cfallin

15 ms·

91.
by cfallin 7y ago
The provisioning was a PITA and I only use the WiFi access point, not their router, but at least for me the WiFi reliability and signal quality is night-and-day compared to my "old" (2015/6-era) TP-Link Archer C7 router/
92.
by cfallin 7y ago
This "never before seen" argument cuts both ways, though. There has also never been a full, verbatim record of all of one's communications, personal notes, searches of the equivalent of the world's largest encyclopedia,
93.
by cfallin 7y ago
I lived in Pittsburgh for 8 years. It was eminently livable as a single grad student on a ~$30k stipend, but I wouldn't want to raise a family on that or thereabouts. Also, apartments may be cheaper but COL is an average over the whole
94.
by cfallin 7y ago
Yes, absolutely, seconded! I was fortunate enough to take her class (which she taught using this book) and I left the class feeling like I really understood things, having proved everything starting from basic probability. The rigor is ad
95.
by cfallin 7y ago
> by the way the say "bag" though (sounds like "beg") The infamous "northwest vowel shift"! I do this too (grew up in the suburbs of Portland) and it's common from Oregon up into BC. Didn't realize
96.
by cfallin 7y ago
Even the kinetic energy (fan motors, HDD motors) eventually becomes heat. E.g., the moving air from fans dissipates its energy in turbulence in the room's air, and in a closed system (airtight room), the resistance to airflow (resultin
97.
by cfallin 7y ago
> Second, this place was targeted at middle income families There's a random apartment building near downtown Pittsburgh that was designed by I.M. Pei [0] -- a little nicer than others in the area, but by no means a luxury building.
98.
by cfallin 7y ago
Yes, in both directions (using a .so, and building a .so in Rust), but IIRC linking to a .so is a bit hairy -- requiring a build.rs (build script) that passes special options to Cargo. Generating a .so is just a different target type to Car
99.
by cfallin 7y ago
I use GCE (Google) for this purely because they had the lowest per-byte cost for block storage, at least when I looked. The instance itself has the smallest CPU/memory config. IIRC my bill is about $7/mo for the instance with sepa
100.
by cfallin 7y ago
IME, hard to say better or worse, but definitely different: less day-to-day stress (work on your own schedule, drive your own project, usually no one directly dependent on your day-to-day output) but much more existential-threat-type pressu
101.
by cfallin 7y ago
For anyone looking for an open-source self-hosted alternative: I've been really happy with Syncthing [0]. It's as invisible as Dropbox once set up. It supports arbitrary topologies (two peer machines syncing, one central always-on
102.
by cfallin 7y ago
Yup, I worked for a bit at Intel, but I don't speak for them, I wasn't involved in any of the designs under discussion, and everything I'm saying here is public knowledge in the computer architecture community. I figured that
103.
by cfallin 7y ago
Sure -- for a good example, GPUs go partway there by not speculating (they still have cache hierarchies though). It works because GPU workloads have massive data parallelism, so while one group of threads (a "warp") is stalled wai
104.
by cfallin 7y ago
> It is possible to have OoO without speculative execution That's technically correct (the best type of correct!), but without speculation, the CPU can't see beyond a branch, so the window in which the machine can reorder instr
105.
by cfallin 7y ago
Yes, but it typically means a significantly smaller speculative window -- rather than a ROB that can fill with several hundred instructions beyond a mispredicted branch, there is just the pipeline depth from fetch to commit worth of specula
106.
by cfallin 7y ago
Yes, that's true, several of the vulnerabilities involve checks that are performed late (not at time of speculative access, but at some point before instruction commit). Not excusing the design choice at all, but it's conceivable
107.
by cfallin 7y ago
The stream of critical CPU vulnerabilities starting with Spectre/Meltdown last year are related to speculative execution , not just Intel. (AMD and ARM CPUs are also vulnerable to Spectre, for example.) Intel CPUs are sometimes vulner
108.
by cfallin 7y ago
There's still some research on this general idea -- e.g., a fellow grad student's work on in-memory bulk data operations: - https://archive.org/details/arxiv-1611.09988 (AND/OR/NOT in RAM) - https:
109.
by cfallin 7y ago
For anyone with a bit of an academic bent, the ideas behind GraalVM are really really cool -- basically, they compile by partially evaluating an interpreter for X with a program in language X. Simple idea at a high level but they actually m
110.
by cfallin 7y ago
Yes, definitely! I just bought a few Wingsung 3008s from eBay (a few dollars each, I think) and they're super-smooth. Couldn't believe I got a TWSBI-like piston filler for that cheap. Only downside to the cheap eBay pens is the sh
111.
by cfallin 8y ago
The idea of straight-line traces goes back even further, to Josh Fisher's work on trace scheduling in compilers in the early 80s (linearizing one control-flow path gives a much wider scope for optimizations): https://en.wiki
112.
by cfallin 8y ago
Re: complexity, read up on "semi-naïve evaluation" for the usual execution strategy, which basically involves keeping lists of newly-added tuples in each iteration of the fixpoint loop and only processing deltas related to those n
113.
by cfallin 8y ago
Doop is a fantastic base system to extend for anyone wanting to do program analysis generally! I built my thesis work on top of it (recently defended but unfortunately not published yet) and Datalog is incredibly productive to prototype ide
114.
by cfallin 8y ago
One solution, not practical for most folks but works well for me: live in a different area code than phone number. (My cell number is in the area code I grew up in.) It seems most spam calls either fake a source number that's in my pho
115.
by cfallin 8y ago
I heartily second the recommendation for "The Idea Factory"! I'm currently reading this book and aside from the seriously impressive run of successes, the characters are really quite amusing at times too. E.g., Shannon built
116.
by cfallin 8y ago
Ah, yes, that makes perfect sense! So many word roots hiding in plain sight...
117.
by cfallin 8y ago
Some of the compound words are really quite funny, too... two of my favorites, randomly encountered recently: gloves/mittens are "Handschuhe" (hand shoes), and a porcupine is "Stachelschwein" (spike/quill pig).
118.
by cfallin 8y ago
Why not, though? Energy is energy -- we (humans) oxidize food, basically burning it slowly, to power our bodies. Whether the energy is carried by glucose/ATP or electric current is just an implementation detail. Comparisons are frequen
119.
by cfallin 9y ago
Yup, the Pennsylvanian is actually pretty nice. The route is the old Penn Railroad mainline and zigzags through some really scenic parts of the Appalachians! The only downside is that it's on a once-per-day schedule (Pgh->NYC at 7:3
120.
by cfallin 9y ago
> [Amtrak] was really pleasant. It just takes forever. Absolutely -- IMHO for mid-distance (200 mi to 500 mi or so) trips, Amtrak is a really underrated option. I travel semi-often from Pittsburgh to NYC (450 mi) and choose train over fl

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