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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Slow? Not necessarily.

    The main issue with that much memory is the data routing and the physical locality of the memory. Assuming you (somehow) could shrink down the distance from the cache to the registers and could have a wide enough data line/request lines you can have data from such a cache in ~4 cycles (assuming L1 and a hit).

    What slows down memory for L2 is the wider address space and slower residence checks. L3 gets a bit slower because of even wider address spaces but also it has to deal with concurrency issues since it’s shared among cores. It also ends up being slower because it physically has to be further away from the cores due to it’s size.

    If you ever look at a CPU die, you’ll see that L1 caches are generally tiny and embedded right into the center of the processor. L2 tends to be bolted onto the sides of the physical cores. And L3 tends to be the largest amount of silicon real estate on a CPU package. This is all what contributes to the increasing fetch performance for each layer along with the fact that you have to check the closest layers first (An L3 hit, for example, means that the CPU checked L1 and L2 and failed at both which takes time. So L3 access will always be at least the L1 + L2 times).


  • You’re probably affected by this even if you didn’t participate.

    The thing about genetics is you can make reasonable predictions about individuals if you have data on their relatives. Heck, you can reasonably make regional predictions with genetic data that will be fairly accurate.

    If any of your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc took this test, then you are now at least a little exposed.


  • I literally had an econ professor years ago who directly told us “do not take a genetics test”. This was before the ACA

    The reason was simple. It’s information that once a private company gets a hold of it, they will use it to hurt you. Whether it’s a drug company that learns you’re predisposed to addiction, so better to give you it people around you nice temporary discounts on addictive meds, or an insurance company that learns you’re predisposed to cancer, so better to look for ways to deny or drop coverage.

    Once these companies know a little bit about your nature, they’ll exploit any aspect possible to increase profits.

    This was not a progressive/socialist econ professor. Just someone who knows how capitalism works.