Web Excursions 2022-04-16
Explainer: Benchmarks – The Eclectic Light Company
There are two basic ways to tackle the assessment of performance:
test each individual step, such as GPU and disk performance, one at a time, and
test them altogether by performing the whole task.
These form the two main types of benchmark: synthetic, and application.
Synthetic benchmarks are specially constructed to test individual aspects of overall performance.
Historically important examples include Whetstone and Dhrystone benchmarks,
which for many years were popular benchmarks for floating-point and integer performance of CPUs, respectively.
As processors have advanced, these have become more complex.
While synthetic benchmarks are ideal for discovering performance bottlenecks, and comparing variants of the same core architecture,
they tell you precious little about the overall performance you could expect when running apps.
For that you should turn to application benchmarks.
The most meaningful application benchmarks for any user are carefully timed tests of real-world tasks which take time,
in a production version of the app normally used.
These are highly individual.
Intermediate benchmarks
Between synthetic and application benchmarks is an uncomfortable compromise in tests
which aim to assess performance on standardised app tasks.
Among the most popular, on Macs at least, is Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.
These assemble a series of representative tasks in a performance category,
such as CPU and ‘Compute’,
to generate a score which can be compared across different platforms and architectures
These don’t provide the same depth and detail as synthetic benchmarks should,
and don’t tell you whether the tasks you use in your main working apps will be faster or slower on another system.
However, they’re the only way of drawing comparisons between completely different platforms.
How you interpret observed differences is another problem.
Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of all benchmarks is how poorly they translate into the perception of performance by the user.
the psychology of computer performance, and how even small delays in the human interface are amplified.
Comparing GPUs is even more tricky, because of the variation in different tests.
Mac GPUs, particularly those in Apple Silicon models, rely on Metal for best performance,
but some graphics benchmarks don’t even run on the GPU, and others use cross-platform libraries such as OpenCL, which is deprecated by Apple so unlikely to achieve good performance on GPUs in M1 models
benchmark testing [is arguably] just a sophisticated form of confirmation bias
DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results
Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies.
Several YouTube ripping services have disappeared, too and even the homepage of the open-source software youtube-mp3 is unfindable.
This first became apparent when it removed several search shortcuts for ‘pirate’ sites.
These “bangs” were seen as a potential copyright infringement liability.
DuckDuckGo ended up removing roughly 2,000 bangs for popular sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and RARBG.
At the time, the search engine stressed that these sites were still listed in search results.
However, that appears to have changed now.
searching for “site:thepiratebay.org” is supposed to return all results DuckDuckGo has indexed for The Pirate Bay’s main domain name.
In this case, there are none.
When we do similar searches for 1337x.to, NYAA.se, Fmovies.to, Lookmovie.io, and 123moviesfree.net, no results appear.
For RarBG.to and Fitgirl-repacks we only get one result, instead of the hundreds of thousands we see on other search engines.
Even several popular stream-rippers have been completely wiped from the search results.
That includes 2conv.com, Flvto.bid, and several others.
The most surprising omission, by far, is that the official site for the open-source software
youtube-dlis not indexed by DuckDuckGo.This site certainly doesn’t host or link to any copyright-infringing material.