I do agree with you. What would have been a better incentive, or do you think the prior system was better?
Personally, it actually motivated me to be a bit more active and finish my post. But I have also noticed a bit of "farming" for points (which was very much a consideration I'm sure, hence "good heart token").
I think the reason it appealed to me was that the feedback mechanism was tangible and (somewhat) immediate. Contrast that with, say, pure upvotes, which feel non-impactful to me.
I think an incentive is good, but one that is less than pure dollar values and more than ego-filling-warm-fuzzy-feeling upvotes.
Those two links are the same. But yeah I'm referring to the latter, w.r.t fuzzing of the synthesized devices.
"Fuzzing" as a concept is used, but not very "block-level" (some some exceptions, e.g. you likely know about UVM's support for random data streams, coming from an FPGA background). The fuzzing analogue in hardware might be called "constrained random verification".
Fuzzing as I've heard it referenced is more of a jargon used in the software security world, the aforementioned AFL fuzzer being one example.
I do agree that traditional fuzzing isn't used in hardware is rather surprising to me.
Oh I guess, while I'm on the topic of "bringing software paradigms into the hardware world", let me also talk about CirctIR briefly.
I also believe LLVM was a bit of a boon for the software security world, enabling some really cool symbolic execution and/or reverse engineering tools. CirctIR is an attempt to basically bring this "intermediate representation" idea to hardware.
This "generator for intermediate language representation", by the way, is similar to what Chisel currently does w.r.t generating verilog. But CirctIR is a little more generic, and...
Hi, I'm a lurker. I work on CPUs. This also motivated me to post!
This is a rather niche topic, but I want to express it, because I greatly enjoy seeing other ramble about their deep-work domain expertise, so maybe someone will find this interesting too? This is relatively similar to the concept behind the podcast [What's your problem?], in which engineers talk about ridiculously niche problems that are integral to their field.
Anyways-- here's my problem.
Fuzzing (maybe known as mutation based testing, or coverage directed verification, or 10 other different...
I thought I wrote an answer to this. Turns out I didn't. Also, I am a horrific procrastinator.
Just made this account to answer this. Source: I've worked in physical design/VLSI and CPU verification, and pretty regularly deal with RTL.
TL;DR - You're right-- it's not a big deal, but it simultaneously means more and less than you think.
Jump to "What It Means" if you already understand the problem.
First, let me talk about about the purpose of floorplanning. The author's mention it a little bit, but it's worth repeating.
...Placement optimizations of this form appear in a wide range of science and engineering applications, including hardware desi
Maybe this is a bit too practical and not as "world-modeling-esque" as your question asks? But I don't strongly believe that raw intelligence is enough of a "credential" to rely on.
You might hear it as-- he/she's the smartest guy/gal I know, so you should trust them; we have insanely great talent at this company; they went to MIT so they're smart; they have a PhD so listen to them. I like to liken this to Mom-Dad bragging points. Any X number of things are really just proxies for "they're smart"
I used to personally believe this of myself-- I'm smart and ca... (read more)