cesaref

3 ms·

1.
by cesaref 6d ago
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers. Given th
2.
by cesaref 8d ago
It used to be quite normal to add a low level random signal to inputs when writing DSP code so as to avoid dropping into subnormal territory. Careful analysis of the algorithm would identify any points where this was also necessary (e.g. fe
3.
by cesaref 16d ago
How on earth do you survive with just one big box of cables? I've got mine sorted into plastic storage boxes with labels, so things like 'Firewire' or 'Monitor' or 'SCSI' can get me to a particular box to
4.
by cesaref 23d ago
I noticed he mentioned that his game was running at 50hz - that's true if an Amiga is running on PAL, but if it's a US machine it'll be 60hz when running with NTSC. Back in the day, most Amiga games were made in Europe, so we
5.
by cesaref 1mo ago
'the only language where 90% of the world's memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years' Let's assume this is true, and ignoring the fact that it's not possible for more than 1 language to have
6.
by cesaref 2mo ago
All information is ephemeral, but I don't honestly think that argument holds much weight here. I'm currently listening to a record which was pressed before I was born, and that will outlast me. My CDs were ripped around 2000 to a
7.
by cesaref 3mo ago
Ah, of course. Interesting.
8.
by cesaref 3mo ago
Unless that site collects personal information, it's fine isn't it? This isn't about where stuff is hosted, it's about privacy.
9.
by cesaref 3mo ago
Yeah, there were two busses, and the bigger ones were certainly rather impressive. I built a PDP-11/23 out of spare bits gifted from a university physics department in the late 80s, and it was awesome, but nothing like an 11/70 or
10.
by cesaref 3mo ago
Is it only me that would have expected curl_getenv() to have an assert that it's argument isn't NULL? I know this doesn't stop runtime problems in release builds, but i'd have thought this sort of simple precondition che
11.
by cesaref 5mo ago
I think the history of this is that these operations were common with assembly programmers, so when C came along, these were included in the language to allow these developers to feel they weren't leaving lots of performance behind. Lo
12.
by cesaref 6mo ago
I'm interested in the implications for the open source movement, specifically about security concerns. Anyone know is there has been a study about how well Claude Code works on closed source (but decompiled) source?
13.
by cesaref 6mo ago
On the subject of the weights and measures to check that a pint is a pint, I remember the father of a friend of mine at university who was responsible for the weights and measures for Staffordshire. I think he was the undersheriff or someth
14.
by cesaref 6mo ago
The older Tektronix TDS540 series did this, but at much lower rates as was common in those days though. Internally there are differential feeds from the very beautiful hybrid ceramic input boards to 4 DACs, with some clever switching so tha
15.
by cesaref 7mo ago
I failed to find this on my skim, my bad :( Interesting that it's mandated as native - i'm really not sure the logic behind this (i've worked in the embedded world where such stuff is not only normal, but the only choice). I&
16.
by cesaref 7mo ago
Just out of interest, why aren't they cross compiling RISC-V? I thought that was common practice when targeting lower performing hardware. It seems odd to me that the build cycle on the target hardware is a metric that matters.
17.
by cesaref 7mo ago
Nobody misses the terrible optical mouse with the blue metal mouse mat though! You are right, the keyboards were great.
18.
by cesaref 7mo ago
The way I read it, the prefix to the > indicates which file descriptor to redirect, and there is just a default that means no indicated file descriptor means stdout. So, >foo is the same as 1>foo If you want to get really into the
19.
by cesaref 8mo ago
Except it has a taste. I think finding something with just the colour and no taste would be a better example of this.
20.
by cesaref 8mo ago
Most of the effort when writing a compiler is handling incorrect code, and reporting sensible error messages. Compiling known good code is a great start though.
21.
by cesaref 8mo ago
Just out of interest, what's the current 'state of the art' for a chip that is hardened to survive launch and any length of time in orbit?
22.
by cesaref 8mo ago
This has reminded me that in System 7, the code for the window was a system resource (resource forks contained all sorts of code, icons, text dictionaries etc). Anyhow, if you dropped an updated window resource into your system with the cor
23.
by cesaref 9mo ago
The problem with articles like this is that they read a little like justifying a decision that has already been made. I've a feeling that if it was written in C++/Rust/Go/whatever, it would also be possible to justify th
24.
by cesaref 10mo ago
I'm interested in why SSDs would struggle with condensation. What aspect of the design is prone to issues? I routinely repair old computer boards, replace leaky capacitors, that sort of thing, and have cleaned boards with IPA and rinse
25.
by cesaref 10mo ago
I think that's an over-simplification. There was pressure on the language to ensure that data structures were compatible with C structs, so avoiding the vtable with simple classes was a win for moving data between these languages. Of c
26.
by cesaref 11mo ago
I don't see the weight reduction being very significant. If we take a Tesla model 3, I believe it weighs 1611kg, and the motor shows up at 80kg if you google it (no idea if this is correct). This YASA motor by comparison weighs 14kg. S
27.
by cesaref 11mo ago
There's the C2PA standard which has picked up momentum recently to I guess help resolve some of the issues. https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-03-c2pa-verification-news... I believe various cameras support th
28.
by cesaref 1y ago
Ok, i'll turn the sarcasm detector up a notch :)
29.
by cesaref 1y ago
The UK has 1/5th of the population of the US, and 12x the population of Minnesota. The last school shooting was the Dunblane Massacre in 1996, which led to gun law changes, removing rights to have handguns and various semi-automatic we
30.
by cesaref 1y ago
I think the point is that the API doesn't specify that the returned integers are positive, or are monotonically increasing, then it's fine for the service to return any unique integer. If a client application makes an assumption a

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