Daily Archives: 2020-08-28

Article note: This is half of _why_ open, interoperable protocols are so important. Zoom is not quite a full-on mono-culture (Teams is honestly a much better product for running classes and I'm pretty skeptical of Miscrosoft in general, Google has a couple products in that space, there are a bunch of other not-terrible video conferencing options, etc.) it just has network effects making it the default, and inertia that makes it tricky to move elsewhere. However. We don't have global email outages because it's all clients talking over a protocol, just local disruptions. We don't have the whole web go down, just local failures (sometimes big ones when we let things like Cloudflare, or AWS, or EIG get too big for their britches). It seems like getting something standard and federated (maybe jitsi...) would be in everyone's best interest, but things are too dumb and desperate for that lately.

Article note: Holy shit, UK is actually up overall on several metrics. The program I work with most is up 15%, but I was expecting a small loss overall. Enrollment up 2%, first year retention up to 86.4%, new freshmen count landed between pre- and post- COVID estimates... that looks good. 20% Reduction in international students because of pandemic and Trump is not great but expected. $62M reduction in revenue from spring in a $72M shortfall, $14 million of that was refunds on room&board last semester... because we're financially a lifestyle residential community with a university attached, like most big schools.

Article note: That's _wild_. Zen2 parts are automatically mirroring the memory operand in a 0-latency hidden register for certain sequences of operations. It can do it through some stack manipulations and pointer+index calculations, and on several kinds of data. My MS involved some thinking about the problems with memory-tagged cached values, and it's firmly doable, but a trip.