pm215

7 ms·

31.
by pm215 7mo ago
Even if there isn't any 3rd party code, the whole process of going through the codebase to confirm there really isn't any 3rd party code, and generally getting the legal department to sign off on it, is a lot of work in itself. My
32.
by pm215 8mo ago
I think Coccinelle is a really cool tool, but I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason. I've read through it multiple times, but I always end up having to find some preexisting script that does what I want, or
33.
by pm215 8mo ago
On the tangential question in the post: "The specification describes bits as combinations of 0, 1, and x, but also sometimes includes (0) and (1). I’m not sure what the parenthesized versions mean" the answer is that the (0) and (
34.
by pm215 8mo ago
This is an important ISA feature -- an instruction encoding that is wasteful of its encoding space is one that has no room for future new instructions (or which has to encode the new instructions in complicated ways to fit in whatever tiny
35.
by pm215 8mo ago
This is a result of the market and its demands, not something specific to the architecture. In desktop and server, customers demand that they can buy a new machine and install a previously released stable OS on it. That means the vendors wi
36.
by pm215 8mo ago
It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start that syn
37.
by pm215 8mo ago
Ah, thanks for that correction -- I jumped straight from "depends on the history of conditional branches" to "branch predictor" without stopping to think that that would have been unlikely in the 386.
38.
by pm215 8mo ago
Yeah, I think random-instruction-sequence testing is a pretty good approach to try to find the problems you didn't think of up front. I wrote a very simple tool for this years ago to help flush out bugs in QEMU: https://gitl
39.
by pm215 8mo ago
Some of the 386 bugs described there sound to me like the classic kind of "multiple different subsystems interact in the wrong way" issue that can slip through the testing process and get into hardware, like this one: > For exa
40.
by pm215 8mo ago
I wasn't arguing that getting LLMs to do this is necessarily bad -- I just think it really is different from having in the past been able to ask other humans for help, and so that past experience isn't a reliable guide to whether
41.
by pm215 8mo ago
I think there are a couple of differences here: Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it for the important stuff, and the rest of the time you
42.
by pm215 9mo ago
You can have either completely separate hot and cold taps, each with their own spout, or you can have a setup with separate hot and cold knobs and a single spout. For my bathroom sink I specified a two taps/one spout unit (similar to t
43.
by pm215 9mo ago
The fun thing about those thunderbolt cables is they have two Arm cores in them, one at each end...
44.
by pm215 9mo ago
Tape save and load seemed pretty reasonable on our system. It does depend rather on the tape deck you're using and also on getting the volume and tone settings right, though. We had the official TI tape deck for it.
45.
by pm215 9mo ago
I'm pretty sure my Dad got ours because they were being sold off very cheaply after TI pulled out of the home computer market. Like you I ended up learning BASIC on it because as an abandoned system all we had was a few cartridge games
46.
by pm215 9mo ago
Yes; this is why QEMU's user-space-emulation clone syscall handling restricts the caller to only those combinations of clone flags which match either "looks like fork()" or "looks like creating a new pthread", becau
47.
by pm215 9mo ago
I think rather than "laziness" I would say it's an instance of the widespread phenomenon of "shipping the orgchart". Because for Linux the kernel developers and the libc developers are separate communities, the boun
48.
by pm215 10mo ago
I think it's quite hard to talk about norms for reading quantity, because it varies so much between people. There are a lot of people (more than half the population) who read basically no books in a year, and a tiny slice who read a hu
49.
by pm215 10mo ago
I suspect that a 1970s mower for UK garden use was typically not very beefy. Wikipedia thinks Larkin had some kind of Victa.
50.
by pm215 10mo ago
"suspiciously close" isn't close enough, unfortunately, though it might make the task less work: If your uname output, compiler architecture ifdefs, etc, don't match the existing architecture then basically every program
51.
by pm215 10mo ago
I think there's two parts to this: 1) these historical source code releases really are largely historical interest only. The original programs had constraints of memory and cpu speed that no modern use case does; the set of use cases f
52.
by pm215 10mo ago
This seems nuts and suggests maybe the people selling AI scrapers their bandwidth could get away with charging rather more than they do :)
53.
by pm215 10mo ago
I'm curious about whether there are well coded AI scrapers that have logic for "aha, this is a git forge, git clone it instead of scraping, and git fetch on a rescrape". Why are there apparently so many naive (but still coded
54.
by pm215 10mo ago
I believe (per the stuff at the bottom of https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accou... ) that the kernel does the accounting of how much memory the new child process needs and will fail the
55.
by pm215 10mo ago
Because the point of forbidding overcommit is to ensure that the only time you can discover you're out of memory is when you make a syscall that tries (explicitly or implicitly) to allocate more memory. If you don't account the CO
56.
by pm215 10mo ago
You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty p
57.
by pm215 10mo ago
The OED agrees about the Dutch idea, giving the etymology as: "early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom) whirlpool < malen to grind, to whirl round (compare meal n.1) + stroom stream n" and also thinks Dutch is the origin,
58.
by pm215 11mo ago
And I would guess that most of the kernel devs who are "working for free" are doing the stuff they personally enjoy and find satisfaction in working on, because it's a hobby -- so many of them are probably not interested in f
59.
by pm215 11mo ago
I assumed the commonly cited 2x markup, so that would be a $100k salary, which is less than various websites say is the average US software dev salary. You could probably find cheaper elsewhere in the world, but even if you cut the salary i
60.
by pm215 11mo ago
For small stuff, the cost is just going to be too much for people to want to pay it. This bug had a $1900 bounty attached. Let's put the cost of one software engineer (salary plus overheads) at $200,000 a year, which I think is an unde

More ›