pcwalton

76 ms·

931.
by pcwalton 5y ago
For what it's worth, I do not believe that this is Apple's strategy. Squabbles with Khronos suffice to explain everything.
932.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Strong disagree as someone who spent years on a cross-platform accelerated vector graphics library in industry. Dealing with API differences and differences in tooling (Metal's tooling is far behind RenderDoc for example) took an enorm
933.
by pcwalton 5y ago
There's mostly not a reason why we couldn't have a single API other than politics. My opinionated takes (opinions mine and not those of my employer, etc.): Vulkan: Standardized by a standards body (Khronos). In an ideal world we
934.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The entire justice system is a "think of the children" argument. I do not in fact find "high user accountability" "refreshing" any more than I would find the necessity of defending myself if robbery were legali
935.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Virtually all of the artists I know despise NFTs (and by extension the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem), largely because of the absolute deluge of fraudsters stealing art and selling it as NFTs without the creators seeing a dime. It&#x
936.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> The ability to pull back funds and reverse transactions creates the excess fat that keeps banking expensive and processes slow. For the victims of, say, Madoff, the ability for the authorities to intervene was very much not "exces
937.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Most of the article is specifically about how financial innovation has resulted in less "nickel and diming" people for transactions.
938.
by pcwalton 5y ago
None of the objections to cryptocurrency have anything to do with the fact that it's "math based". Traditional money is also in fact based on math.
939.
by pcwalton 5y ago
PCIe 5 speed is 64 GB/s, so theoretically if you perfectly pipelined the result you could achieve the same performance on a next-generation discrete GPU.
940.
by pcwalton 5y ago
I don't think this is a reasonable assumption for the browser at all. It's 2021; WebRender has proved that a better design is possible.
941.
by pcwalton 5y ago
I really would like to see a defense of Bitcoin that doesn't rest on the assumption that I want to live in Galt's Gulch.
942.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> Never mind that doing so would destroy the value of the cap/opex invested. "Bitcoin is centralized, but that's OK because the central authorities can be trusted to do the right thing" isn't exactly a compelling
943.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The difference is that traditional money is up front about that fact and doesn't use decentralization as a selling point.
944.
by pcwalton 5y ago
That isn't really that hard to deal with. Placing those combining characters is tricky, especially when internationalization is concerned, but once you have pixel positions the text bounds are easy to calculate given the metrics info
945.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Lock-free programming is really tough. There are really only a few patterns that work (e.g. Treiber stack). Trying to invent a new lock-free algorithm, as this vulnerable code demonstrates, almost always ends in tears.
946.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The information you're after to measure line heights, glyph sizes, em-height, etc. is generally in the 'head' [1] and 'OS/2' [2] tables of an OpenType font. Don't be afraid to parse these tables if you nee
947.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Raytracing can absolutely be done on GPU even without RTX-style hardware; there are tons of implementations of it in the literature. Last I read the research, the best approaches dynamically bundle up rays hitting the same or nearby objects
948.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Written properly, a monolithic kernel in Rust would provide many of the benefits of a microkernel, due to the memory safety. It'd be much along the same lines as Microsoft Research's Midori, with software isolation instead of hard
949.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> Also, IIRC, shift by variable amount was microcoded and would take a cycle for each bit distance shifted. Wait, it was possible to ship a CPU in 2006 without a barrel shifter? ARM1 was from 1985! If it was something silly like "on
950.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> The SPU approach is pretty much what a GPU does, but instead of 64 they have hundreds if not thousands. Eh, only if you count every SIMD lane as a separate "core" like GPU manufacturer marketing does. More realistically, you
951.
by pcwalton 5y ago
I mean, the Cell SPU design is everywhere, it's just now part of every GPU and called compute shader. Vector processors are a good idea, but they have to be accessible to programmers through standard, easy-to-use, ideally-cross-platfor
952.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The biggest companies on the planet with massive C++ codebases are all very aware of the clang sanitizers and use them regularly. UBSan has far more deployment than Zig.
953.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> In general, it can. Yes, it's called threads. > You can look at Erlang, Haskell, and Go as things that just handles the matter internally, between the compiler and the runtime, and erases the color distinction. Erlang, Haskell
954.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Is GeneralPurposeAllocator the one that quarantines memory forever? That isn't practical, as I've mentioned before. To name one problem, allocating 1 byte in a 4kB page leaks the entire page.
955.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Well, I generally think that CPU SIMD is best used for little one-off things that you don't want to bother uploading to the GPU or other accelerators, not large-scale batch data processing. Like, if your game logic is running on CPU, t
956.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> the only memory safety gamedev needs are bound checking and use after free protections Disagree, but in any case, we're talking about the fact that Zig doesn't provide use-after-free protection.
957.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The constrained Delaunay triangulation in Loop-Blinn is for tessellating the object so that every fragment belongs to at most one curve (i.e. removing self intersections). It doesn't approximate cubic Béziers with quadratic ones. See s
958.
by pcwalton 5y ago
I generally agree that vertical SIMD is more efficient than horizontal SIMD when both are options, but the dot product is kind of an unfair example: that's literally the worst case for horizontal SIMD. A fairer example would be somethi
959.
by pcwalton 5y ago
NURBS are a generalization of Bézier curves, so everything that applies to Bézier curves here applies to NURBS as well.
960.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> 3. GPUs cannot natively render cubic curves (look at any of the papers on this and you'll find they do CPU-side translation of cubic -> quadratic before sending to the GPU in the best case) which harms perf substantially and ma

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