I know what one of the three words in the title actually mean. If you want to know what a word means, you consult a dictionary. If people are actually using these words, it kind of makes sense to add their definitions.

Do you happen to use an ISP that implements CGNAT? I’ve seen this error, too, and I’ve read that it’s flagging CGNAT IPs as a VPN?

I think age of code plays a big part. 2 years ago: Yeah, I could do better, but it’s workable. 15 years ago: Delete everything and just start from scratch.

I have to wonder if NPUs are just going to eventually become a normal part of the instruction set.

When SIMD was first becoming a thing, it was advertised as accelerating “multimedia,” as that was the hot buzzword of the 1990s. Now, SIMD instructions are used everywhere, any place there is a benefit from processing an array of values in parallel.

I could see NPUs becoming the same. Developers start using NPU instructions, and the compiler can “NPU-ify” scalar code when it thinks it’s appropriate.

NPUs are advertised for “AI,” but they’re really just a specialized math coprocessor. I don’t really see this as a bad thing to have. Surely there are plenty of other uses.