abainbridge

10 ms·

61.
by abainbridge 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide#Internal_combust...
62.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Yeah, agreed. My comment should really have been, "I'm glad modern ISAs are high level because low level ones would be a massive burden". And, "It isn't C's fault that low level ISAs are a massive burden".
63.
by abainbridge 3y ago
But we have/had architectures that expose parallelism at the instruction set. Eg itanium and graphcore. And the PS2 made cache management the programmer's problem. I don't think any of these experiments proved successful in t
64.
by abainbridge 3y ago
This article is correct that your computer is not a fast PDP-11 but wrong that this has anything to do with C. Eg, "another core part of the C abstract machine's memory model: flat memory. This hasn't been true for more than
65.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Elite 3 (aka First Encounters) was before my time. Braben kept wanting to get another Elite project going, but there was barely enough resource to do a decent job of the two games that were already in development at the time (Dog's Lif
66.
by abainbridge 3y ago
This was a long time ago, when I was only a baby programmer. It's changed beyond all recognition since I was there. It was sort of lovely. The "office" was a farm house in the Fens. There were two dogs in the office. One was
67.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Interesting stuff. I'm going on a 20 year old memory of a conversation I probably didn't understand at the time, so I'm very fuzzy on the details.
68.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Many years ago, when I worked at Frontier, David Braben told me a fun anecdote about NES Elite. He said they initially got the game working using the hardware timer in the NES to keep track of real time so that the in-game physics progresse
69.
by abainbridge 3y ago
> no, it won't move your memory around into larger areas every time you call it. Most of the time it will simply bump up the allocation end point. This happens more frequently than you think. I just tried some simple "I want to
70.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Here's one way to get to the "it's never going to happen" outcome: The grand-parent comment argues that we need AI that works in a much broader set of circumstances to "solve" self driving. In particular it wou
71.
by abainbridge 3y ago
The same game (almost) with the same slider (almost) is not at all confusing: https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html Getting the subtle elements of a UI wrong have a profound effect.
72.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Yeah brother, me too. An fx-100D to be precise. I had to put new batteries in it ~8 years ago. I love the minimal UI. I use Real Calc on my phone when not near my fx-100D. Each time I'm infuriated by the overhead of: unlock phone, laun
73.
by abainbridge 3y ago
I guess the way I presented thoughts looked like I was saying NSS are bad for you. I don't have the evidence for that claim. But I don't think the balance of evidence is in favour of NSS either. I know you can cherry pick health s
74.
by abainbridge 3y ago
I'm not sure artificial sweeteners are good for anything. A 2019 meta analysis published in the British Medical Journal said, "Most health outcomes did not seem to have differences between the NSS (Non-sugar sweeteners) exposed an
75.
by abainbridge 3y ago
I think rear underrun protection and sideguards became mandatory in May 1983. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1982/1576/pdfs/uksi_1982...
76.
by abainbridge 3y ago
From the article, "A commonly heard advice is to not use binary search for small arrays, but to use a linear search instead. I find that not to be true on the Apple M1 for integers, at least compared to my branchless binary search, whe
77.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Hmmm. Fair point. I got this argument from a HW engineer I know. You forced me to think more about what he was saying. His point was actually that the TSO model requires the HW to keep track of more stuff. More stuff uses more energy and ad
78.
by abainbridge 3y ago
edit: The emphasis is wrong here. The main benefit of a relaxed memory model is that it reduces the amount of work the memory subsystem HW needs to do. Another ISA difference not discussed by the article is the memory model. I expect that t
79.
by abainbridge 3y ago
How does the benchmarking work here? I always find this kind of micro-benchmarking hard. I feel like I want to see results with and without a preceding cache flush. And with/without clearing of the branch predictor state. Other things
80.
by abainbridge 3y ago
Find me a regular Mk1 or Mk2 Escort in really good condition, and I will gladly pay you £3126. Even the boring models command ridiculous values now: https://www.classiccarsforsale.co.uk/ford/escort/351743 For £675
81.
by abainbridge 3y ago
I think Ford Escort means something different here in the UK. They've gone up in value hugely in the last 20 years and are generally worth a lot more than Model T Fords now. (Annoyingly they're worth much more than a contemporary
82.
by abainbridge 4y ago
How can we quantify "not actually much"? Here's my attempt for multiply: You'd have to do a imul instruction followed by a right shift. On, say, Ice Lake, the imul has a reciprocal throughput of 1 and a latency of 3. The
83.
by abainbridge 4y ago
Efficient fixed-point arithmetic requires hardware support. "Some DSP architectures offer native support for specific fixed-point formats, for example signed n-bit numbers with n−1 fraction bits (whose values may range between −1 and a
84.
by abainbridge 4y ago
I'd also add speed to that list. Resizing is an expensive operation. Correctness is often traded off for speed. I've written code that deliberately ignored the conversation to a linear color space and back in order to gain speed.
85.
by abainbridge 4y ago
But is also expected to life 7.5 years longer.
86.
by abainbridge 4y ago
I think the Xlib dependency would prevent compilation as an αpε. I put some effort into doing X11 from scratch (without Xlib or Xcb) to make this possible. Or at least, my aim was to be able to build with musl libc and generate a single exe
87.
by abainbridge 4y ago
How would I do that? I think there is any such function in the Win32 API.
88.
by abainbridge 4y ago
I used to use a timer to limit the frame rate to 60 Hz too. But on Windows, I found that DwmFlush() seems to act like WaitVSync(), so I've been using that in preference for years now. I think this is undocumented behaviour. I guess wha
89.
by abainbridge 4y ago
std::midpoint also seems to yield less efficient code with g++12 targeting x86-64: https://godbolt.org/z/j695ce98Y
90.
by abainbridge 4y ago
Possibly true, but it yields less efficient code in GCC 12 for x86-64. https://godbolt.org/z/oafPrb4K8

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