When two processing devices try and access the same memory there are contention problems as the memory cannot be accessed by two devices at the same time (well, sorta: parallel reads are fine, it’s when one side is writing that there can be problems), so one of the devices has to wait, so it’s slower than dedicated memory but the slowness is not constant since it depends on the memory access patterns of both devices.

There are ways to improve this: for example, if you have multiple channels on the same memory module then contention issues are reduced to the same memory block, which depends on the block-size, though this also means that parallel processing on the same device - i.e. multiple cores - cannot use the channels being used by a different device so it’s slower.

There are also additional problems with things like memory caches in the CPU and GPU - if an area of memory cached in one device is altered by a different device that has to be detected and the cache entry removed or marked as dirty. Again, this reduces performance versus situations where there aren’t multiple processing devices sharing memory.

In practice the performance impact is highly dependent on if an how the memory is partitioned between the devices, as well as by the amount of parallelism in both processing devices (this latter because of my point from above that memory modules have a limited number of memory channels so multiple parallel accesses to the same memory module from both devices can lead to stalls in cores of one or both devices since not enough channels are available for both).

As for the examples you gave, they’re not exactly great:

• First, when loading models into the GPU memory, even with SSDs the disk read is by far the slowest part and hence the bottleneck, so as long as things are being done in parallel (i.e. whilst the data is loaded from disk to CPU memory, already loaded data is also being copied from CPU memory to GPU memory) you won’t see that much difference between loading to CPU memory and then from there to GPU memory and direct loading to GPU memory. Further, the manipulation of models in shared memory by the CPU introduces the very performance problems I was explaining above, namely contention problems from both devices accessing the same memory blocks and GPU cache entries getting invalidated because the CPU altered that data in the main memory.
• Second, if I’m not mistaken tone mapping is highly parallelizable (as pixels are independent - I think, but not sure since I haven’t actually implemented this kind of post processing), which means that the best by far device at parallel processing - the GPU - should be handling it in a shader, not the CPU. (Mind you, I might be wrong in this specific case if the algorithm is not highly parallelizable. My own experience with doing things via CPU or via shaders running in the GPU - be it image shaders or compute shaders - is that in highly parallelizable stuff, a shader in the GPU is way, way faster than an algorithm running in the CPU).

I don’t think that direct access by the CPU to manipulate GPU data is at all a good thing (by the reasons given on top) and to get proper performance out of a shared memory setup at the very least the programming must done in a special way that tries to reduce collisions in memory access, or the whole thing must be setup by the OS like it’s done on PCs with integrated graphics, were a part of the main memory is reserved for the GPU by the OS itself when it starts and the CPU won’t touch that memory after that.

I’ve both lived in the UK and The Netherlands.

IMHO, it’s to do with how socially the UK is a very classist society were people worry a lot (insanely so compared with The Netherlands) not just about their place in the social ladder but about it being visible to others - the TV Sitcom Keeping Up Appearances is actually a pretty good illustration of this: even though it’s a comedy and thus exagerated in the forms the characters in it display such traits and act on them, the way of thinking of the characters is based on how people in Britain (especially England) tend to see their standing in society and the importance they give to projecting the “right” appearances (part of what makes that comedy funny is that it’s a satire of certain traits of British society: a lot of British comedy is even more funny once you’ve lived there for a while and start getting the in-jokes).

Then overlayed on this is the common take there on social climbing which is to spend far more time and effort trying to stop others below oneself in the social ladder from climbing than in climbing oneself. People like to look down on those seen as lower status, expect others to “know their place” and will actually put some effort into making sure those who don’t are punished for it.

This is, IMHO, why punishing the poor is so popular in Britain. It also anchors a lot of the anti-immigration feeling since there is no lower class in British Society than non-Britons.

As for other Anglo-Saxon countries, I don’t really know.

It happened to me for during a couple of days last week that I could hear my own heartbeat whenever it was quiet.

No idea why and it’s gone now.

Actually it that was meant as point about “it’s the Law” being a traditional excuse of Fascists.

Guess it felt too close to home for you.

Mate, the UK isn’t the US: Starmer has a Parliamentary Majority in a country that doesn’t even have a written constitution and which is not a Presidential System, so nothing stops him from changing this.

It’s just that New Labour isn’t left of center (probably not even center anymore) and so they couldn’t care less about the “plebes”.

Starmer has a Parliamentary Majority.

They could have changed this anytime they wanted.

So they’re either malicious, incompetent or both.

I lived in the UK for over a decade until Brexit, and frankly I think that by the time I left they were one of the most far-right countries in Europe, just in this English-upper-class style of posh words and the oppression done “elegantly” via extreme “rules” rather than the direct violence of the (not posh) populist far-right, - people are still made to hurt for the crime of being poor, and the system is designed to hurt anybody who would defy the local elites (just notice the conviction to years in jail of of Environmentalist demonstrators for blocking a road) but all the Ts are traced and Is are dotted, all prim and propper - so people from the outside don’t really notice how so very close to Fascist Britain already is.

(“It’s the Law”, say the far-right muppets over there, same as Nazi enablers would say in Nazi Germany.)

Rules on social security explicitly designed to make it likely that people make mistakes (this allowance apparently changes depending on a person’s weekly income, which floats if you’re in insecure employment, which is exactly the problem of the working poor, and it’s down to the recipient to figure it out precisely, down to the pence, with no help) and then punishing them disproportionatelly hard for the error is exactly the style of “by the rules” hurting of people for being poor (and human, hence making mistakes) beloved by the Posh Fascists and their followers (of which there are many, as proven by Brexit which was the product of a campaign of Racism and Nationalistic Exceptionalism).

Just to add to this, the reason you only see shared memory setups on PCs with integrated graphics is because it lowers performance compared to dedicated memory, which is less of a problem if your GPU is only being used in 2D mode such as when doing office work (mainly because that uses little memory), but more of a problem when used in 3D mode (such as in most modern games) which is as the PS5 is meant to be used most of the time.

So the PS5 having shared memory is not a good thing and actually makes it inferior compared to a PC made with a GPU and CPU of similar processing power using the dominant gaming PC architecture (separate memory).

The stuff that the Brits recently tested is exactly an EMP pulse, though directional.

The thing is, you can harden the drones against that.

From what I’ve heard on TV around here (Portugal), France still refuses to allow electrical lines passing through French territory from Spain and Portugal to sell power directly to the rest of the EU.

France is fine with buying themselves power from Portugal and Spain on the cheap to resell for more money to the rest of the EU or with selling power themselves to Spain and Portugal. Spain and Portugal have very good conditions for renewables, especially solar (for example, Portugal has twice the amount of peak sun exposure hours per year than Germany), so it makes sense to produce that kind of renewables here (on the other hand, things like hydro - which is still most of Portugal’s renewable energy generation - make a lot less sense since both countries are predicted to become much drier with global warming)

There are some crazy ideas to bypass France with a submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea, but those are quite complex and costly.

I’ve also heard about the gas thing and the plan was to import gas from Northern Africa via Spain and sell it to the rest of Europe, as neither Spain nor Portugal produce gas. This would serve to reduce the dependency of, earlier, Russia gas and nowadays LPG from places like the US. That said I agree that we (Europe) need to wean ourselves of fossil fuels.

Both Portugal and Spain want to have power lines connecting the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe.

The problem is that France refuses to allow the construction of lines to export energy from Portugal and Spain to the rest of Europe because that would threaten France’s very own business of exporting the power generated by its nuclear power plants to the rest of Europe.

In this latest power outage it would’ve been especially beneficiary to Portugal to be connected to nations other than just Spain, since Spain’s problems dragged down the Portuguese grid, and if there was a different place from where Portugal could have sourced enough power to make up for the sudden crash of the power coming from Spain, the country might have avoided the total collapse of power.

Solar is generated as a DC current which has to be converted to AC and the grid voltage (so, 220V in Spain) in order to supply it to the energy grid, so all that it takes to control the flow of energy from solar generation into the grid is to be able to remotely tell the DC-AC converters of the solar farms to stop sending power to the AC side. When the converters are in that state, energy is not flowing down to the energy grid and all that happens on the other side is that the solar cells get a bit more warm.

Of course that means it has to mandatory for any solar supplier to the mains network to have a converter which can be switched off remotely by the grid management company.

Similarly, wind generation can be reduced and even stopped by changing the pitch of the blades and similarly it must be possible for the grid management company to do so remotely.

Switching on and off power sources (for example, switching on or off power turbines in dams or gas power stations) has long been how the grid management company balances production with consumption in order to avoid blackouts.

The problem is not an inherent inability of the new forms of renewable generation to be reduced or stopped when needed, it’s that if not forced the businesses generating that energy won’t pay the extra money to have systems in placed to do so which can be remotely activated by the electric grid management company: the flow of renewable energy is not controllable because the power supply operators won’t spend the money into making it controllable unless forced and at least until now there was no political will to force them to do so.

It’s a political (and Capitalism) problem, not a technical problem.

If I passed that impression, I’m sorry.

I’m well aware that plenty of people in Germany are fighting Far-Right extremist in all its forms, both at home and abroad and I definitely don’t think of Germans as “all the same” (if I did I would be a massive hypocrite) - as with everybody else Germans come in all sorts, good, bad and everything in between: so is human nature.

What I see is a political and press environment in Germany (and, as I said, I see similar things in other countries) spreading a way of thinking about other people which is the same that the far-right has, hence in my view it’s indirectly boosting the far-right in that country partly by confirming to people who already thought like that, that it’s fine to think so, and partly by teaching others to think like that.

This is not a German thing: the same kind of environment anywhere else would have the same result.

Yes, I consider all the people who argue “the Gaza genocide should be the most important political issue of our time in every country of the world” one group, namely the group of people who bring it up in every political discussion everywhere.

Please point out exactly were I said that “Gaza genocide should be the most important political issue of our time in every country of the world”

Beyond that:

• I’m making the point, repeatedly, that politicians building support at home for their policies of supporting far-right extremism abroad (which is what Israel - an ethno-Fascist white colonialist nation with Appartheid constitutionally enshrined - is as is it’s ultra-racist Genocide in Gaza) is tightly related to the growth of far-right extremism at home because to do the former means spreading the way of viewing the world of the far-right hence it boosts the latter.
• Your whole point is “if you go after one of those things you stop the other thing from being addressed”, which implies that those things are totally unrelated, plus it relies on the ridiculous falacy that people cannot deal with more than one problem at the same time.

Your point relies on the notion that repeated and overt statements in favour of Racial Descrimination (which is exactly what people like Schulz do when they say that “Germany unwaveringly supports the Jewish Nation” to justify sending weapons to Israel to carry on executing their Genocide) somehow don’t embolden Racists to think that “Racism is ok” and hence that those criticizing the former somehow, magically, are derrailing the fight against the latter.

First, this really jumped out from your post:

you people got Trump elected

Perfect illustration of somebody who mentally reduces other human beings from persons into groups.

The curious thing is that somebody who thinks like that about human beings is pushing a “nothing we can do about it with certainty, let’s not talk about the Gaza Genocide”…

Second: how exactly does the political system in the US make this behaviour of the German authorities and political class any less hypocrite? In fact, how does it at all relate given that Germany has a mixed system including a Proportional Vote component, so totally different from the US?

Third: What’s exactly is your point? Because that exact argument structure can justify closing your eyes and make believe it ain’t happening for everything bad :

• Gaza Genocide: “no evidence that their preferred option changes anything about it”
• Environmental destruction: “no evidence that their preferred option changes anything about it”
• Fascism; “no evidence that their preferred option changes anything about it”
• Poverty: “no evidence that their preferred option changes anything about it”

Best just give up on politics altogether to stop evil-doing! How convenient for the evil-doers.

That view is literally “in Germany” and is certainly widespread (if you count both people who support the AfD and people who support the mainstream’s party take on Israel), because it’s literally “in Germany” that politicians and a segment of the press have been spreading as “normal” to support or not of people based on their race.

It’s kinda the whole point of my post that if you spread and normalize Racist takes on other people you’re cultivating Racism and hence get lots of Racists, and that’s exactly what’s happening in Germany (and the US, and Israel, to name just a few other supposed Democracies were this shit should not be happening).

Now, if you think the political and press environment in Germany spreading Racist views on human beings I something that reflects poorly on Germans, that’s all you.

From my own post

the entirety of the German political mainstream

and

German politicians

Please point out exactly were I am making statements about “Germans” in general

If when you read such a post what you see is criticism of those never mentioned in it - “Germans” - rather than criticism of those repeatedly mention there - “German politicians” - then the Racist As Fuck part is coming from your side.

Those eagerly cultivating at home a Fascist way of thinking (from the Racism of “unwaveringly support for the self-proclaimed representatives of a race whilst they mass murder children” to the Authoritarianism and total contempt for the Rule Of Law of “expelling foreigners without Trial for attending demonstrations”), will never get rid of the Fascists because it is they themselves who are feeding Fascism.

Either the German authorities and politicians are dumb as doorknobs and they’re unable to understand that endorsing Fascist Thinking creates Fascists, or all their “dealing with the fascists at home” is either performative or just infighting between the different pro-Fascism powers in Germany to decide who ends up at the top of the Fascist hierarchy.

“The ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the BfV said on Friday.

Pretty much the entirety of the German political mainstream is right now “unwaveringly supporting” a fascist regime commiting an extreme Genocide in Gaza, and that support has been very openly because of the ethnicity the murderers claim to represent, or in other words, due to “ethnicity-and ancestry-based conceptions”.

Normalize race as an excuse to support no matter what those commiting the most atrocious of actions and all that it takes is to add “if it applies to them, then surely it applies to us” to that normalized racism to get something like the ideology of the AfD.

German politicians have long been plowing and fertilizing the field from which the AfD sprouted with great vigour.

This right now is just hypocrisy: the AfD is but the tip of the iceberg which is the view in Germany that the way people are treated should depend on their race and even the most horrible of deeds are excusable if one’s race is the right one.

So what exactly are you doing to clean up the Democrat Party of a leadership who managed to lose against none other than Donald Trump, TWICE?

Or are you just another tribalist muppet that thinks “the chief is always right and needs not concede anything to anybody and it’s everybody else who has to just do what the chief wants” hence rages against those who are not of your tribe and didn’t follow the wishes of your “chiefs” rather than against your “chiefs” for not even trying to appeal to those other people?

Because it would’ve been way easier for the handful of people in the Democrat Party leadership to, rather than totally refusing to care as they did, listen to and start addressing the concerns of the millions who were hesitant in voting Democrat, than for those millions of voters to magically change their minds when the party which should have been trying to appeal to them couldn’t give a rat’s arse about their worries.