pm215

6 ms·

61.
by pm215 11mo ago
If you think Arm is a "nice RISC encoding" then I think you've mostly been looking at the older integer bits of it :-) As you get into FP and SIMD there are just a lot more useful operations that need to fit into the strictly
62.
by pm215 11mo ago
I haven't looked at them, partly because I'm sceptical about how much use they are. In my experience the hard part of emulating new instructions is the semantics, the "what does this instruction actually do?" bit. The li
63.
by pm215 11mo ago
For a learning project like this one, this would probably be overkill, but my personal suggestion for instruction decoding is that it really pays in the long term to use a data driven decoder. It's fairly easy to do a handcoded "i
64.
by pm215 11mo ago
The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note: "This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allow
65.
by pm215 11mo ago
This is partly because of the UK's ticketing system, which (like airline prices) heavily discounts for people who can book ahead and travel at off-peak hours. If you're able to do that, then for instance, right now you can get a t
66.
by pm215 11mo ago
Mmm, presumably big infrastructure projects like HS2 don't count as "operational" expenses. (Personally I put the huge costs of HS2 down to our complete inability to build anything in a reasonable timeframe and budget, rather
67.
by pm215 11mo ago
I think there's a couple of things about typical foreign experiences of UK public transport to note (some of this may not apply to you in particular, of course): (1) Most tourists visit largely London and its near surroundings. Public
68.
by pm215 11mo ago
They're a consultancy: ultimately they do things because either some company paid them to do it, or because they think it will help bring in future business. There are definitely companies out there who want to run "wrong endian&q
69.
by pm215 11mo ago
Oh hey, a 9000/340 in the Cambridge area. Almost certainly that originated with the university's Engineering department, who back in the 1990s got rid of a lot of these machines that they had been using as X terminals. My notes sa
70.
by pm215 11mo ago
I suspect Dijkstra would have disagreed with you about "and" and "or", judging from his criticism of the technical report which had the line "even the standard symbols used for logical connectives have been avoided
71.
by pm215 11mo ago
My guess would be that it's a split between employees in support (where being helpful to the customer is the aim and suggesting workarounds is part of the job) vs development (where it was almost certainly acknowledged as a bug but had
72.
by pm215 11mo ago
Broadly speaking I think the instruction set doesn't make much difference (assuming it rises above a baseline level of capability). What did for all the workstation and minicomputer class vendors with non-x86 architectures was that x86
73.
by pm215 11mo ago
Personally I strongly do not want to get better at remembering dreams. At the moment I very rarely remember anything about dreaming, and on the very rare occasion that some fragment of memory from a dream pops into my head it is super confu
74.
by pm215 1y ago
You could definitely do better than x32 did (IIRC it is a bit of an outlier even among "32-bit compat ABI" setups). But even if the kernel changes were done more cleanly that still leaves the whole software stack with the ongoing
75.
by pm215 1y ago
In practice it seems like it's not as simple as that; see this lkml post from a few years back pointing out some of the weird x32 specific syscall stuff they ended up with: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/1
76.
by pm215 1y ago
The problem is that it's relatively easy to add "supports both endiannesses" in hardware and architecture but the ongoing effect on the software stack is massive. You need a separate toolchain for it; you need support in the
77.
by pm215 1y ago
The unexpected thing in that particular case is that even if you were well aware and avoided the flag when building your numeric code, the way some other non-numeric-computing person compiled some unrelated non-numeric module like "gev
78.
by pm215 1y ago
That isn't what I want, though. I don't see any point in the index as a construct -- I am happy with changes being either (a) not in any commit, just in the working directory or (b) in the most recent commit. Somewhere lurking in
79.
by pm215 1y ago
What I mean is that I do not want a single "swiss army knife" rebase command that does everything with lots of options to remember. It's fine to have that in the toolbox for the once in six months weird requirement. But for t
80.
by pm215 1y ago
On that first point, there's a use case I sometimes have where stgit feels very clunky: * I have a branch foo with a stack of patches which are the thing I'm working on, based on a master branch * I have a separate stack of patche
81.
by pm215 1y ago
Yeah, I get the impression jj is good for this, and if I were using raw git then it would be a massive upgrade. Luckily for me stgit already does what I want in this area so I have no strong need to investigate alternatives, but if stgit ev
82.
by pm215 1y ago
I find myself from time to time with stuff in the index (merge conflicts in particular I think can result in this). I never put anything there explicitly. I would love to be able to configure git such that the index didn't exist, but I
83.
by pm215 1y ago
I would love the git index to not be a thing you had to care about unless you deliberately wanted to use that feature, but in my experience this is not the case...it feels to me like an implementation detail that surfaces into the UI more t
84.
by pm215 1y ago
As an stgit user, this seems like a weird workflow to me. I never want to have that many uncommitted changes just floating around that will eventually belong to multiple commits. If I'm halfway through something and realise "oh, i
85.
by pm215 1y ago
Yeah, we do try to maintain at least some back compat. Some things go through a deprecate-and-drop cycle, but that is more often driven by "the old thing is a pain to maintain internally" than by "the new thing is more user f
86.
by pm215 1y ago
The countervailing force here is the desire for command line backwards compatibility. Every time you change a default to be something that makes more sense today, you break the existing working setups of some unknown number of people... The
87.
by pm215 1y ago
For a counterexample in the other direction, the 8-track system uses "cartridge" for its enclosure-with-audio-on-magnetic-tape object.
88.
by pm215 1y ago
Though English, French, etc sharing the same unicode codepoints is not as far as I'm aware problematic, whereas Chinese and Japanese characters sharing codepoints does cause wrong behaviour (wrong shape of character used in text beca
89.
by pm215 1y ago
It might also have a different atmosphere on a dark evening lit only by candlelight, compared to "lit as brightly as possible for photography".
90.
by pm215 1y ago
There are, but you have to run enough of the javascript on the page and from the cdn for them to to show up.

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