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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I was thinking about Knights of Sidonia. They bough the rights while second season was being made, and while I’m not sure whether they also Labelled the first season as Netflix Original, they at least took it down from everywhere and instead put it on their own site.

    EDIT: Correction, as far as I can see, they bought the rights a month after the first season finished airing, and they did call the first season a Netflix Origin.

    When the second season aired, I got pretty butthurt that I not only couldn’t see the new season on other sites than Netflix, but I couldn’t even see the first season anymore!












  • Right, apologies for dumping it down so far, I find it hard to properly gauge the knowledge of others on the internet, and just try and play safe.

    I wasn’t aware that one could serial program gate arrays, as, as far as I know, the definition of serial programming is code that is governed by a processor, and which prohibits anything but serial execution of commands. So it’s new to me that gate arrays can run serial code without any governance or serialization process, since gate arrays by themselves are anything but serial. Or rather, you need to synchronize anything and everything that is supposed to be serial by yourself, or use pre-built and pre-synced blocks, I guess.

    Anyway, going by the definition that serial programming can only be performed using some kind of governance or synchronizing authority, that alone would be another layer of security.

    As serial implies, it rid us, or lessened the burden, of those timing related issues, some of which included:

    • All the problems of accessing in-use resources that multi-cored serial “parallel” programming reintroduced.
    • Making a block and not properly timing it resulting in the clock changing while it’s still flipping gates and produce unexpected behavior.
    • As the above, just generally having to time everything, as having too many clock blocks or sync checks results in unnecessary speed loss, and having too few checks might result in unexpected behavior.
    • Over/underclocking and other slight power and clock variations.
    • Uninitialized gates producing random behavior.
    • And by extension: the power up process not being exactly the same every time, resulting in more unexpected behavior. Very annoying to debug when it looks all right to start with.
    • Reading through seconds of timing diagrams (that’s a lot of reading with a clock time of nano seconds).
    • Block placement and connection problems.
    • Using gate array layouts/code with differing transistor specs.

    And the list goes on, but you know.

    Serial also has a lot of pitfalls, and you can definitely screw things up bad, but at least you don’t have to think much about clock or timing, or memory placement, unless communicating between devices or cores, and those sync problems tend to be rather tame and simple compared to intra-processor problems.

    At least from my experience.


  • I think you are misunderstanding me. Are you perhaps thinking about multithreading or multi core? Because some people have also started calling that “parallel”, even if it is nothing like low-level parallel.

    A CPU does not build upon a CPU, a CPU builds upon transistors which are collected into gates, and which can be assembled into the correct order using parallel programming.

    EDIT: as an example, you do not actually need a computer to parallel program. Get yourself a box of transistor, some cable, and a soldering iron, and you can build some very rudimentary gate arrays, like a flip-flop.

    This link might give a better understanding of our confusion.

    EDIT 2: One could perhaps illustrate the confusion which this topic is often victim of as such:

    Transistors are part of the hardware and are parallel programmed to form complex gate arrays called “Processors”, which feature instruction sets used by machine code, which is made using assembly, which called “serial programming”, which enables high-complexity operations such as multi-core “parallel” programming.

    I’m talking about the former “PGA parallel programming”, and not the latter “multi-core parallel programming”.