I’ve had this issue with a crappy monitor. Whenever I plugged my laptop into the HDMI cable to that particular monitor, the WiFi practically died. I think it’s because the cable or the monitor acted like an antenna, but a properly shielded cable shouldn’t be doing that anyway, so who knows what the culprit is. All I know is it was either the old monitor or the cable itself.

I’d start by slowly excluding the hardware one by one. It you’re using some third party dock, that dock could very well be the reason why the WiFi dies.

I think it’s a similar situation to the weather radars and sattelite receivers that are getting broken as more and more components of 5G are rolled out: these industries didn’t think the regulators would be so monumentally stupid as to reassign frequencies like that. Normal politics gives years of heads up before dramatic changes like these take place, but it’s been a while since normal politics have been practiced.

As for unlicensed bands themselves, I believe here in Europe several of them got moved around a bit, though that was mostly small bands that were used for devices that have since (i.e. more than 10 years ago) been altered to use Bluetooth and WiFi and other such technologies, essentially freeing up the spectrum. Someone using their thirty year old room broadcast microphone or wireless handset may be technically committing a crime, but I doubt the impact will ever register on a scale large enough to set off any investigations.

My point is that devices can and should support these kinds of regulation changes. Allowing your customers to comply with the law while using your hardware is part of their corporate responsibility.

The 6GHz band was used before it was used for WiFi. Frequencies can be reassigned, and they get reassigned on a regular basis.

It’s a pretty stupid thing to do that has no use other than annoying random people, but it the WiFi equipment industry can’t deal with changes like these, they need to get their act together. Samsung and Comcast will be fine, and grandma just needs to install her updates like she should be doing anyway.

PNGv4/v5 may improve compression but it won’t be backwards compatible. It’ll get stuck in the same kind of limbo JPEG-XL is. Until that gets resolved, we’ll have to stick with AVIF/HEIFF/WebP.

I don’t really see the need for advanced compression in lossless files. You generally don’t download those in bulk without looking at lower quality previews anyway. Would be nice if the real file supports the same colour space the preview file does anyway. I’ll appreciate it when it lands, but I don’t think I’ll spend the hours converting my photo library to save maybe half a gigabyte of space.

What a weird take. Alpha channels are used all the time. A lot of tools use WebP for them, though. Things like stickers and emoji in chat apps often recode into WebP or force you to figure out how to make a WebP with a certain configuration to accept your pack, but from there on out they rely on alpha channels.

MacOS app icons are a collection of layers with alpha channels embedded into them, stacked on top of each other, or themed individually. Unless you’re blind, any iOS or macOS user encounters alpha channels every time they turn on their screen. On Android, those files are even actual PNGs. On Windows, those are .ico resources, and everything larger than 64x64 is guaranteed to be a PNG embedded inside of an .ico (possibly embedded inside of a .exe/.dll/etc.

WebP has replaced jpeg for most web content already when it comes to compression. This just solves things like “how do I save my HDR images without degrading them every time I hit save”.

Alpha channels are also why a lot of Android apps are full of PNGs. Every app you use will be using a PNG somewhere, probably uncrushed, full of Photoshop metadata.

Of course social media is full of lossy images. Websites can be, too. But plenty of web content is lossless PNGs in ARGB format, because that’s what the person making that shit decided to use, and they don’t care about saving a few milliseconds of transfer time every time you download their content.

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If the scene is willing to pay people enough, I can see cheaters use this to write cheats that are undetectable by the OS. Right now, VM detection and PCIe bus monitoring for DMA devices seems to catch the most proficient cheaters, but it the CPU can turn your increment function into a multiplication, all bets are off. If cheaters do go this route, I expect game companies to blacklist these CPUs entirely.

Altering the CPU instructions could be very useful for reverse engineering, as debugger detection could be worked around on the CPU level. You could also use it to alter and monitor things like encryption functions. Malware could use microcode to write an entire class of CPU instructions custom to the malware/infection/infected PC itself, making it impossible to reverse engineer it using standard means. How powerful this stuff really is depends on how much free space there is in the memory that contains the microcode, but it’s pretty cool and scary stuff, depending on if your intentions are good or bad.

Intel used to have SGX, a processor component that was designed to run isolated code that not even the OS could manage. The only official way to play Blu-ray on PC, Powerlink, made heavy use of that for hiding DRM code. SGX got breached with SPECTRE/MELTDOWN, though, and Intel dropped it somewhere around the 9th Gen core processors for desktop CPUs. If AMD has a similar feature I don’t know about, that can be presumed broken on these chips now.

The new AMD 9950X3D CPU has 128MiB of L3 cache. Windows 95 installs to about 60MiB in total. Doom takes up 12MiB for all episodes. That means in theory you could load all of Windows 95 and DOOM into the L3 cache with some room to spare.

Of course this wouldn’t work out in practice because you’d lose those cache lines at some point during execution. However, Intel does have a part in its boot process where it runs a miniature OS in cache alone, but that’s part of the CPU design and probably can’t be altered.

If you could hijack the temporary “use cache as RAM” stage, you’d still lack video output or game input. I don’t think you can initialize the I/O components without completely clobbering the cache?

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