rwallace

15 ms·

121.
by rwallace 6y ago
> resurgence of fixed point arithmetic in hpc Where is fixed point arithmetic resurging in HPC? Serious question; I haven't heard about this, but if it's happening in places I haven't heard about, I would be interested in
122.
by rwallace 6y ago
I think your summary is accurate. For reference, I'm willing to cut Wolfram more slack than some people are, I think his quest to discover the ultimate laws of physics from the other end is potentially interesting, but I don't thi
123.
by rwallace 6y ago
> my friend who started a 20 million dollar software company in Chicago and then moved to Prague to try to repeat it and he knows exactly why software engineering doesn't scale in Eastern European countries I'm curious, why doe
124.
by rwallace 6y ago
Great! Then you're the ideal person to ask something I've been wondering: We see the occasional headline about machine learning algorithms outperforming human radiologists. What's the catch? I'm prepared to believe they
125.
by rwallace 6y ago
> nobody explicitly specifies "result of an addition of natural numbers should match ..." Yes they do. In most programming languages, by default integer arithmetic is modulo 2^64 (at best). If you want arbitrary precision arith
126.
by rwallace 6y ago
Interesting article! One thing I'm curious about: I can see what the bit shifter was for, but the article also mentions a separate byte shifter. What was that for?
127.
by rwallace 6y ago
Look, I completely agree with you that the housing crisis is terrible and needs to be fixed, but sniping at proposals for particle accelerators is not the way to express that view! Let's make political comments in contexts where they
128.
by rwallace 6y ago
Does Wolfram's model correctly generate the many worlds of quantum mechanics? I get the impression that it doesn't, and I've seen it claimed that this has been mathematically demonstrated, but I can't say for sure. That
129.
by rwallace 6y ago
Excellent article! Just one thing surprised me: > While I was writing a book about Wolfenstein 3D[1], I wanted to vividly demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating point I would've expected fixed point to wo
130.
by rwallace 6y ago
I've seen it plausibly argued that in e.g. Japan, they have a culture of not talking on your phone on the subway, and this substantially reduces transmission.
131.
by rwallace 6y ago
Thanks! That actually reminds me of something else I was wondering: why only three blades, leaving so much empty space for wind to pass through unimpeded? I understand adding a fourth or fifth would give you slightly less energy per blade,
132.
by rwallace 6y ago
I think I am missing something here, because I don't quite get how the wind does continual work on the device to generate power. I mean, at the start the device goes downwind unreeling a tether, so it is pulling on the tether and doing
133.
by rwallace 7y ago
I don't think the point is that Americans should consider themselves too good for the COBOL jobs. The point is that the organization has stated that it will refuse to hire many people who would be willing and able to do the jobs.
134.
by rwallace 7y ago
In CL, if you catch an exception, you have the option of trying to fix the problem and then letting the code continue from where it left off. This is only moderately difficult to implement in machine code, but somewhere between problematic
135.
by rwallace 7y ago
Right. However, the inventions you mention, were not expected to be useful the same year . The problem today is not that there is a demand to focus work on potentially useful areas; that's fine as far as it goes. The problem is that t
136.
by rwallace 7y ago
Okay. I personally do not have the financial reserves to bootstrap something like this, though if someone else does, I by all means wish them luck.
137.
by rwallace 7y ago
I agree, it's not the most user-friendly of business models. Do you know how to make a more user-friendly business model profitable enough to appeal to investors? This is not a rhetorical question. If I knew a way to make a more user-f
138.
by rwallace 7y ago
You could use that argument to prove Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. I mean sure, there is actual evidence that global warming is real whereas Vogons are not, but if you want to make a case, you need to
139.
by rwallace 7y ago
There is some theorem that says network utilization with collision detection can be as low as 1/e^2, though in practice it rarely approaches that. 20% sounds like a plausible bad case if the network is heavily loaded and the stars are
140.
by rwallace 7y ago
Now I'm curious. I thought collision avoidance generally meant giving each machine a more or less constant allocation of 1/N of the total bandwidth, efficient when every machine wants to transmit all the time, but in the usual cas
141.
by rwallace 7y ago
I'm surprised RISC-V has significantly larger gate count for 64 than 32 bit; I thought the extra gate count for 64 bits was negligible from around the time when the Nintendo 64 used a 64-bit CPU because it was cheaper to keep it as it
142.
by rwallace 7y ago
> Based on the recent observation, LIGO scientists estimate that these heavy pairings should be almost as common as the lighter binary star systems that astronomers have been studying for decades. Big neutron star pairs should be all ove
143.
by rwallace 7y ago
> According to the Intel optimization manual, using EBP, RBP, or R13 as the base address will make LEA slower. Now that's odd. What is special about those registers, that code using them can end up slower than the others?
144.
by rwallace 7y ago
> A modern transistor is 1000 x 1000 x 1000 atoms. Um? A silicon atom is something like 0.2 nanometers. 1000 times that is 200 nanometers. We passed that a long time ago. Am I missing something?
145.
by rwallace 7y ago
Interesting piece of history! But I disagree with the assessment on the part of the author: > There’s something both grimly funny and profound to me about the riot... all over the personal jealousies of two vain and insecure actors No, i
146.
by rwallace 7y ago
I have advocated a worldwide travel shutdown exactly twice in my life: SARS, and now. SARS was a damn close call; it was stopped by proactive measures of contact tracing and quarantine (i.e. you quarantine, forcibly if need be, not only eac
147.
by rwallace 7y ago
> For example, in 1962 the Telstar satellite (the first satellite to transmit television pictures) and the Minuteman missile both used switching power supplies. I thought switching power supplies were for converting high voltage AC to lo
148.
by rwallace 7y ago
So what would be some examples of when a scrappy upstart took over because the segment leader ran into tech stack scaling issues? (As opposed to the segment leader running into corrupt or incompetent management, failing to notice a new mark
149.
by rwallace 7y ago
Okay, but let's stop and think about it for ten seconds: Of course drinking a slightly different brand of milk doesn't make you live 4.5 years longer; the headline claim is obvious nonsense. (And as I understand it, it's no
150.
by rwallace 7y ago
That's why the readme says: > To use VCMI you need to own original data files.

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