I'm very happy with my Leopold with Cherry MX Clears, having come from a Model M as my first board. Alternatively, at this price point one could put together a very decent custom from a kit + switches + keycaps.
I have an original production Model M and don't think I would ever go back to it. It's extremely loud (friends would always complain if we were gaming together), keypresses are very heavy, and it takes up a ton of deskspace.
If the Model M or F are appealing to you, at this price point you should also consider some more modern production keyboards or even building your own from a kit + switches + keycaps. If you're after the heavy & tactile keypresses of buckling springs a board with Cherry MX Clear (common) or Green (less common) will probably satisfy you - I can highly recommend any of Leopold's boards with Clears in them.
IMO, some of Kailh's clickbar switches are a better bet than Cherry's click jacket ones. They also tend to be cheaper!
Box Jade is relatively soft to press with a sharp tactile event, Box Whites are softer still, and Box Navies are too stiff for me. I currently use Pinks, since they have a medium-thickness clickbar.
And since someone might want linears (no bump or sound in the keypress), Gateron Yellow switches are a great value. Not the cream of the crop, but very nice for what they are, and you can buy them from any number of sites.
I have 5 or 6 original production Model Ms – I'm typing on one now – and it remains the best PC keyboard ever made, IMHO.
I've used them consistently in every office job I've had in the last 8 years, too. Two (2) colleagues ever have complained, out of hundreds. OTOH I worked in two Linux vendors, so there were lots of folks with mechanical keyboards. :-)
Definition, martial law: Martial law is the temporary imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions or suspension of civil law by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency where civil forces are overwhelmed, or in an occupied territory. [1]
The key phrases are "imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions" and "suspension of civil law by a government".
The Canadian Emergencies Act, which was invoked by the Liberal government today, specifically states the following: "For greater certainty, nothing in this Act derogates from the authority of the Government of Canada to deal with emergencies on any property, territory or area in respect of which the Parliament of Canada has jurisdiction" [2].
I'd do a deeper reading but I'm a bit lazy, but my understanding is that the EA does not allow, in any way, a shift in governance that could be described as "martial law" - where the military is in control of civil functions and can create or remove laws as military leadership desires. Even with the EA invoked, the federal government still controls the Canadian military (but can be assisted in enforcing civil law _by_ the military).
I'm no fan of Trudeau either, but we should seek to be precise when discussing hot situations like this. People can get very inflamed off of internet posts and the idea that we're under "martial law" is riling people up.
> I'd do a deeper reading but I'm a bit lazy, but my understanding is that the EA does not allow, in any way, a shift in governance that could be described as "martial law" - where the military is in control of civil functions and can create or remove laws as military leadership desires. Even with the EA invoked, the federal government still controls the Canadian military (but can be assisted in enforcing civil law _by_ the military).
Is that martial law is? What you're describing sounds more like a coup to me ("where the military is in control of civil functions and can create or remove laws as military leadership desires").
My understanding of martial law (very colored by being an American) is basically direct enforcement of domestic government authority by the military with little or no recourse to normal civilian oversight (e.g. courts). However, the military isn't acting independently, but is still taking orders from some civilian leader in some part of the government.
Both of the situations you described can be accurate simultaneously.
There are two levels of civil government. The military can override the civil functions of the lower level (the states) while still taking orders from the upper level (the federal government)
In ordinary functioning of government and civil society there's an effective separation of the army and the police in law enforcement. In the US, this is governed by the posse comitatus act. Canada doesn't really have an analogue, the government can request the assistance of the army when lower levels of government are unable to perform their duties sufficiently to maintain order.
The use of the emergencies act makes it clear that this is one of those situations and allows the government to utilize the military to support lower levels of law enforcement.
This is not martial law. This is not a coup. This is not unprecedented - after all Pierre Trudeau used the War Measures Act (predecessor to the Emergencies Act) to restore order in the October Crisis.
This is more like a state calling in the national guard.
The answer to lower levels of government not being able to maintain order isn't to roll over. It's to bring in more help. That's what's being done here. And it's governed by the Charter. Much more stringently than the War Measures Act ever was.
[edit] We cannot allow a small, loud, group of individuals to overturn the democratic will of the people as decided in the last election. This is un-democratic, unfair, and must end immediately. We can talk about ending restrictions in the open, but not with a boot on our throats. This occupation must end before we decide on what to do next. I remind you of the interview Pierre Trudeau gave re: the October Crisis.
Pierre Trudeau: Yeah, well there's a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it's more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of a soldier's helmet. [1]
I highly recommend listening to the longer speech [2]. Far more interesting than any speech given by Justin, IMO. Obviously a different situation, but with similar roots: wanting to overthrow a democratically elected government because they don't like the lawful, legal, constitutional decisions.
They can have their say in peaceful protest, in court or at the next election - and not before.
If it's unlawful, illegal or unconstitutional then avenues exist within the courts to resolve their grievances do they not? I'm led to believe that rule of law continues to prevail within Canada.
[edit] Not just that, Trudeau operates a minority government, meaning two other parties could gang up and oust them at basically any time. And yet, he remains in office. I think this really speaks to how small the vocal minority is.
They've brought guns, ammo, knives [1], built encampments, stashed them full of diesel and propane [2], disrupted trade, jobs, lives, supply chains, threatened violence. Harassed and intimidated healthcare workers. And for what? This is not your average picket, and it's gone on more than long enough.
We're all frustrated, we're all tired of this. I'm open to revisiting the health measures, but not like this.
My understanding is that international law requires nation have some form of martial law.
The idea is that if your nation is “hosting” a battle field, and the police start arresting belligerents and charging them with civilian crimes, the military can override them and say “you can’t charge invading soldiers with a crime for honorably doing their duty” - they must be treated as POWs, not criminals.
For example, if Russia is attacking Toronto, and a Toronto Police Officer comes across a wounded Russian soldier with an AK-47, she can’t charge the soldier for possessing an illegal weapon. The soldier would have to be treated as a POW.
This means the military must - must! - be able to say “this area is under martial law”.
I doubt this applies to the current situation.
But if Canada is as diligent as they claim to be about International law, they need to have the ability to declare martial law.
You've struck on the fundamental problem that the FPGA industry has been trying to solve for 30+ years - how to get an FPGA into the hands of every developer, like how GPUs have propagated to be essential tools.
Nobody has come up with a good answer yet. Developing for an FPGA still requires domain-specific knowledge, and because place & route (the "compile" for an FPGA) is a couple of intertwined NP-hard problems development cycles are necessarily long. Small designs might take an hour to compile, the largest designs deployed these days ~24H.
All this to say is that while they are neat, nobody has found the magic bullet use case that will make everyone want one enough to put up with the pain of developing for them (a la machine learning for GPUs). Simultaneously, nobody has found the magic bullet to make developing for them any easier, whether by reducing the knowledge required or improving the tooling.
Effort has been made in places like High-Level Synthesis (HLS, compiling C/C++ code down to an FPGA), open-source tooling, and (everyone's favorite) simulation, but they all still kinda suck compared to developing software, or even the ecosystem that exists around GPUs these days. You'll often hear FPGA people saying stuff like "just simulate your design during development, compiling to hardware is just a last step to check everything works" - but simulation still takes a long time (large designs can take hours) and tracking down a bug in waveforms is akin to Neo learning to see the Matrix.
If the FPGA industry thinks it has been trying to do this for decades, then it has been going about it seriously wrong! Keeping your systems as black boxes, with unit prices and development prices that make them prohibitive for anything but high margin device, effectively guarantees they'll never become popular consumer commodities.
With how open development works, the straightforward minimal investment is to publicly document some devices' bitstream formats and bootstrap the ecosystem by releasing some reliable Libre place and route software. The software doesn't even have to contain all of the trade secret heuristics, it just has to work with (./configure && make && make install) and be functionally adequate enough that individual developers can scratch their own itches.
Being able to offload a repeated, complex MIMD computation to an FPGA treated like an instruction could be a huge win for scientific computing and any large, steady workload that is expensive enough for companies to invest in optimizing for the FPGA. If this became commonplace and relatively inexpensive then large corporations would likely fund improvements into compilers to make the developer experience simpler and faster.
Disclaimer: I work in this space (not at Xilinx), comments are strictly my own opinions and do not reflect any positions of my employer, etc.
Broadly speaking, FPGA-based ML model accelerators are in an interesting space right now, where they aren't particularly compelling from a performance (or perf / Watt, perf / $, etc.) perspective. If you just need performance, then a GPU or ASIC-based accelerator will serve you better - the GPU will be easier to program, and ASIC-based accelerators from the various startups are performing pretty well. Where an FPGA accelerator makes a lot of sense is if you otherwise need an FPGA anyways, or the other benefits of FPGAs (e.g. lots of easily-controlled IO) - but then you're just back to square 1 of "there's some cases where an FPGA makes sense and many where it doesn't". Besides that, a few niche cases where a mid-range FPGA might beat a mid-range GPU on perf / Watt or whatever metric is important for you.
Again, opinions are my own and all that. As someone in the space, I am very much hoping that someone - whether an ASIC startup or Xilinx / Intel come up with a "better" (performant, cheaper, easier to use, etc.) solution than GPUs for ML applications. If the winner ends up being FPGAs, that would be really really cool! Just at the moment it's not too compelling, and I'm trying to be realistic.
All that said, FPGAs and their related supports (software, boards, etc.) are an $Xb / Y market - nothing to shake a stick at, and there are many cases where an FPGA makes sense. Just doesn't currently make sense for every dev to buy an FPGA card to drop in their desktop to play with.
>come up with a "better" (performant, cheaper, easier to use, etc.) solution than GPUs for ML applications
you probably are aware but Xilinx themselves is attempting this with their versal aie boards which (in spirit) similar to GPUs, in that they group together a programmable fabric of programmable SIMD type compute cores.
I've done it as well with my parents, who love wine. At the shops I've been to, you buy the grape concentrate up front and they handle to process of making it up until bottling. Once the juice has fermented, you go in and they walk you through cleaning and sanitizing the bottles, filling them, corking them, and usually shrink-wrapping the tops. They provide all the supplies except the bottles themselves - customers bring their own, saved from buying wine the "normal" way.
Never seen a shop do ageing, so the wine will be noticeably "young". My parents like dryer and sharper white wines anyways (Pinot Grigio, Riesling, etc.) so it doesn't bother them. Also note that due to taxes and such, the cheapest wine you'll find commercially is C$11 a bottle, so even at C$20 / gallon you're getting a great deal if you like the resulting wines.
Personally, I quite like the wines my folks get through these shops - properly chilled they make a wonderfully refreshing beverage in the summer, and we'll often drink a few bottles on the back deck together when I go to see them.
Anecdotally, recently my dad got me a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs) and an entry-level DAC. The two put together have blown me away and I've been having a blast the last couple of weeks re-listening to all my favourite records from as far back as the 70s.
I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.
It might very well be the DAC doing the work then, or maybe the placebo effect is just making me pay more attention to music I first heard years ago and I'm picking up more :)
Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.
Just the Hifi level is probably enough for almost any system. I also noticed a huge difference coming from YouTube and Spotify on the Hifi setting in Tidal. I didn’t bother with Master as my ears aren’t that magical
Nah that's just Tidals marketing talking. "Anyone" can submit music to Tidal through services like DistroKid etc. However, to get the Tidal "MASTER" badge on your song, you basically just have to pay them extra. I don't need to submit another file to them, so it's the same master. It might be that they do some post-processing on it, but it's not the revolutionary thing they make it out to be.
Adding to the comment about difficulty, the number and ratio of likes : dislikes on a problem is a good measure of difficulty. A Medium with 5K likes and 300 dislikes is probably quite a good (well-written, constrained, fair) problem. A Medium with 300 likes and 800 dislikes I'd steer clear of.
There are people for whom a vegan diet works. You seem to be one of them. I tried it a few times, and no matter what I supplemented, I would lose weight rapidly. I understand that it can turn into a moral argument as well, except that I kill fewer animals than you to eat. Responsibly-grown meat is less detrimental to local ecosystems than vegetables.
