I worked on AAA engines that completely disregarded caches and branch prediction and while that worked great 10 years ago the same architecture became crippled on modern CPUs. Its so very easy to trash CPU resources that at this point I'm convinced most programs easily waste 90% of their CPU time.

For the last AAA title I shipped we spent weeks optimizing the threads scheduling, priorities and affinities along with profiling and whatnot; it was still an incredible challenge to use the main core above 80% and the other cores above 60%. If your architecture doesn't take the hardware into account from the ground up, you're not going to fully use the hardware :)

I don't know if that's strictly true, but I do feel games aren't as easy to split across threads/cores as many other types of software. Ultimately, a game boils down to one big giant blob of highly mutable and intertwined state (the world) that is modified very frequently with very low latency and where all reads should show a consistent view.

In other domains, avoiding interaction between different parts of your application state is a good thing that leads to easier maintenance and often better behavior. In a game, the whole point is having a rich world where entities in it interact with each other in interesting ways.

You don't need interactions between entities at every point in time. There are very specific sync points during a frame and there isn't many of them (maybe 5 or 6). Your units can also be organized in a table where each row can be updated in parallel before moving on to the next.

Many types of software can get away using only concurrency or parallelism. Game engines have to master both. You want parallelism to crunch your unit updates and you want concurrency to overlap your render pass on top of the next frame's update pass.

Now it takes a change in perspective on how to structure code and data to properly exploit multiple cores to their full potential. It is certainly possible to have interaction in the game world and do it in a multi-core multi-threaded way, it just needs smarter structures and better organisation of data.

Game developers have and will adapt to this.

Games are still just an update and render pass in a loop. Nothing will change that, they might be decoupled and overlapped but they're still present. They're just much more complex than they used to be. Some engines will fork/join at every step (sometimes hundreds of times per frame), others will build task graphs and reduce them and a 3rd team will use fibers to build implicit graphs. No matter what you do you're still executing code with very clean sequential dependencies.

Game engines started going multi-core at least a decade ago. First by using one thread per system, then moving towards tasks. Today I don't know of any AAA game engine not already parallelizing its render path and unit updates massively.

That's a common trope; it mostly applies to the rendering path. AI / Physic engines are nicely scalable with the number of cores (AI in particular, because a) it's oftern agent based, which naturally work concurrently and b) with AI, slighly relaxed synchronization constraints sometimes generate some desirable degrees of fuzziness and unpredictability ... although this is probably a very slippery slope ...)

Hah, in my experience that's hopelessly optimistic. The C I write is probably 10-100x slower than it should be (leaving SSE and threading aside entirely), but the Python I write most days is a hundred times slower still.

* pure Python: 1.0x (baseline)

* NumPy (numeric python): 120x

* Google-optimized pure C: 2,500x

* optimized Python + Cython + BLAS: 8,700x

This is optimizing the same numeric algorithm (word2vec) using different languages and tricks, from naive pure-Python down to compiled Cython with optimized CPU-specific assembly/Fortran (BLAS) for the hotspots [0].

[0] http://rare-technologies.com/word2vec-in-python-part-two-opt...

Fortran yields some of the fastest code out of the box, yes, but C/C++ can yield equivalent performance by adhering to certain basic rules.

I did just that in C# last years and got at least two orders of magnitude of performance gain from it. Still, I constantly wished I was working in C instead :)

See http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o...

On consoles we get access to the hardware specs and profilers for everything - even if behind huge paywalls and confidentiality contracts. Yet with all that information available its still insanely hard to optimize the codebase.

There's absolutely no incentive to push these tools/specs to hobbyists because even professionals have a hard time getting them. Its also worth mentioning that having access to the tools and specs doesn't mean you'll understand how to properly use them.

In fairness, some of this design philosophy --- which Bernstein has held for a very long time! --- gets a lot clearer with the advent of modern ARX ciphers, which dispense with a lot of black magic in earlier block cipher designs.

A really good paper to read here is the original Salsa20 paper, which explains operation-by-operation why Bernstein chose each component of the cipher.

https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/design.pdf

At some point the inequality gets too far out of whack and it's time to reconsider your values. Same reason we keep switching back and forth between dominant network architectures every 8 years. Local storage gets too fast or too slow relative to network overhead and everyone wants to move the data. Then we catch up and they move it back.

I don't spend a lot of money on physical security. I leave my car and front door unlocked usually, and don't bother with security systems.

If you find yourself having to lock and bolt everything under the sun lest it get damaged/stolen, then yes, I think it is an indication that the current state of things is wrong. There is something wrong with the economy/community/etc. in your area.

I realize that "the internet" doesn't really have boundaries like physical communities do, but I too wish for a world where security was not an endless abyss sucking money into it and requiring security updates until the end of time. In other words - a world where you could leave the front door unlocked online without having to worry about malicious actors. It will never happen, of course (at least not until the Second Coming ;)

I also assume you don't live in a dense city. Even in a utopia you couldn't have perfect safety without investing in security: some people are going to commit crimes and violate property just for fun, and when there's a lot of people in one area, that becomes a concern.

There has never in history been a time when people can be secure without investing in security. To claim that investing in security is in indication of something "wrong" is therefore at best a sentiment far ahead of its time.

And yes, people here (mainly the elderly) do keep vast sums of cash at home http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027129/Honest-Japan...

Japan also has some of the densest cities on earth.

Of course, it's far from perfect (there's plenty of crime, people still lock their doors, and sexual violence seems to be off the charts), but it shows that paranoia doesn't have to be the default state. If they made it this far, how much further is possible within human nature?

People here are basically honest. There aren't any turnstiles on the transit system --- they just assume you'll have bought a ticket. Children roam the streets on their own and think nothing of talking to random adults.

Of course, they back up this trust with enforcement; there are occasional spot checks on the transit system with big fines; and if you don't pay a driving ticket the police will come to your house and remove your license plates...

Now I guess someone would call a bomb disposal team and cut the traffic 3 blocks around it. (and I would have been very sad, because to this day I still love that bag, leather, light, durable, practical, it still fits a modern 13" laptop perfectly)

Anyhow, this thread is all anecdotes.

That's true. And crime statistics aren't much more useful because willingness to report and how well the police handle filing differ a lot between cultures.

The crime statistics themselves are very useful, there's no need to chuck them about because some level of crime goes unreported. Statisticians have long ago realised that we can measure this too.

All the apartments have thick security doors[1], lower windows of buildings have iron bars and all gardens have tall fences. If you leave anything that looks even remotely valuable in your car, someone will break a window and grab it. There is tonnes of vandalism, and even if you leave a motorbike locked with a secure lock it's somewhat likely it won't be there the next day.

It sounds the complete opposite of Japan!

[1] A few weeks after I arrived I was at a friends house and there was a disturbance of some sort in the apartment next door. The police couldn't get in, so called the fire service who had to work for 20 minutes to break the door down. They considered going in through the outside, but it was the third floor and all the windows had metal shutters.

Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots?

My upbringing has had this "golden rule of ethics" (don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself) ingrained in me pretty well, so I would never feel excitement about this.

(Hypothesis: This ridiculous objectivism has had people forget how much cooperation is ingrained into humans by nature.)

That said, I am aware that such thoughts exist in my subconsciousness, because the subc is always exploring all possible paths, but I have never experienced that as an even remotely acceptable (in terms of my own moral) path of action.

This only works for people who sufficiently appreciate their own possessions. Others might develop a very relaxed "stuff comes, stuff goes, who cares it's just materialistic crap anyways" attitude and and that equips them to have surprisingly little remorse in regards to theft. This is probably exemplified best in the extremely high rate of theft affecting near-zero-value bikes in many Dutch cities. That kind of thief might even rationalize by inverting guilt, "if he feels bad about the loss it's his own fault that he is not as cool about shitty old piles of rust as I am"

You've missed my point for the opportunity to moralize and posture. Consider this: You know cheating is wrong, you probably consider yourself to be someone that would never do it, yet you can still acknowledge that it would most likely be enjoyable for at least a very short while, right? That's all I'm saying, not (lmao) some kind of faux-objectivist philosophy on the right to take other people's property or whatever it is you seem to be imagining.

Because eugenics went out of fashion a long time ago. The "roots" is free will, so you can't really change that without horrific consequences. Using birth control (voluntary and involuntary) to bias the population was a popular idea in the 1920s. China's latest gamifaction of "social credit" is another biasing attempt. I'm not aware of any "roots" solution that doesn't require total surveillance or head measurements...

We have a way to go, but we have made at least some progress. Maybe in another few hundred years humans won't be so 'Us and Them'. Maybe materialism will be the next thing we work on. Who knows, maybe by the time we reach the next galaxy we'll have it sorted out.

If the most powerful institution in the western world couldn't "fix" this aspect of human nature over millennia, it is sheer arrogance to think we can do better today.

Something like aggressive behavior though, is something that can be selected against.

You mean change human nature?

Actually it's the exact opposite: very pragmatic and empirically verified.

It's exactly what people, in statistical quantities, tend to do over what they tend not to do.

Plus, most of it is shared with our animal siblings.

Except if you think that an Elephant or a Cat doesn't have certain natural characteristics (insticts, behaviors, traits) based on their species.

That's because it's a casual online conversation. I don't stuff my responses with citations when I'm not writing a paper.

>Do people ever?

Yes. There are tons of research on human psychology, cognition, physiology, evolutionary traits, instincts and other aspects of what colloquially is called "human nature".

There, now the philosophical twaddle is excised without ruining the spirit of the point

Also, thanks for the unjustified rudeness, you've made a great contribution today.

Do you mean chemical lobotomies or a post scarcity economy? Because there are some wants that are impossible to fulfill, for example: there are a bunch of murderers in Syria motivated by the desire to fly a winged horse to a sky mansion where 72 infinity virgins await. I don't see that happening, even post scarcity.

If you're suggesting I should move, then sorry. I would love to live in the woods on a lake and live out my days. I could do that easily. But I think I have a responsibility to help solve the problems the economy that pays my rent is causing. I choose to live in the ghetto where I can see what's going on so that I can help.

If that is true, I very much respect that ...

Anyway, I suppose you know, that people usually adopt to their enviroment. So if you see not so nice changes in your ethics and livestyle, you should probably reconsider your home ...

You passively pay for security at a bar when you buy a drink - the price of the bouncer is part of how they derive the cost of your beer. Similarly you pay taxes (local, state, federal) that pay for a massive amount of physical security that you utilize unknowingly on a day to day basis.

Just because you don't find it necessary to lock up your stuff in your driveway doesn't mean that you can claim that you don't use or pay for physical security.

In my city you can't use a wooden door, because thief can easily break it with good kick, so everyone uses heavy iron doors with good locks. You can't leave your automobile with factory locks, it'll be stolen, sooner or later. Everyone uses additional security systems. You can't even leave your bag in the closed car, if your windows are not tinted. Someone will see it, break window and stole your bag. You must use heavily tinted window, so no one from the street could see anything inside. Even the thought that I could leave my car or home unlocked is foreign for me. It's my property, so it's my work to defend it.

I think it's amazing we manage to spend so little on security.

I went to college in Atlanta, where leaving anything slightly valuable inside your vehicle would lead to a smashed window. So I've developed a lifelong paranoia about never leaving valuable items in sight in a locked car.

Also, HN crew if someone is going to rob your house they don't just try to enter in a locked door. The robber is going to knock, if you answer, make up some story how they are looking for Alice & Bob, and go on their way. If nobody answers, then they try to see if your doors are locked. I used to frequently get strangers "looking for someone" at my door in Atlanta, too. Few things are scarier than hearing a knock at the door when you are in bed, ignoring it, then hearing them try to open your door.

I guess the long commute is worth it.

I once did a Habitat for Humanity build out the Bankhead (not Buckhead, big difference) highway. The had to have Atlanta PD watch the lot DURING THE DAY because multiple cars had been stolen from Habitat Volunteers. I still think that was crazy cars were stolen that brazenly in broad daylight.

I don't have a pulse how things are these days. But don't get scared off by these stories, there are lots of good things about living in the city too. Go Jackets. :)

What did you study btw?

The epitome of this is most of Switzerland. I went on a Tinder date with a girl recently whose apartment door did not even have a lock.

Before I moved into my second college apartment, the previous tenants warned that they got robbed a few times, and then learned never to open the blinds, and didn't have a problem after that. We therefore never opened the blinds. We pretty quickly broke off a key in the lock and ended up leaving it unlocked except when everyone was gone for multiple days (I won't bother explaining how this worked, or why we didn't get it fixed for a year.)

So our door was always unlocked, but since you couldn't see inside, theft was never the goal of the folks who wandered in. It was always those who were friends and customers of other people in the building who were told they could hang out with us until their friends got back from class or those who had to use the bathroom late at night.

One of my roommates was up until 4 am in the living room every night, and one time someone wandered in while no one was there, and left a note thanking us for letting them use the bathroom, but nothing was ever taken except xbox controllers, and we thought we knew the culprit.

It's not even really a poverty issue - there are places where people are poor as churchmice, but the social stigma around theft is strong enough to keep people in line.

I think it's a density thing. In a small town, there's nobody to steal from you, and even if there was you'd eventually figure out who it was since everybody knows everyone. In a big city, someone can be in and out without you ever knowing, and you would never find them again. Indeed, most of the city residents I met in NZ still locked their doors (the people mentioned above were in smaller villages), while when my family went on vacation to a rural vacation home (in the US) my mom felt comfortable enough to leave the back door unlocked.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/police-blotter-reports-f...

I was once walking through Atherton and a police officer stopped me to make sure I wasn't doing anything suspicious. I suppose the number of "walking while white" infractions a community tallies might be a good (if unfortunate) indication of how wealthy they really are.

The same police officer later bought me a coffee for no particular reason. What a country.

- Cheapest home for sale in Atherton on Zillow is listed for $3.2 million

- The public schools shown to be in the same area as this house have unbelievably low scores (as measured by GreatSchools.org):

-- Selby Lane Elementary (assigned) .... 4/10

-- Garfield Elementary ..................2/10

What gives?

There is some social engineering going on there. If you live in an area where everybody locks his door and don't have a huge problem (like bands of bored teens trying every house, or lots of junkies, ...) the chances are very small that anyone would try to open your door, and if they do, they most likely come prepared. I remember that in my previous flat in the center of London, we left the kitchen window opened for years without even realising it. It would have been trivial to break into our place, but nobody cared. They entered 2 times over the same period at my neighbour place, likely because they saw something they wanted to steal through the window.

in most suburban places you can also leave the garage door open all day long just fine.

it's primarily dense cities that are the issue. just like online, when there's transience and anonymity, there's a high incentive for people to behave poorly.

Sometimes people tend to behave even more poorly if there is no anonymity. This happens when they think that they are morally right in an important area although they are totally wrong. Many racist "this needs to be said" comments are written using real names.

Sure it's different when you're in the city, but out here it's mostly older folks.

Try living in a bad neighborhood then.

If you already live somewhere nice and safe, the spendings and effort you don't do on security has been done by the state (police), buying or paying rent for the house, etc.

And perhaps more than it saves (like policing, it's a continuous effort too, you can just make the nice and safe and leave them at that).

1) the fact that the rest of us lock our doors, so most ne'er-do-wells have accepted the notion that closed doors tend to be locked. It's a form of herd immunity that protects you so long as only a small number of people behave like you.

2) the shift from cash to electronic money, meaning that physical theft is less lucrative than it once was (and meaning that most money is protected by entities that invest meaningfully in security.)

You're a free rider, benefiting from effort made by others, while being a (small) net negative to society. You're welcome for the security we've provided for you.

The current state of things is wrong, and unhealthy. We may one day achieve a healthier reality after recognizing this is so.

You would have spent more money on personal entertainment than on your personal security. Your TV, tablet and books would have cost you a lot more than your locks.

Add in the cost of tickets to concerts and plays and your entertainment expenses dwarf any security expenses that you have had.

"CPU designers see vastly more benefit to spending area on, e.g.,vectorized floating-point multipliers."

followed by "Intel is doubling the vector size in its newest CPUs---again!---this time from 256 bits to 512 bits."

Seems like they are being optimized to be better at vector math, and games just happen to highly use these pieces of HW.

More likely the other way around ...

[1]: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/openblas/fundraiser

It may in fact be that desktop/mobile CPUs are being optimized for their contemporary benchmark suites, thus targeting the ensuing benefits in marketing. The benchmarks themselves were, for a fair amount of their existence, focused on games-related performance, at least from what I recall.

In short, I think "optimizing for games" means nothing to a CPU designer at say Intel, and anyways qualitative differences (expanding the ISA, or integrating new features on the IC) are more expensive to develop and sometimes tricky to market. Instead, marketing quantitative differences is much easier (hence optimize for benchmarks) - though arguably no easier to develop. Witness Intel's first rocky attempt at targeting the benchmarks in the early 2000s: Netburst [0]. Of course, in the past 5 years, things have changed (the rise of smartphones, meteoric rise in GPU performance with expanding markets & new software, CPU "per core" performance stagnation), so Intel is in the process of re-positioning itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst_(microarchitecture)

The reason for this is simple -- it's twice as slow. The vector width is half the size, and so you can do half as many operations at a time.

This would also explain for instance why many programming languages drop single precision floats altogether: they don't plan to vectorize in the first place.

OTOH rendering of geometry only needs about as much precision as the display offers, which often means 8 bits on older hardware.

A goofy example, but I suspect that the aliens in the Independence Day film lived in such a world; their system didn't seem to have too much security - and why would you need any, in a telepathic society?

That brings up an interesting hypothetical... Is it possible to have a password that you don't even know? Sure biometrics is one method, but are there any password schemes that work on things like word associations or unconscious behaviors found during the typing process, like statistical analysis of the time between key presses?

I remember doing an online course and they had me type several paragraphs in order to determine my typing "signature" but it seems doubtful to me that it would be precise enough to be used for authentication.

Certainly, that's why the "forget password" link is so common ;)

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515726/a-password-so-secr...

Seemingly, yes, according to https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical... , which has a paper I read a while ago and a video I never got around to watching.

Abstract:

Cryptographic systems often rely on the secrecy of cryptographic keys given to users. Many schemes, however, cannot resist coercion attacks where the user is forcibly asked by an attacker to reveal the key. These attacks, known as rubber hose cryptanalysis, are often the easiest way to defeat cryptography. We present a defense against coercion attacks using the concept of implicit learning from cognitive psychology. Implicit learning refers to learning of patterns without any conscious knowledge of the learned pattern. We use a carefully crafted computer game to plant a secret password in the participant’s brain without the participant having any conscious knowledge of the trained password. While the planted secret can be used for authentication, the participant cannot be coerced into revealing it since he or she has no conscious knowledge of it. We performed a number of user studies using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to verify that participants can successfully re-authenticate over time and that they are unable to reconstruct or even recognize short fragments of the planted secret.

Trying to recall a password that I commited only to muscle memory is damn near impossible without some kind of keyboard in front of me.

(edit: in fact, I went ahead and posted the question: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/4x7yin/i...)

Similarly with war, there is likely some optimal level above zero that increases our overall safety as humans by honing our abilities in force.

The integer vector extensions they're almost certainly using I'd argue are primarily designed to optimize various codecs not games; unsurprisingly, crypto algorithms tend to have similar CPU loads to compression algorithms.

People would justify getting a better machine for playing games by saying that it would make their work more productive too.

In more recent times, look at all of the video games that made sure they could run well enough for casual players on a reasonably recent vintage laptop. I know I bought a new laptop at least once specifically so that a video game would be playable. My code compiled a lot faster on it (SSD) but I accept that I really bought it for playing games.

edit: found it http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

Now what do we have? Ssl protecting the packets that we broadcast to everyone on ad delivery platforms.

Now what do we have? Now we're spending more money time and effort, getting poor and limited solutions, trying to patch up email sender verification, shove SELinux around things, wrap every browser request in "are you sure?" modal dialogs and "Request refused for your protection" trip-ups, replace IRC-plain-text-chat with "text-chat in a browser" (Slack, Discord) or walled gardens (iMessage, Google, Skype), fight hard to replace C with languages where buffer-overflows aren't one mistake away and everything isn't de-facto built around rudimentary-types and string-concatenation, and do it all without compromising backwards compatibility or established user experience too hard.

'Awesome'.

The real problem is, for lack of a better term, the mentality of individuals and businesses. It doesn't matter how uncrackable and fast your encryption is if nobody uses it because it's fundamentally inconvenient or hard to justify on a balance-sheet.

'Every time I use a key in a lock, I am reminded that we live in a fallen world'

It's kind of sad isn't it.

Now, put real money on the line and you get the gambling industry which is much more serious about security.

Yes, I get it makes sense that there's more of a market for fun stuff than serious stuff, but putting aside security theatre, false flag operations, etc. - the idea that there aren't really threats in the world seems like it needs a bit more explanation.

Nature doesn't have any inherent ethical system, so unless you can fault the universe for existing incorrectly, I don't buy your argument.

However, I remember running it just fine on an old XP machine with a 32bit, single-core pentium III and 2GB of RAM. In addition, this game has been available on smartphones quite some (phone model) generations ago.

Actually, Minecraft is widely derided as being extremely wasteful with resources. And yet yeah, it still runs on my kids' 9-year-old laptop.

Well, aside from the cult of Mac... They spend the same amount of money as gamers, but for bog-standard commodity hardware in a pretty case.

Gamers are willing to pay three times the price for hardware just to get a few percent more performance. I would claim that drives innovation.

I imagine professional workstations for industries such as software development, visual arts, industrial design, film production, music production etc. are large users of high end CPUs.

None of them uses overclocked CPUs (like Intel's K-series) that's fairly standard for high-end gaming

Someone should write a song about it.