all extra confusing (as to why people republished this) because a 9850X3D was already rumored a couple weeks ago as a higher binned 9800X3D, which would actually make sense, as well as a 9950X3D2 with dual X3D CCDs.
So it goes: unintentional data leak. Data leak pipeline becomes common knowledge. Then manipulation.
"New CPU in Passmark" news has become so regular, I've long since assumed that they are not leaks at all, but intentional product hype.
EXIF metadata is editable, too. Similar that it could be useful intelligence, but it is very easy to deceive others with it.
The two articles I saw about the 9700X3D each called out the discrepancies in the listing, like the high clock speed.
The mainstream journalism about this was actually pretty good
> So it goes: unintentional data leak
No
probably doesn't help that 'tech journalists' are some of the worst with very little journalism background.
A lot of mainstream tech journalism seems to be done by people that are just sort of… excited hobbyists or something. Neither techs nor journalists.
I want to 3D print my own hardware on the nanoscale level.
A major takeaway from this is that the news media can easily be misled and report false information. Everyone sees this whenever there's a news article in a field they are an expert in, but then they trust all of the other articles in fields they are not.
Journalism is thrash and journalists are happy to lie about anything if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability.
Journalism is a crucial part for a free world.
I agree, but I get very worry every time I see a news about a scientific even where they just copy the press release of the university that has a lot of unsupported hype (and sometimes errors). (And sometimes, the journalist add more errors or cut critical parts.)
>Journalism is a crucial part for a free world.
Good, free journalism that tries to tell the truth. Otherwise, even North Korea needs journalism.
Eh. I think the idea of journalism as a career or distinct field is less important with the advent of social media. People are either reliable or they aren't, and "journalist" was never a strong signal. And investigative journalism seems pretty dead in traditionally-reputable outlets; the good investigative journalism seems to be done by independent people and sold to publishers.
Even the people I like/trust at newspapers I prefer to consume via social media without passing through the editor.
Tech/Game/Movie journalism is mostly trash because they are like a external Spokesperson for the paying business, often they even get the text that they should publish.
However calling all journalists "trash" i wildly unfair for people like Scott Horton, Patrik Baab or David Talbot....and manymany more.
Let me try one: Software is trash and programmers are happy to lie about anything if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability.
See how you sound?
Sounds reasonable to me.
I would stand behind:
Everything is trash and everyone is happy to lie about anything if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability.
> Journalism is thrash and journalists are happy to lie about anything if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability.
Funny, if you see the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI, they act like they are still doing serious journalism.
Isn't this related? It's exactly decimation of their budgets that lead to the bad quality.
Where did they lie? Someone posted some benchmarks. They reported on the appearance of benchmarks that indicate a new chip. Being wrong is not lying.
Did you get to the part where some made up facts about the fake model, like TDP?
You missed the "if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability" part of the original comment.
> I feel badly for all of the people who may have held off on a 9800X3D purchase because of this Passmark that we thought wouldn't work.
I'm considering a new build soon, but RAM prices are out of control, like they've more than doubled since June! (Damn AI bubble...) I guess I'll have to get by with my Ryzen 1800X a bit longer.
You can likely put a 5800X3D or 5700X3D in the same motherboard and get a massive performance upgrade
I’m rocking an AM4 build still and very happy with the bump I got from going to a 5800X and maxing out the RAM (primarily for productivity use rather than gaming).
5700X3D is great for gaming, but for programming 5900XT will be nicer. You can run make -j32 :)
Great for when you're installing Linux from source.
I hope I'm never working on a project where -j32 on a 5900XT is noticeably faster than than -j16 on a 5700X3D.
Then again, -j1 is nice, when you need to time a break. (https://xkcd.com/303/)
I was hoping for a slightly budgetier X3D chip but I went and got a plain 9700 a few months ago. I realized I probably don't need the performance and the extra power budget/efficiency of using a 65W chip was nice.
Clearly there's a market for a 9700X3D though!
inb4 "Why don't people trust news anymore?" this why
Tech journalism was always infamously bad.
I sometimes use lwn.net as an exemplary showcase of things non-tech journalists should learn (e.g.: add references whenever paraphrasing material some or all readers might have direct access to)
If a tech journalist actually understood their subject matter at a competent level, they wouldn't be a journo and go out and get a job in that subject matter dramatically increasing their salary. Those that can't do, teach. Those that can't teach, become journalists???
Leaks can't be trustworthy.
Leaks can however be verified, which is how journalism is supposed to work (otherwise it's just sparkling gossip)
Passmark is clearly going to have to do a security pass on its CPU information now to make this at least a little bit harder!
Don't publish benchmarks until a few data points for the same model come in from different sources, and are roughly the same?
Publishing is ‘coming in from different sources’ though?
Or do you think journalists are going to wait for ‘peer review’ for their breaking news?