astrobe_

7 ms·

61.
by astrobe_ 4mo ago
I'd say if it does have methodological deficits, it should be ignored. Measuring a length with a wet spaghetti can only result in nonsense.
62.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
I haven't shipped millions of units but I do have occasional glimpses of the HW side as a firmware programmer. My impression is that decisions regarding costs are not always entirely rational, hence my questioning. Thanks for the answe
63.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
It depends on the HW:SW cost ratio and the volume. In favourable case the extra bit on the price tag can amount to a rounding error. Moreover, the price tag includes a profit margin, which is usually adjusted to match the competition alread
64.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag, especially when you sell a lot of units, and assuming the SW is much better than "good enough". HW is the best licensing key; if you can do that, go for it.
65.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
You can't send a "moral person" to jail, unlike "physical persons". But sometimes I wonder if taking a fraction of their shares from them would make them more... Moral I guess.
66.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
Besides Spolsky's law of leaky abstractions, "abstractions" can also result in "lowest common denominator" situations, which are the opposite of performance optimization. Talking negatively about abstractions is not
67.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
Indeed, even I can guess. I see two answers that end with the same word, so the correct answer is probably one of those.
68.
by astrobe_ 5mo ago
So "modern" is a synonym for "current" here, if one puts aside warnings about its decline due to human activity?
69.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
The thing is, "better" is an ambiguous word. I can change a program in some way and make it smaller. I can change it in some other way and make it faster. Both are "better", but in different ways. More often than not, ho
70.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
"I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks" - M. Zuckerberg, ~2000. Also: Blade Runner, anyone?
71.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
This reminds me of a comment I read here a long time ago; it was about XML and how DTDs were supposed to permit one to be strict. However, in reality, the person said, if the the other end who is sending you broken XML is a big corp who ref
72.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
That's sort of the point TFA. You make implementation choices that feel OK and then the time comes to implement the "trivial" pause function... In other domains, adding the delta time of your main loop to your timers can caus
73.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
It depends on how your timers are implemented. If they are implemented as a "rendez-vous" absolute date (as in UTC for instance - not in local time unless you want to add "eastern eggs" related to daylight saving time...
74.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
> The flip side is everything is being degraded by random mutation "degraded"? Aren't random mutations precisely one of the core mechanism of adaptation?
75.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
There's a negligible amount of "power users" among government employees; I think the majority of them are trained in reading and applying laws, and given the strong scientific/literary divide in the French culture, they
76.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
Frankly: that's stupid. In case you didn't figure it out, I work in the field and I can tell you that this is was not the mindset at the places where I worked.
77.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
Well, that's a different market. What I say is that there are markets in which customers wants to be sure that the firmware is from "us". And those markets are certainly not IoT gizmos, which I suspect induce some knee-jerk r
78.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
Yes, BIOS is really a PC-thing, AFAIK. Embedded processors have "bootloaders" which often serve a similar purpose of performing the minimal viable hardware initializations in order to load the OS kernel.
79.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
I don't know about executable signing, but in the embedded world SecureBoot is also used to serve the customer; id est provide guarantees to the customer that the firmware of the device they receive has not been tampered with at some
80.
by astrobe_ 6mo ago
One thing that confused me in TFA is that it says that "[neanderthals were] maybe a couple of thousand breeding individuals", yet they were enough to inter-breed with sapiens at some point(s) [1]. In my mind, tribes of "far-f
81.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
Ambiguë (ambiguous) and aiguë (acute) [1], but these are "old" spellings. For instance, this word "ambiguë" was changed in the 1990 spelling reform to "ambigüe" [2] probably to emphasis the fact that the U
82.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
> It only really makes sense for extremely memory-constrained embedded systems Even "mildly" memory constrained embedded systems don't use swap because their resources are tailored for their function. And they are typicall
83.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
Interesting point. On one hand they probably don't care if everyone knows where the carrier is (actually I'm pretty sure every military power knows where the other powers' military is), on the other hand from a "good pra
84.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
It's pretty hard to hide it from anything . Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to W
85.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
Data cache issues is one case of something being surprising slow because of how data is organized. That said, Structure of Arrays vs Array of structures is an example where rule 4 and 5 somewhat contradict each other, if one confuses "
86.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
> The only downside was anything you shared with her would be spread in the entire village before dawn It's a better service than FB or Instagram that depress because people only show their good sides there... As you said, she was a
87.
by astrobe_ 7mo ago
The problem simplicity is facing is mentioned in TFA with the keyword "future-proof", which is the typical instance of FUD in software. It is extremely difficult to fight against it, as, just like fake news, it would take 10 times
88.
by astrobe_ 8mo ago
You're welcome. Actually, Forth doesn't have forward declarations as a "direct" feature, but it has what I would call "function values", which can be used like functions and changed almost like variables [1]. T
89.
by astrobe_ 8mo ago
In communication protocols, you typically send a symbol which tells the receiver the meaning and the syntax of the message, and then the data attached to the message. In technical terms, messages belong to different application protocol dat
90.
by astrobe_ 8mo ago
> Object-oriented Forth? Far out. The cost is stupidly high, though. Look at the source code of [1]. The only good page to take from OOP book is the automatic and implicit pseudo-variable "self" or "this", that can re

More ›