> 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.
I am skeptical of your second claim here… if you can “scour for solutions”, and you find something about it on the internet, then AI could find it the same way.
Just cause the AI could find the info definitely does not mean it will find and apply that knowledge correctly to solve a problem.
I find AI shockingly bad ad searching the web, as SEO blogspam sites heavily pollute AI context windows, while relevant and important resources are typically very densely presented reference material which must be constantly revisited.
It doesn’t need to. It has already all the fundamental knowledge it needs. Just set it up on a system with an editable proc file system and it would be able to figure it out.
A lot of the solutions are buried in places AI can't scrape or train on. Like inside people's brains or inside private codebases or chatrooms not open to bots. However you can find these people and the products and services they're making and start talking to them.
Most LLMs can't even count parentheses properly to build basic Lispy stuff. Building something niche like a logic solver in Scheme macros only? Forgetaboutit.
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.
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.
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
OP here: Yep, it's Discord. This all happened on a Discord server for a tech youtuber, I'm not sure if they want to be "outed" but they're an 800K subscriber-ish youtube channel with a five-ish thousand member private discord. There were a bunch of people involved, but you might see Arae around in the Reddit thread, she was the one with the actual 9700X in question. None of us have met IRL and we do stay fairly anonymous, but we do chat quite regularly (I've known Arae in particular for at least six months now).
If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!
> 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.
Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.
An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.
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.
> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
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 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 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.
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???
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)
> 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.
Idk all my friends are alcoholics and we only talk about stupid stuff
[flagged]
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.
I am skeptical of your second claim here… if you can “scour for solutions”, and you find something about it on the internet, then AI could find it the same way.
Just cause the AI could find the info definitely does not mean it will find and apply that knowledge correctly to solve a problem.
I find AI shockingly bad ad searching the web, as SEO blogspam sites heavily pollute AI context windows, while relevant and important resources are typically very densely presented reference material which must be constantly revisited.
It doesn’t need to. It has already all the fundamental knowledge it needs. Just set it up on a system with an editable proc file system and it would be able to figure it out.
A lot of the solutions are buried in places AI can't scrape or train on. Like inside people's brains or inside private codebases or chatrooms not open to bots. However you can find these people and the products and services they're making and start talking to them.
Are AI companies training off discord chat history? There's so much technical information locked up in them these days.
Most LLMs can't even count parentheses properly to build basic Lispy stuff. Building something niche like a logic solver in Scheme macros only? Forgetaboutit.
Yeah AI definitely can figure this stuff out. Doesn’t mean you can’t also seek out people.
[dead]
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 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
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.
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
> I have good friends
Ahhh, I see, I see...
OP here: Yep, it's Discord. This all happened on a Discord server for a tech youtuber, I'm not sure if they want to be "outed" but they're an 800K subscriber-ish youtube channel with a five-ish thousand member private discord. There were a bunch of people involved, but you might see Arae around in the Reddit thread, she was the one with the actual 9700X in question. None of us have met IRL and we do stay fairly anonymous, but we do chat quite regularly (I've known Arae in particular for at least six months now).
If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!
> 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.
Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.
An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.
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.
It's all content marketing.
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.
> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
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!
> 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 want to 3D print my own hardware on the nanoscale level.
[flagged]
Journalism is a crucial part for a free world.
>Journalism is a crucial part for a free world.
Good, free journalism that tries to tell the truth. Otherwise, even North Korea needs journalism.
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.
True, I was thinking too narrowly.
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.
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.
> 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.
inb4 "Why don't people trust news anymore?" this why
Tech journalism was always infamously bad.
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???
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)
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?