rwallace

12 ms·

91.
by rwallace 5y ago
> When I've been micro-optimizing performance-critical code, integer division shows up as a hot spot regularly. Now I'm really curious. In my experience, integer division practically never happens (except by powers of 2 that ar
92.
by rwallace 6y ago
Thanks for the perspective! It's always good to get a look at what the situation looked like to the people who were there at the time. And yes, I can certainly understand that you had to get a product to market within the applicable co
93.
by rwallace 6y ago
A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.
94.
by rwallace 6y ago
> IBM has discontinued many mainframe platforms in the past, and there's no guarantee that next year they won't approach you with a 10x markup on your renting costs, that will become 50x in a couple of years and will keep going
95.
by rwallace 6y ago
> C or C++, where memory layout is inverted relative to something like Fortran (which seemed to get this right from the 1960s) when you consider most cache lines on most processors. How do you mean? As I understand it, the only differenc
96.
by rwallace 6y ago
The second statement is unfortunately true. But be careful of taking the first one at face value. The outsider might be optimizing for being right. He might also be optimizing for looking good in his social circle, confirming some self-imag
97.
by rwallace 6y ago
They solved the problem of unpredictable load times at compile time? Using just LLVM? How?
98.
by rwallace 6y ago
I'm curious, what was the reason for the difference? While the C language standard doesn't guarantee anything about alignment, I'm used to the behavior of compilers in practice being consistently 'align everything on its
99.
by rwallace 6y ago
I have seen it claimed that, roughly speaking, - The sale price of the Xbox itself pays for the per-unit cost of the machine - The percentage Microsoft gets of the sale price of games, adds just about enough to pay for the development and m
100.
by rwallace 6y ago
Reasonable people can differ on whether quiet NaN propagation is good or bad, so I don't fault you for being in the latter camp, but I am surprised by your suggestion that it was particularly friendly to 1980s hardware. I was under the
101.
by rwallace 6y ago
How? I was under the impression that RISC-V was deliberately minimalist in the hope of obtaining smaller cores, and I can see how that would allow higher clock frequency, but I would've expected the trade-off to be longer programs. How
102.
by rwallace 6y ago
Sympathies! Now I'm curious, how did it happen? What equipment was it, that your employer preferred Apple over IBM, let alone had such a vehement preference as to actually fire you over it?
103.
by rwallace 6y ago
> they still pay royalties per chip, even with a perpetual license on the ISA Why would they have to pay royalties per chip? I would've thought the whole point of a perpetual license on the ISA was that they didn't have to do t
104.
by rwallace 6y ago
> General purpose GPU hardware is way more wasteful for matrix math, like maybe >10x waste on power and equally worse performance, than tensor cores. I didn't realize there was that distinction; I thought GPU's were just opt
105.
by rwallace 6y ago
I'm curious about the specifics of the problems this would solve, having been doing some thinking about what an ideal file system would look like. In particular, is this something you would need primarily for files you create, or exist
106.
by rwallace 6y ago
Now that is interesting! Do you remember where he said this?
107.
by rwallace 6y ago
Can you summarize, or point to a discussion of, the ways in which PTX differs from a traditional RISC architecture?
108.
by rwallace 6y ago
> But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence) The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blo
109.
by rwallace 6y ago
> From my perspective Julia is sacrifising some amount of "duct tape UX" to gain speed, and that's the wrong direction. What particular language features of Julia make that trade-off? (Not a rhetorical question, I'm n
110.
by rwallace 6y ago
What would you have considered the normal/preferred way of handling this? After all, hardware price drops were normal, that's how the market was expanded; wouldn't it be the case that no matter when the price came down, someo
111.
by rwallace 6y ago
So why exactly does anyone want that, if not as a subgoal of spotting fraud? (I mean, if the first link in the chain is "because that's what's necessary and sufficient to comply with the law" then why was the law written
112.
by rwallace 6y ago
I am surprised! I always thought that was precisely their job. So if it's not, what is their job instead?
113.
by rwallace 6y ago
Intuitively I would expect that to work even with twisted-pair; each sensor needs to transmit for maybe a millisecond every 300 seconds, which would allow for 150,000 sensors while still using only half the available bandwidth. What am I mi
114.
by rwallace 6y ago
> One case where timer-based scheduling is needed is when implementing a web browser. The JavaScript standard has a function called setTimeout which asks the browser to call a JavaScript function some number of milliseconds later. Chromi
115.
by rwallace 6y ago
Suppose we grant that hell exists with some nonzero (albeit tiny) measure. By the same logic, heaven (some extraordinarily joyous and worthwhile state of existence) also exists with some nonzero measure. You probably feel that the latter
116.
by rwallace 6y ago
I'm curious, what do you find are the advantages of structural typing?
117.
by rwallace 6y ago
> Or a learning tool to make computer science & networking concepts concrete and tangible? That seems like a perfectly good use case to me?
118.
by rwallace 6y ago
My safety worry wouldn't be the lack of flight attendants per se, it would be distracted pilots. The pilots have enough to keep track of already. The last thing we need is having planes start crashing because a pilot was distracted dea
119.
by rwallace 6y ago
> back when Microsoft was developing their 32 bit Windows, they were all set to not save the x87 state during a context switch, effectively killing the x87 Do you mean '64-bit Windows'? (When 32-bit Windows was being developed,
120.
by rwallace 6y ago
> We said we liked their CPU performance, but didn't like the Archimedes graphics hardware which was too low res and low depth, and could not be upgraded. I'm surprised about that! Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org

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