HackerNews Summary (2023-05-21 03PM)

Source: An Example of a Very Sad Google Account Recovery Failure — and How It Affects Real People – Lauren Weinstein’s Blog

Summary
Google’s account recovery process has been a long-standing issue for users suffering from the inability to regain access to their accounts and recover data. An example of a failed case is a nearly 90 years old woman who was unable to recover her 15+ years legacy Gmail account and subsequently created a new one as there was no back-channel for her account.

Fact

💻 One cannot easily contact a human being at Google tech support

🔒 Google’s account recovery process can be difficult to navigate and frequently fails

👴🏼 As a result, recovery failures can have a significant impact on older individuals like the 90-year-old in this example, who lost access to her data

📉 Inactive account deletion policy, which was recently announced by Google, has worried users who fear losing access to their accounts

---

Source: Noise Is All around Us—and It’s Affecting You More than You Think

Summary
The COVID-19 quarantine provided a brief pause in human activity, allowing researchers to observe how noise impacts every corner of the planet. With the “anthropause”, researchers noticed a significant change in the song repertoire of whales in the oceans. Meanwhile, the conversation around noise and control is not new. It has always been a struggle to find the right balance between unwanted and wanted sounds.

Fact

🐳 Whales significantly broadened their song repertoire during the quarantine period as the oceans became much quieter due to the halting of ships in ports all around the world.

👥 The discourse surrounding noise has always been a struggle between those who want to control what they hear and those who believe we should embrace all sounds.

🎧 Technology, such as noise-cancelling headphones, has made it more accessible for individuals to live in an acoustic cocoon of personal comfort.

---

Source: Is Consciousness More Like Chess or the Weather?

Summary
Anil Seth, a cognitive and computational neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, discusses the relationship between consciousness and intelligence and the possibility of creating machines that not only think but also feel. He argues that consciousness and intelligence are two different things and building a conscious machine requires understanding the sufficient mechanisms.

Fact
💭 Consciousness and intelligence are two different things. Intelligence is about achieving goals in a flexible way, while consciousness is about subjective, raw experience and feelings.
💻 Building a conscious machine requires understanding the sufficient mechanisms, and there is no consensus on what those mechanisms are.

---

Source: LLVM’s libc Gets Much Faster memcpy For RISC-V

Summary
An optimized memory copy function “memcpy” was merged into LLVM’s libc library for RISC-V, which shows a significant improvement in benchmarks with results dropping to as low as 126 ns. However, Glibc still produces much faster RISC-V memcpy results compared to LLVM libc.

Facts
– 💾 An optimized memory copy function “memcpy” was merged into LLVM’s libc library for RISC-V.- 🏎️ The new implementation better handles where unaligned memory accesses are either illegal or extremely slow, resulting in better benchmarks.- 🧪 Benchmarks of this updated implementation show some tests dropping to as low as 126 ns (from 474 ns), but GNU’s Glibc still shows much faster results in some cases.- 🚀 The updated implementation is currently enabled for the RISC-V 32-bit and 64-bit software, but it could also benefit ARM32 in the future.

---