#thehylianbatman

[edorazzi]

JOSIE I'M SO EXCITED FOR A MATTER OF TRUST!!!!! I'm pretty sure you're the one who led to me finding out about the PV and being curious about it and the characters, and even though I don't watch Ladybug any more, I still love the characters and the way we understood things in 2015/2016, and so to see the Mentor AU get a HUGE piece is HUGE news and make me feels HUGE happiness and respect for your skill and talent!!!!! I'm SO EXCITED TO READ IT THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

Eeeee, thank you so much!!! I'm thrilled to finally have this comic ready to go after working on it so long, and the responses just to the title/character pages have been amazing! I had no idea people would be so hyped for it! ; u ;

The majority of A Matter of Trust takes place in 1999 and adapts the PV into that time period, and I purposely capped the "modern day" at 2015 before canon got so huge and complex - it's my love letter to the early Miraculous fandom (as well as Felix's character and the difficulties of being neurodiverse) and I hope people can feel that! ❤️

#josie talks about things #A Matter of Trust #thehylianbatman #felix having untreated high-functioning autism is a HUGE part of his character in my mind :V #everyone knows it except him #''PV felix is a mean unfriendly person'' yeah lmao he's constantly overstimulated and undertherapied LOOK at him #and everyone benefits from true understanding love (bri) and an adorable therapy cat (adrien)

[andmaybegayer]

Hello. So what's the deal with computer chips? Let's say, for example, that I wanted to build a brand new Sega Genesis. Ignoring firmware and software, what's stopping me from dissecting their proprietary chips and reverse-engineering them to make new ones? It's just electric connections and such inside, isn't it? If I match the pin ins and outs, shouldn't it be easy? So why don't people do it?

The answer is that people totally used to do this, there's several examples of chips being cloned and used to build compatible third-party hardware, the most famous two examples being famiclones/NESclones and Intel 808X clones.

AMD is now a major processor manufacturer, but they took off in the 70's by reverse-engineering Intel's 8080 processor. Eventually they were called in to officially produce additional 8086 chips under license to meet burgeoning demand for IBM PC's, but that was almost a decade later if I remember correctly.

There were a ton of other 808X clones, like the Soviet-made pin-compatible K1810VM86. Almost anyone with a chip fab was cloning Intel chips back in the 80's, a lot of it was in the grey area of reverse engineering the chips.

Companies kept cloning Intel processors well into the 386 days, but eventually the processors got too complicated to easily clone, and so only companies who licensed designs could make them, slowly reducing the field down to Intel, AMD, and Via, who still exist! Via's CPU division currently works on the Zhaoxin x86_64 processors as part of the ongoing attempts to homebrew a Chinese-only x86 processor.

I wrote about NES clones a while ago, in less detail, so here's that if you want to read it:

Early famiclones worked by essentially reverse-engineering or otherwise cloning the individual chips inside an NES/famicom, and just reconstructing a compatible device from there. Those usually lacked any of the DRM lockout chips built into the original NES, and were often very deeply strange, with integrated clones of official peripherals like the keyboard and mouse simply hardwired directly into the system.

These were sold all over the world, but mostly in developing economies or behind the Iron Curtain where official Nintendo stuff was harder to find. I had a Golden China brand Famiclone growing up, which was a common famiclone brand around South Africa.

Eventually the cost of chip fabbing came down and all those individual chips from the NES were crammed onto one cheap piece of silicon and mass produced for pennies each, the NES-on-a-chip. With this you could turn anything into an NES, and now you could buy a handheld console that ran pirated NES game for twenty dollars in a corner store. In 2002. Lots of edutainment mini-PC's for children were powered by these, although now those are losing out to Linux (and now Android) powered tablets a la Leapfrog.

Nintendo's patents on their hardware designs expired throughout the early 2000's and so now the hardware design was legally above board, even if the pirated games weren't. You can still find companies making systems that rely on these NES chips, and there are still software houses specializing in novel NES games.

Why doesn't this really happen anymore? Well, mostly CPU's and their accoutrements are too complicated. Companies still regularly clone their competitors simpler chips all the time, and I actually don't know if Genesis clones exist, it's only a Motorola 68000k, but absolutely no one is cloning a modern Intel or AMD processor.

The die of a Motorola 68000 (1979)

A classic Intel 8080 is basically the kind of chip you learn about in entry level electrical engineering, a box with logic gates that may be complicated, but pretty straightforwardly fetches things from memory, decodes, executes, and stores. A modern processor is a magic pinball machine that does things backwards and out of order if it'll get you even a little speedup, as Mickens puts it in The Slow Winter:

I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,” and you’d think, “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would never work, but then you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would wake up the next morning and read their newspapers and the headlines would say OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE. You’d give your buddy a high-five and go celebrate at the bar, and then you’d think, “I wonder if we can make branch predictors even more accurate,” and the next day you’d start XOR’ing the branch’s PC address with a shift register containing the branch’s recent branching history, because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything and get something useful, and you test the new branch predictor, and now you’re up to 96% accuracy, and the branches call you on the phone and say OK, WE GET IT, YOU DO NOT LIKE BRANCHES, but the phone call goes to your voicemail because you’re too busy driving the speed boats and wearing the monocles that you purchased after your promotion at work. You go to work hung-over, and you realize that, during a drunken conference call, you told your boss that your processor has 32 registers when it only has 8, but then you realize THAT YOU CAN TOTALLY LIE ABOUT THE NUMBER OF PHYSICAL REGISTERS, and you invent a crazy hardware mapping scheme from virtual registers to physical ones, and at this point, you start seducing the spouses of the compiler team, because it’s pretty clear that compilers are a thing of the past, and the next generation of processors will run English-level pseudocode directly.

Die shot of a Ryzen 5 2600 core complex (2019)

Nowadays to meet performance parity you can't just be pin-compatible and run at the right frequency, you have to really do a ton of internal logical optimization that is extremely opaque to the reverse engineer. As mentioned, Via is making the Zhaoxin stuff, they are licensed, they have access to all the documentation needed to make an x86_64 processor, and their performance is still barely half of what Intel and AMD can do.

Companies still frequently clone each others simpler chips, charge controllers, sensor filters, etc. but the big stuff is just too complicated.

#computer stuff #silicon #vlsi #ask #video games #thehylianbatman

[wlw-cryptid]

Hasselbutch potatoes? Is that anything?

we're cooking w this one

#i simply want to be able to make treats for butches that seduce them thoroughly #i wish to make their stomach so happy they sit there and think about buying a ring #she speaks #asks #thehylianbatman

[speeps-highway]

Happy happy birthday! I hope you have a nice day and get to do something you really love!

wow thank u

#ask box #thehylianbatman

[zootycutie]

96!

96. desktop background?

For the family computer, we still have the generic "hot air balloons" background, but my personal laptop is a Monster Cereals one still. XD

#response #askbox meme #thehylianbatman

[wilwheaton]

Chiming in to the voting conversation, I believe ranked voting does help solve the problem, but I also believe the Electoral College needs reform specifically here in America. I think we should keep it to preserve the balance of power between states and the federal government, BUT I think it needs to be made proportional instead of winner-take-all. That, plus ranked voting, would be a great start to better voting.

I fully support the complete abolition of the electoral college. It’s a racist institution, enacted to appease racists, and is fundamentally undemocratic.

#thehylianbatman

[astriiformes]

Nate! Hello! You're wonderful!!!! I saw that post about seven incomplete Duolingo courses, and I was just curious: What courses are you taking? Scottish Gaelic I remember! But no others. I'm looking into getting back into it after a couple of years!

Oh boy, well I’ve dabbled in pretty decent number so I have to establish a definition of “taking” here, but the main ones I’ve poured a good bit of time into are Scottish Gaelic, German, Irish, and Norwegian. I’ve also poked at the Mandarin course some to try to refresh my knowledge from high school, but not that seriously, and have done a little of the Welsh and Czech ones but have them more on the back-burner.

Revealing here that I tend to like Celtic and Germanic languages, I guess. There are more I’d like to look at sometime (Finnish!!) but even doing more than about two seriously is a challenge, so for now I mostly juggle those main four and look wistfully at the rest of them.

#thehylianbatman

[snazzystarlight]

I think Anon may mean WASP as in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, AKA the general Trump supporter.

Oh yikes! I honestly would prefer being compared to a sharp insect!

#we have made too many jokes about me looking like a fox reporter #time to pass on it's my time gotta go #also is a wasp a insect or like an arachnid #thehylianbatman

[blanddcheadcanons]

The Zsasz headcanon looked best. I thought the font was funky on one that mentioned Beast Boy, and the first one was too small. There was also one that was centered, and I'm not into that. Still an excellent job though!

none of them were centered tho...  the Damian is emo looks almost centered but if you look closely you’ll it is left-aligned...  But yeah I’m liking this Pixlr X program  Thanks for your thoughts!

#thehylianbatman

[jitterbugjive]

It's been a long time. Can I get a reminder as to what happened to the Mane Six ("three are dead" and such)?

Rainbow Dash was murdered by Pinkie Pie clone, who was executed. Rarity hit her head and went in to a coma after becoming obsessed with the murder (It was agreed with Jay the reality where Lil Miss Rarity is in a coma is Miss Twi’s reality) Applejack became a drunk ala Crapplejack style and boards up the farm (I can’t remember what happened to Granny Smith and Big Mac) Fluttershy couldn’t handle the whole situation and went in to Everfree to hang herself and her body was never found.

So yeah Applejack is the only one who’s really there, and she blames Twi for things so they don’t talk any more.

#thehylianbatman

[nocontextdoctorwho]

Hey, you've tagged that recent Amy & Rory set with "Asylum of the Daleks", but I'm fairly certain it's actually from "Night Terrors", so I just wanted to let you know. Thanks for your blog!

Thank you! I’ve updated it :)

#havent checked my messages in a while so sorry this is late #thehylianbatman #ask

[fialleril]

So I just had a thought: The Death Star had many many people on it, and Luke (probably) hadn't killed anyone before then. What sort of long-term effects do you think that would have on him, and how do you think he'd cope with it?

Bold of you to assume Luke hadn’t killed anyone before.

The boy grew up on a gangster planet bullseyeing 6 foot long rats for fun (and meat). His aunt and uncle’s farm was a stop on the freedom trail. He’s a good shot with a blaster and he both aims and fires at stormtroopers without a second of hesitation the minute he leaves that farm. He mans the guns in the Falcon like he’s been doing it for years.

(Also it’s worth noting that both Luke shooting the stormtroopers and shooting down the TIEs take place before he destroys the Death Star, so even if you assume he’d never killed anyone on Tatooine, he’d definitely killed people before the Death Star run.)

The Death Star was a purely military target. Luke destroyed a space station that’s sole purpose is to literally destroy entire planets. Everybody on that station knew that and went along with it. It’s honestly difficult to imagine a more perfectly clear cut scenario of good vs. evil.

So no, I don’t think Luke is losing any sleep over this, and I really don’t think it’s something he needs to cope with.

#replies #thehylianbatman #star wars #luke skywalker #has killed multiple people on screen before he ever even gets to the death star run #we watch him shoot several stormtroopers #and there's the tie pilots he takes out during the escape #there's no hesitation or any hint of nerves even the first time he shoots a stormtrooper #which honestly says to me that this likely isn't the first time he's killed someone #luke skywalker is a very good man #but he's not the soft naive farmboy fandom often paints him as #my meta #meta in tags #killing

[andmaybegayer]

So my hope, eventually, is to have my own purpose-built computer which is an expandable skeleton and will more-or-less never need to be entirely tossed out, only supplanted/upgraded Ship of Theseus style.

However, Microsoft is getting a bit too uppity for my tastes, and I hope to mainly run Linux on that eventual computer.

However, I'm also a gaming man, and I recognize that, in many cases, Linux kinda sucks for games, or, at least, that's what I've heard. Emulation is also a pain I'd rather not deal with (both of Windows and of games themselves), and so, for games that don't support Linux, I'd like to have the option of having Windows on the same machine, so that I can run Linux most of the time, but switch to Windows whenever I wanna play games.

My question is how realistic is that? I know that machines with multiple OS's exist, and you can choose which one you want at boot, but I'm hoping for this to be an extremely fancy computer, connected to a lot of extremely fancy computer peripherals. Would switching OS's without power cycling the machine screw with the other hardware? Is it even possible, or would you need to power cycle it in any case? Is there any way to build this hypothetical computer, or am I asking too much/investing too much effort? Would it be easier/better to just build a really good Windows machine and a really good Linux machine?

So the use case you're talking about is pretty popular among a certain kinds of Tech Nerd, and most of them solve it with iommu GPU Passthrough and a windows VM on Linux. I knew a few people doing this back in like 2018 and while it's a little fidgety it's fairly reliable.

You can't share GPU's the way you can share CPU and Memory. Not on consumer hardware, anyway. So if you want to run a VM with windows with a gaming GPU, it needs its own entire GPU just for that.

The basic layout is this: Build a normal high end system with a lot of extra resources, say, 32+GB of RAM, 10+ CPU cores, a couple terabytes of storage, and two separate GPU's. Run Linux on the system, as your host, and only use one of the GPU's. Create a VM on the host under qemu and hand it 16GB of RAM, 6 cores, a terabyte or two of storage, and use iommu to pass it the other GPU. Now use software like LookingGlass to capture the framebuffer directly off the Windows GPU and forward it to your Linux GPU, so that you can display your windows system inside Linux seamlessly.

Now, you do need two GPU's, so it can get expensive. A lot of people choose to run one higher end GPU for windows and a basic GPU for Linux, but that's up to your use case. You can run two identical GPU's if you wish.

The main place this kind of thing is being tinkered with is the Level1Techs forum, Wendell is a big advocate of GPU virtualization and so has aggregated a lot of information and people with relevance here. He also makes a lot of video stuff on IOMMU.

So I have to have two whole GPU's?

Kind of. There ARE ways to live-reset a running GPU which allows you to do tricks where you can swap a single GPU between the host and the VM without rebooting, but it's extremely dubious and flaky. Virtualized GPU partitioning exists but only on extremely expensive server GPU's aimed at virtualization servers for enterprise so it's well outside of our price range.

If you're interested in single-GPU, there is ongoing work getting it to run on consumer hardware on the Level1Techs forum and he's even running some kind of Hackathon on it, but even the people having success with this have pretty unreliable systems.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/vfio-passthrough-in-2023-call-to-arms/199671

This setup works fine maybe 25% of the time. I can always start the VM just fine, my linux desktop stays active and any software launched after the VM gets the GPU will render on the iGPU without issues. However I suffer from the reset bug, and 75% of the time shutting down the VM won’t return the GPU to Linux and I have to reboot to fix that.

I'm quite satisfied with this setup.

Is this a good idea

It depends on what you need and how willing you are to switch between the host and VM. A LOT more things run smoothly on Linux these days. Wendell started tinkering with IOMMU back in like 2015, and I started gaming on Linux back in 2016. If you had native software, great! Without that, well, good luck with anything less than five years old.

I played Burnout Paradise and even Subnautica on my 750Ti laptop on plain old Wine, and then DXVK came out in 2018 and the world got flipped turned upside down and I have video of me running Warframe on Linux with that same mediocre system a few weeks before Proton hit the scene and we got flipped turned... right way up? Now with Proton I would say most things run pretty well under a mixture of automatic steam stuff and scripts off lutris and homemade WINEPREFIXes.

That said, if you want everything to Just Work, it's hard to beat a VM. I'm not sure how competitive games run, but for everything else a VM is going to be more reliable than WINE.

#ask #thehylianbatman #computer stuff #iommu #Linux #vfio

[wlw-cryptid]

What do their elf eyes see. In Legolas. That's what you said, what do they see, and yeah. That's a line from LotR right. Legolas what do your elf eyes see. What do their elf eyes see in Legolas.

what do their elf eyes see in legolas bc that boys NOT getting on top

#thank you. i forgot about the joke. ice failed us. ive failed all of us #she speaks #asks #anon #thehylianbatman

[incorrectdokidokiquotes]

Thank you for all your quality Sayuki content!

Oh absolutely. It’s a quality ship

-Mod Natsuki

#ask #not a quote #so THAT'S the ship name #sayuki #thehylianbatman #mod natsuki

[batfamquotes]

Seriously, can't you just block the people making the stuff you don't like so you don't have to see it any more? I feel like that's a better solution.

listen you go to the maribat tags and block all the weirdos posting their crud see how long that takes.

also this asks seems kinda like you’re talking down to me.

#thehylianbatman #replies