adrian_b

17 ms·

211.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Only the read of data small enough to be read atomically will complete in a bounded amount of time (i.e. not larger than 16 bytes on the current x86 or Arm CPUs). If you have a bigger shared data structure, in which some other thread writes
212.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
That is always possible, even in any algorithm that claims to be wait-free, if some writer just keeps writing the shared data. All the claims about something being lock-free and/or wait-free depend on a rational behavior of the writers
213.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
It depends on how you hold it. If you have accurate device models, and you know how to use simulations, you can predict quite well the behavior of the analog circuits that you design. Simulations that work like the real thing are an absolut
214.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
The so-called "SIMT programming model" is a term from the obfuscated jargon that NVIDIA has introduced for CUDA, where they have renamed almost all traditional terms used for decades in the computing literature. The "SIMT pro
215.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Already at launch, and also during the next few years, until Intel fought back with Core 2 (but in servers the Core 2 descendants became better than Opterons only in 2009, with the Nehalem Xeons), Opteron was immensely better than the Ultra
216.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
> The open weights will be released next week.
217.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95. Until then, all the applications that could be found for Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1 looked like worthless toys in comparison with the professional applications that were available for
218.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
I assume that there would be a zillion of legacy C source files that would be broken by such a change.
219.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
No filesystem, regardless of what kind of journaling is used, can guarantee anything else except that after a power failure you will get the same filesystem as it was a few minutes before the power failure. If there was anything written to
220.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Interesting part of the less known history of Apple.
221.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Nowadays, the journalized filesystems of Linux, and also NTFS of Windows are quite mature and many of their early bugs have been fixed. Many years ago that was not true. In the early years after 2000, I have witnessed a great number of comp
222.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
I have been using in parallel both Linux and FreeBSD on my computers for around 3 decades, because each has advantages over the other in certain circumstances. Until around 2004, I looked at Linux more like a toy in comparison with FreeBSD,
223.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
MASM was a decent assembler, but it also had some syntax choices that lead to excessive verbosity. In any case, today nasm is mostly equivalent with it, if not better, while being kept much more up-to-date with the Intel-AMD ISA extensions.
224.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
The GNU assembler is not intended to be used by humans, but its goal is to assemble the output of compilers. On Linux, the "standard" assembler for humans is "nasm", though there are also others. For anyone writing a non
225.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Some programmers find it easier to write concurrent programs that use "light-weight threads", "fibers", "goroutines", "coroutines" or other variants of this idea. This feature is obviously intended fo
226.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
You should better not use swap at all, which eliminates all problems, especially on any system that has a decent amount of DRAM. I have stopped using swap a quarter of century ago, and it was for the better. I have seen swap advocates, but
227.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
It is much better to not use any swap in Linux, so you will never have this probem, or any other problem caused by swap. I stopped using swap on Linux about a quarter of century ago, when it was a great improvement, and since then I have ne
228.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
This problem has never existed with bigger DRAM cells. At some point in time, a few generations of DRAM ago, they have reduced the dimensions so much and without discovering adequate mitigations for the problems introduced by this, that the
229.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
The big companies consider them a failure in their own computers, so they use appropriate memory, but they consider that "consumers" either must accept them as normal and not a failure, or pay a great overprice in comparison with
230.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
That is why every subsystem must have means to detect the failures, to allow the replacement of the bad components. ECC in DIMMs achieves this. For myself, this has been the greatest advantage of always using ECC, that I have been warned ea
231.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
That shown in TFA is obtained by using the conversion specifier "%a" in the "printf" family of functions from "stdio", i.e. from the standard C library. The conversion specifier "%A" works in the same
232.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
> I suspect that diode-transistor logic was used instead of TTL for the output multiplexer because the simpler DTL circuit worked better with the high programming voltages. The DTL circuitry uses very large resistors biased to the progra
233.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Yes, they said that the updated V4 Pro will be published soon.
234.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
The Anthropic and OpenAI models are much more censored and in ways that directly prevent them to be useful, e.g. by refusing to reply to elementary questions of biology and chemistry. Any normal user is much more likely to ask questions to
235.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
They have said that the updated final version of V4 Pro will be published soon.
236.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
That speed is significantly lower that what can be attained with streaming from SSDs. Not only in big desktops, but even in most recent mini-PCs, it is possible to read concurrently from one PCIe 5.0 SSDs and one PCIe 4.0 SSD, at a total su
237.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Clearly it was meant that they will go away only if you use a custom harness, without the defects that now exist in all vendor-controlled harnesses, because of the non-aligned goals of the vendor and of the user. While it was not spelled ex
238.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Preprint of that: https://dqlin.xyz/pubs/2021-hpg-HOI/
239.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
In this particular case, there never exists any need to compute a logarithm of an arbitrary base, so such a function must not exist in a library. If someone had the weird idea to write some formula with logarithms in a random base they shou
240.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
In the past there were a lot of standard libraries that computed the transcendental functions with big errors. Now there are several libraries that are guaranteed to produce correctly rounded results for any FP64 arguments. However, the cor

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