Rust wgpu now has a
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@ireneista @mcc @MaddieM4 agreed, i personally feel there is some hope here, just that i think more eyes need to be on these less often discussed parts of the stack
@amarioguy @mcc @MaddieM4 yeah for sure. well, talking about it in public like this does call attention to it
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Anyway, I spent the last week writing documentation for Redox. The Redox project seems to be happy for my documentation patches. One thimble full of water, out of the sinking boat.
I feel all this keenly.
Remember a while ago I mentioned needing to upgrade my file server? Well, upgrading it means switching to a Linux-based distro - now slop-friendly - and to a recent OpenZFS - now also allegedly slop-friendly.
So what do I do here? Start my own fork of one of the most complex file systems out there and try to port to a non-slop OS?
Everywhere I look it seems worse and worse.
I don't even want to be doing software any more. I want to make knives.
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I feel all this keenly.
Remember a while ago I mentioned needing to upgrade my file server? Well, upgrading it means switching to a Linux-based distro - now slop-friendly - and to a recent OpenZFS - now also allegedly slop-friendly.
So what do I do here? Start my own fork of one of the most complex file systems out there and try to port to a non-slop OS?
Everywhere I look it seems worse and worse.
I don't even want to be doing software any more. I want to make knives.
@CliftonR There are a lot of things you can do with knives
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@amarioguy @mcc @MaddieM4 yeah for sure. well, talking about it in public like this does call attention to it
@amarioguy @mcc @MaddieM4 and yeah if we had our way we'd remove like at least 80% of the functionality modern ISAs have, as security hazards. we realize we're prone to the nostalgia bias here, of course, but CPUs are an unremovable part of attack surface for any computer and we don't think we're being unreasonable in wanting to have even the slightest confidence in their safety
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@mcc @ireneista @MaddieM4 right, but an open ISA is not the same thing as being able to create silicon with said ISA, for a truly open chip, we do need people who can fabricate said silicon, is more my point
also RISC-V is evolving, usually according to how big companies want it, it's not like RISC-V stood still and just froze, there's a lot of funky stuff being added to it (M-mode being my usual example, it reeks of "intel SMM" levels of mistakes personally)
@amarioguy @ireneista @MaddieM4 i have silicon with said isa on my desk. like. i can reach out my right arm and touch it. maybe you don't think it's a healthy ecosystem. i am not a hardware person so it looks like success to me. what seems unhealthy to me about the success on my desk is all such silicon comes with a glob of proprietary GPU on the die (in the case on my desk it's an FPGA, but FPGAs are proprietary in a way that make CPUs blush). Hence: I want the RISCV of GPUs (see thread above).
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@amarioguy @ireneista @MaddieM4 i have silicon with said isa on my desk. like. i can reach out my right arm and touch it. maybe you don't think it's a healthy ecosystem. i am not a hardware person so it looks like success to me. what seems unhealthy to me about the success on my desk is all such silicon comes with a glob of proprietary GPU on the die (in the case on my desk it's an FPGA, but FPGAs are proprietary in a way that make CPUs blush). Hence: I want the RISCV of GPUs (see thread above).
@amarioguy @ireneista @MaddieM4 Intel SMM does seem to me like a mistake, but as far as I know Intel SMM is in the CPU of the computer I am using to type this sentence, and I am using the computer I am using to type this sentence anyway.
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@amarioguy @ireneista @MaddieM4 Intel SMM does seem to me like a mistake, but as far as I know Intel SMM is in the CPU of the computer I am using to type this sentence, and I am using the computer I am using to type this sentence anyway.
@mcc @amarioguy @MaddieM4 no, yeah, quite fair
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@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
@amarioguy @MaddieM4 @mcc I never use anything 3D (much less “AI”), I don’t think I need anywhere near feature parity, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that. I do a lot of GUI scrolling and window switching, viewing websites and other 2D documents, some video decoding and occasionally encoding, but the rare times I play a game it’s an old flash game. Is there a common activity outside of gaming that requires close to feature parity that I’m not thinking of?
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@mcc @amarioguy @MaddieM4 no, yeah, quite fair
@ireneista @mcc @amarioguy I mean this is all just practicality vs idealism, which is one of the classic debates across all topics across all time.
Without taking a side in it, especially as more of a software than hardware person, I have noticed that usually the result is some kind of compromise, and victory is defined by moving in the right direction rather than achieving an absolute. RISC-V being, in a lot of ways, a move in the right direction, at the cost of some technical warts.
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@ireneista @mcc @amarioguy I mean this is all just practicality vs idealism, which is one of the classic debates across all topics across all time.
Without taking a side in it, especially as more of a software than hardware person, I have noticed that usually the result is some kind of compromise, and victory is defined by moving in the right direction rather than achieving an absolute. RISC-V being, in a lot of ways, a move in the right direction, at the cost of some technical warts.
@MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy our usual take on the role of idealism is that we need to know what our ideal world is, so that we can evaluate each step by whether it takes us closer or further
without that, activists go in circles and each new group has to dismantle the previous group's work
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Rust wgpu now has a .agents/skills, a .claude/skills, an AGENTS.md, and a CLAUDE.md.
Increasingly wondering if my goal of living in a way that I never benefit from the actions of generative AI users and generative AI users never benefit from the actions of me is going to inherently mean never using hardware-accelerated video on a computer again.
The scale of work you bring attention to is at once enlightening and soul-crushing
#I-still-hope-to-help-do-it-someday -
@MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy our usual take on the role of idealism is that we need to know what our ideal world is, so that we can evaluate each step by whether it takes us closer or further
without that, activists go in circles and each new group has to dismantle the previous group's work
@MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy that's very much the spirit in which we're offering our thoughts, we're not trying to say don't use RISC-V. we have a RISC-V machine ourselves that we intend to use to test our compiler when we get to that stage of things.
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@eniko redox is currently capable of handling one channel of mono sound output and i think no support for sound input whatsoever
@mcc yeah. I'm uh, aiming for CPU framebuffer rendering, for exactly those reasons
I mean. The affine textured low res low poly PS1 aesthetic is in right now? At least that's what I tell myself
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@lispi314 I don't think they're discussing this. This is I believe a very big problem but not my concern at the current time because (1) you need a programming language; that's not optional (1.5) i no longer acknowledge the existence of C (2) there are already at least four Rust backends and at least two frontends (3) i am much more confident i can create an independent Rust implementation than I am confident that I can do literally *any* of the projects described in the thread above.
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@amarioguy @mcc @MaddieM4 and yeah if we had our way we'd remove like at least 80% of the functionality modern ISAs have, as security hazards. we realize we're prone to the nostalgia bias here, of course, but CPUs are an unremovable part of attack surface for any computer and we don't think we're being unreasonable in wanting to have even the slightest confidence in their safety
@ireneista @amarioguy @mcc @MaddieM4 DECSYSTEM-10 ISA with hypervisor facilities added and the floating-point facilities removed and offloaded to the GPU/vector math processor
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This thread is probably meandering and maybe solipsistic. My point is this: My weird background means I can look at this staircase full of missing stairs, identify one step, and go, "I can fix that". But I don't know if there's enough of me to fix multiple steps. I haven't decided what to do from here. Pick a step and fix it anyway? Pick a "fun" project, like the GPU [which face it, even if I finished it chances are not high more than 3 people would ever use it]? Give up and learn electric bass?
@mcc Meanwhile I feel silly for trying to remain fairly high up in the stack. I look at the missing steps and can only think about how not terribly helpful I would be right now trying to like… help with a kernel. Hell I took my eyes off of audio for a while because “the world needs more music theory!”
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@mcc Meanwhile I feel silly for trying to remain fairly high up in the stack. I look at the missing steps and can only think about how not terribly helpful I would be right now trying to like… help with a kernel. Hell I took my eyes off of audio for a while because “the world needs more music theory!”
@griotspeak Thinking only in a utilitarian way and not contemplating concepts such as joy:
If you're helpful high in the stack, but don't think you'd be helpful low in the stack, wouldn't it make more sense to stay high in the stack, where you're useful?
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@ireneista @amarioguy @mcc @MaddieM4 DECSYSTEM-10 ISA with hypervisor facilities added and the floating-point facilities removed and offloaded to the GPU/vector math processor
@decay @ireneista @amarioguy @MaddieM4 i don't want to write for the DEC PDP series anymore, I've written enough C
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@eniko redox is currently capable of handling one channel of mono sound output and i think no support for sound input whatsoever
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@MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy that's very much the spirit in which we're offering our thoughts, we're not trying to say don't use RISC-V. we have a RISC-V machine ourselves that we intend to use to test our compiler when we get to that stage of things.
@ireneista @mcc @amarioguy That is also true. Navigation is complex. Without a north star it's impossible.
