Taniwha

7 ms·

61.
by Taniwha 5mo ago
he made fishing shows, not exactly politically contentious
62.
by Taniwha 5mo ago
They investigated one too many rightwinger who supported the government
63.
by Taniwha 5mo ago
I lived on Dana St in Oakland at the Berkeley border, we continually found lost and confused people - the street continued down our block and stopped, reappeared after a jog a half block away, numbers got smaller as it went south, over the
64.
by Taniwha 6mo ago
and so you can at 1-bit too, and the hardware will be even smaller and cheaper
65.
by Taniwha 6mo ago
If you can print small enough with this technology I'm pretty sure you can make transistors - sort of 1980 era transistors, not very dense, but if you are printing bulk materials you can build in 3D rather than 2D, make interesting num
66.
by Taniwha 6mo ago
Wearing my chip designer's hat decimal FP just means more (and slower) gates
67.
by Taniwha 6mo ago
If you like unreliable narration and rug pulls Nick Harkaway's novel 'The Gone-Away World' really takes the cake (and is brilliant)
68.
by Taniwha 6mo ago
Everyone who has ever had to build a floating point unit has hated it with a passion, I've watched in done from afar, and done it myself
69.
by Taniwha 7mo ago
BTW my really big peeve about modern verilog is that it never picked up {/} as synonyms for begin/end - my experiments (20 years ago) showed that it was an easy extension, the minor syntactic ambiguities were trivally fixable
70.
by Taniwha 7mo ago
I'm a long time verilog user (30+ years, a dozen or so tapeouts), even written a couple of compilers so I'm intimate with the gory details of event scheduling. Used to be in the early days that some people depended on how the orig
71.
by Taniwha 7mo ago
yeah, that's rather a pain though and it effectively leaves one 68k frozen while the other services the page fault - it means you can't run another user process while the page is being read in (because it too might cause a page fa
72.
by Taniwha 7mo ago
68451 or a custom SUN-like (SRAM, kind of like a PDP11) MMU, there was a guy who went around Silicon Valley in the mid 80s designing SUN-like MMUs for companies, they were all different, and some were broken (couldn't protect user spac
73.
by Taniwha 7mo ago
Of course while you're doing the next version you should knock out a tiny tapeout version, it should easily fit in a single cell (maybe 2 if you want to push the 256 byte sram in as well)
74.
by Taniwha 8mo ago
I think that what we're all waiting for for this to take off is one of the Cheap Chinese assembly houses to set up a web site where you can drag and drop chiplets into a carrier with standard interface buses, you press a button and brr
75.
by Taniwha 8mo ago
I was at an alternative type computer unconference and someone has organised a talk about the singularity, it was in a secondary school classroom and as evening fell in a room full of geeks no one could figure out how to turn on the lights
76.
by Taniwha 8mo ago
I think FP needs it's own custom tests (billions of them!) - I hate building FP units, they are really the pits
77.
by Taniwha 8mo ago
This sort of bug, especially in and around pipelines are always hard to find. In chips I've built we've had one guy who built a system that would build random instruction streams to try and trigger as many as we possibly could
78.
by Taniwha 8mo ago
Oh sure, and next you'll say a byte is 10 bits ....
79.
by Taniwha 8mo ago
It's security theatre, someone has to pay the performers
80.
by Taniwha 9mo ago
Yes but Cathedral and the Bazaar was telling us that the world had changed, gcc was free, linux was a thing etc, mainframes (where compilers cost $10k and you (mostly) couldn't bring your own OS) were being replaced by workstations etc
81.
by Taniwha 9mo ago
Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away
82.
by Taniwha 9mo ago
You can go to this effort to get it to make the right magic number .... or just find the place where it gets tested and replace the conditional branch with a unconditional branch (or a no-op) Having said that I once wrote 68k code that was
83.
by Taniwha 10mo ago
TT allows you to pay more and build multi-block designs
84.
by Taniwha 10mo ago
It's worth noting that before the dotcom bubble the rule of thumb was that a startup had to have 5 quarters of profit before going public - the whole dot-com thing of going public on vibes before making any profit was part of why it wa
85.
by Taniwha 10mo ago
The latest esp32 chips are RISCV meaning you're not paying a licence for the old ESP CPU (which comes from elsewhere). There are also 10c RISCV cores available that people are starting to use I don't think it "saves" it
86.
by Taniwha 10mo ago
yup, same for any real time code, new/malloc/free/delete use hidden mutexes and can cause priority inversion as a result - heisenbugs, that audio/video dropout that happens rarely and you can't quite catch - best to
87.
by Taniwha 11mo ago
Guess what, if you AI agent does insider trading on your behalf you're still going to jail
88.
by Taniwha 11mo ago
Unix up until at least System III used the structure thing to do the equivalent to unions, before unions were a thing - for example each disk driver had a data structure that began with a common part and then had a per-device part, generic
89.
by Taniwha 11mo ago
ESPOL was (is?) simply a version of the standard Algol compiler that let you do 'system' sorts of things. The Burroughs large systems architecture didn't really protect you from yourself, system security/integrity depend
90.
by Taniwha 11mo ago
Algol60 had call by name, Algol68 doesn't really, it does have "proceduring" which creates a function to call when you pass an expression to a parameter that's a function pointer that has no parameters, you can use that

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