pcwalton

17 ms·

181.
by pcwalton 2y ago
To provide some context: It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher. His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subje
182.
by pcwalton 2y ago
> Making a nanite mesh is complicated, with a lot of internal offsets for linking, and so far only Unreal Engine's editor does it. meshoptimizer [1] is an OSS implementation of meshlet generation, which is what most people think of
183.
by pcwalton 2y ago
I wonder who originally authored the font, and when it was created. The site cites Leroy Lettering as the likely origin, so presumably it was someone there?
184.
by pcwalton 2y ago
It's frustrating that anything related to X/Twitter is such a predictably-partisan tinderbox because this is really interesting technical information. Thank you for sharing it!
185.
by pcwalton 2y ago
I suspect that the biggest reason for the low fare evasion rate on Caltrain is that the line serves a relatively-wealthy clientele for whom the fare isn't a burden. Many of Caltrain's patrons even get subsidies from the companies
186.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Right. The issue is not that Musk is putting his finger on the scale for the political right per se--it's his site and he has the right to do that. The issue is that he claims to be supporting "free speech" while doing so. To
187.
by pcwalton 2y ago
In Germany they have Kontrollieren who come through the buses and check all the passengers. The frequency varies from line to line, but you generally won't be allowed to get away with not paying for long. I have no doubt that if they w
188.
by pcwalton 2y ago
I was curious about your claim, having spent time abroad in Germany and never having seen an honor system. In fact, what your link describes is not an honor system but a proof-of-payment system. Proof-of-payment systems are common in the US
189.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Note that random data is not a common case for sorting algorithms. It'd be interesting to see how the numbers change on partially-, mostly-, and fully-sorted data.
190.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Right, available memory includes swap. (That's why I didn't say "available RAM".)
191.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Reminder: if overcommit as a concept seems distasteful, the real ire should be directed at the Unix fork syscall, an API that will always fail on a process using over 50% of the available memory without overcommit. Ideally apps would use vf
192.
by pcwalton 2y ago
70% of mobile games are Unity too. Honestly, even outside of gaming, we could probably go back to web apps again, now that hardware is better. Zuck's famous quote about the company's biggest mistake being going with HTML5 instead
193.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Mathematica might be one of the few remaining holdouts of this convention: Return starts a new line, while Enter submits the command to the REPL. Enter is aliased to Shift+Return, though, which I'm pretty sure is what most people use n
194.
by pcwalton 2y ago
It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a position on the value of any of the other changes to the product.)
195.
by pcwalton 2y ago
> It's really hard for a goose to lay a second golden egg. With Microsoft, it's their Windows/Office monopoly. With Apple it's the iPhone. Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs bu
196.
by pcwalton 2y ago
> (As a side note, I would expect this conditional branch to slow down more code than it speeds up. But remember that compiler writers measure an "optimization" as successful if they can find any example where the "optim
197.
by pcwalton 2y ago
> We are spinning the compilers much harder and imposing changes on end programmers for roughly 10-20% over a decade. That's not a lot of gain in return for the pain being caused. > I suspect most programmers would happily give
198.
by pcwalton 2y ago
On desktop Unix, D-Bus provides a friendlier interface to send file descriptors than sendmsg.
199.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Move semantics and rvalue references. It was clear that within C++11 there was a substructural type system struggling to get out.
200.
by pcwalton 2y ago
I mean, this is basically what eBPF accomplishes in Linux.
201.
by pcwalton 2y ago
It depends on what you mean by "open and flexible". Obviously, Windows NT isn't open source (though it has been heavily reverse engineered, and Microsoft publishes kernel symbols, which is more open than most proprietary soft
202.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Another example is Rust's borrow checker, which has roots in substructural type system papers from decades earlier. Many academics considered substructural type systems dead (killed by GC, more or less) until Rust resurrected the idea
203.
by pcwalton 2y ago
If you're allocating a call stack per thread you might as well just use actual threads.
204.
by pcwalton 2y ago
> Other than visual changes, what new functionality does Windows 11 actually have that Windows XP didn't have? Off the top of my head, limiting myself to just NT kernel stuff: WSL and Hyper-V, pseudo-terminals, condvars, WDDM, DWM,
205.
by pcwalton 2y ago
I'm loath to engage more with this weird anti-Irish prejudice, but I should point out that your blaming the Irish (and Italians apparently?) for FDR is ahistorical. FDR won 42 of 48 states and won the popular vote against Hoover by 17%
206.
by pcwalton 2y ago
I'm guessing it's just x86-64 vs. AArch64. There are two columns, one marked "(Aarch64)", for Linux too. I would imagine the "MacOS" bit is there to emphasize that the values haven't been verified on iOS.
207.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Yeah, it's probably the worst comment I've ever seen Rayiner write. (This is the nicest way I can word this comment; it'd be impossible for me to say what I really feel about that insult to my heritage without breaking the si
208.
by pcwalton 2y ago
In order to access the string contents in the first place you need the pointer. The length is stored right next to it. So they're both going to be in the same cache line, assuming proper alignment. In the rare case in which they stradd
209.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Well, the Z80 and 8086 are both de facto descendants of the 8080, so it makes sense that they'd be similar.
210.
by pcwalton 2y ago
Far more likely that Apple doesn't like emulators because they allow for the distribution of software that bypasses the 30% revenue cut, as well as enabling content that they don't want (adult content, extreme political content, e

More ›