PAPPPmAc

9 ms·

31.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
IMO, grammatically pleasing AI spew is exploiting the same mental shortcut as the well established "Anything looks credible if it's typeset in LaTeX" or "Printing resumes on nice paper for a subconscious boost" effe
32.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
The article indicates they _were_ hacking a clone (mirror) of the data... which is curious, since Apple does claim there is a hardware key to prevent exactly that. Presumably someone is doing a little lying-by-omission - Probably there is
33.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
I occasionally use tcc ( https://bellard.org/tcc/ ) like an interpreter (`tcc -run`), it's convenient for certain odd tasks. Not so much for interactive stuff, but if I'm building little PoCs for an idea that w
34.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
I've had really good luck with the one generation old relatively up-market Dells - their consumer products tend to be mediocre, but the Latitudes and Precisions are typically good hardware ... look for Dells that start with a "7&q
35.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
Unfortunately it's mostly locked up in a university CMS, and I haven't put copies out on the public 'net partly just to slightly obscure the semester to semester changes we make to throw off lazy cheaters.
36.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
I teach a sophomore-level class for electrical and computer engineering majors out of the Valvano materials, we put references to the chapters in both the free online and later inexpensive print version in our materials. It's great in
37.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
I was going by this low hanging chart from the server market: https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_is_now_the_most_popula... which seems credible with my memories from industry buddies at the time. Though, as you
38.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
CentOS was, as you say, a community developed drop-in replacement for RedHat RHEL that subsumed a number of earlier RPM-based distributions in the early-mid 2000s. It was _widely_ used: in the 2010s the CentOS install base was on the same
39.
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
Yup, since the NexGen Nx586->AMD K6 and Intel P6 (Pentium Pro) generations, which were contemporaries of Transmeta's founding in ~1995, modern x86 parts are pretty much a dynamic JIT in silicon in front of whatever fancy internal ar
40.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
The point is that NT is portable, and once Merced hit the market in 2001 5+ years overdue and not delivering on any of its performance promises, the only question was "What architecture will succeed x86, because we can cross IA64 off t
41.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Or Intel would have been cut out if they didn't put forth an offering that was less expensive and more performant? When NT4 came out, it ran on Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. You could even run (...at about half speed) x86 binaries on the
42.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
I'm certainly not going to claim that x86 and its irregularities and extensions of extensions is in _any way_ a good choice for the lingua franca instruction set (or IR in this way of thinking). Its aggressively strictly ordered memor
43.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
IMO, Itanic was a doomed design from the start, the lesson to be learned is that "You can't statically schedule dynamic behavior." The VLIW/EPIC type designs like Itanium require you have a _very clever_ compiler to sch
44.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Look closely at AMD designs (and staff) of the very late 90s and early 2000s and/or all modern x86 parts and see that ...more or less, that's what happened, just not with an Alpha mode. Dirk Meyer (Co-Architect of the DEC Alpha 21
45.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Recall that what made the Primer so effective in Diamond Age is that it had access to enormous external financial and human resources. The later copies that raised the Mouse Army and did not have those resources were (intentionally) not gr
46.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
This gamingonlinux thread https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/01/bluetooth-support-for-... seems to have the details of getting it working on Linux, it looks like it depends on some udev rules, both the ones from t
47.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Can confirm. Just tried with my newly-Bluetooth'd Stadia controller, will pair with an on-hand Android device and Linux box, doesn't show up on the find controllers screen of an (un-hacked) Switch, as expected.
48.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Did my freebie. The update behavior is interesting. The tool is picky (in that "Flashback to ActiveX bullshit" kind of way) about the platform that does the update. Has to be a real computer (won't work from Android). Has t
49.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
I'm not sure that attributing the successes to "sales or marketing" had as much to do with it as timing and position. Management _failures_ certainly dominated the era, there were vast numbers of unforced errors due largely
50.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
The tale of major incumbents' completely bungled OS/Platform projects of the 80s and 90s really is one of the great epics of the field. A short - and playing it a little fast and loose for narrative like a Malcolm Gladwell piece -
51.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
(Just because I love this argument): Have you used Mid-90s OpenStep and BeOS on period hardware? People rose-tinted-glasses the hell out of OpenStep (...and the first few OS X releases), it's ridiculously sluggish and brittle (in tha
52.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
I went and listened to the RISC V BoF at SC22 a month or so ago, mostly because I wanted to hear what their plans for making the proliferation of extensions manageable for toolchains and libraries looked like... The presented plan included
53.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Earliest record I'm aware of was two limited-scope papers about rigging linear algebra systems onto GPUs in 2003: Krüger and Westermann out of TU Munich and Bolz et. al. out of Caltech. Both were published in the same 22(3) issue of IE
54.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Surprising related fact: terminal multiplexers appear to be a relative neologism, multiple terminal emulators running on a graphical system likely predate them by years. I've been trying to dig my way into the history for funsies rece
55.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
There's a public copy of the (super sketchy) draft toolchain that some of the folks in the lab were working with on github: https://github.com/aggregate/MOG It's a horrifying toolchain that uses MIPSEL assemb
56.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
I got one of the free promotional Controller + Chrome Cast Ultra "Premier Edition" bundles they were seeding to YouTube Premium customers out of sheer curiosity. I tried it for the free month, and hadn't taken the controller
57.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
IIRC Intel bought Micron out of the 3DXpoint/Optane project in 2018, and (based a some hallway conversations at conferences) folks at Micron were not exactly enthusiastic about the early results from the technology or Intel's over
58.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
I argue about this a lot. Some reasonably substantiated opinions: 1. Highly sophisticated large-scale static analysis keeps getting beaten by relatively stupid tricks built into overgrown instruction decoders, working on relatively narrow w
59.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
The first of Intel's many expensive lessons about the problems with extremely complicated ISAs dependent on even more sophisticated compilers making good static decisions for performance. Then they did it again with the i860. Then
60.
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
Krunner is super finicky about it though, especially since it won't handle even the simplest of mixed units (eg. neither 6ft 2in or 6'2" works, where 6ft, 6', 2", and 2in all give conversions on their own). ...and t

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