titzer

47 ms·

931.
by titzer 3y ago
> exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits Uranium is everywhere . While there are mines that have extremely high concentrations of Uranium, it is present in trace amounts in almost everything from granite to sand to soil to g
932.
by titzer 3y ago
IMO SSA is not useful for bytecode formats; it is rather for doing optimizations in a compiler. When designing Wasm, several team members work working on PNaCl (LLVM bitcode) and others were working on Web VMs. The fact that SSA requires de
933.
by titzer 3y ago
> And yes carbon likely plays a role as we can model an atmosphere and see this. But it’s probably not as significant as the hundreds of other natural variables. And yet, thousands of scientists who spend their entire careers on figuring
934.
by titzer 3y ago
> Steady rise then big rise and then a crash regressing to the mean. Point is - we don't know. I don't know of any situations in statistics where a 5 sigma drop is considering "regressing to the mean".
935.
by titzer 3y ago
I sometimes take solace in that no matter what I do, if I go to the rails 10x either way in terms of my own private behavior, it's not even a drop in the bucket to what 8 billion other people are doing, and what 2,200 billionaires ar
936.
by titzer 3y ago
I don't dispute those at all; I think we're headed for disaster. But Earth's ecosystems and biospheres are huge and complex. We've probably kicked off a cascade that inevitably leads to a major collapse already , but it
937.
by titzer 3y ago
Oh, it won't be 10 years, stop hoping for entertainment! It will be a long, slow, boring grind taking place over generations. It already has been. I'm 43 and 66% of the world population is younger than me. I remember there were l
938.
by titzer 3y ago
I feel like there is/should be some kind of programming language design equivalent of this. If you wanted to make programmers basically incapable of writing correct programs, how would you do it? Here's where I'd share exampl
939.
by titzer 3y ago
Thanks for the suggestion!
940.
by titzer 3y ago
I didn't know about this, and reading through the comments, I found out that xargs can also do batching and parallelism (nice!). However, it appears that if you pipe the output of an xargs-parallel command into another utility, it jumb
941.
by titzer 3y ago
In retrospect, too many crazy software dances are due to miserliness on the part of hardware designs. Saving a couple bits in the address lines and not needing to straddle cache lines? We're far past the point where that's a consi
942.
by titzer 3y ago
> WebAssembly, which allows unaligned accesses And I think we made the right call (other than the vestigial alignment bits in load/store immediates, which AFAIK, no engine is making use of).
943.
by titzer 3y ago
> UB is inevitable There's a huge difference between UB (as in C/C++) and nondeterminism, so I don't accept this assertion. UB in C gives no semantics to executions containing it; it is neither spatially nor temporally c
944.
by titzer 3y ago
It's actually really annoying to get an example from a video, but nevertheless... The example shows you still didn't really seem to grok my point, which I will state again. A compiler can introduce additional checks for overflow t
945.
by titzer 3y ago
> This prevents using native size of the machine if it's larger than that of `int`. Having implemented multiple compiler backends for 64-bit machines, this is not true. All 64-bit machines I am aware of, and certainly all modern one
946.
by titzer 3y ago
A great quote. She's absolutely right. C has absolutely polluted people's understanding of what compiler optimizations should be. Compilers should make a program go faster, invisibly. C makes optimization everyone's probl
947.
by titzer 3y ago
> these kind of super-hot loops are quite common People say this, then they write microbenchmarks. Then compilers optimize the heck out of these microbenchmarks (and numerical kernels). Rinse and repeat for several decades, and every dir
948.
by titzer 3y ago
Exactly. The irony in all of this is that C is not a portable assembler. It'd be better if it were [1]! If you want the exact semantics of a hardware instruction, you cannot get it, because the compiler reasons with C's abst
949.
by titzer 3y ago
The solution is to have the compiler automatically split iteration into a known in-bounds part and a possibly-out-of-bounds part. In this case, generating an additional check that {ARRAY_WIDTH < (INT_MAX - offset)} would be sufficient to
950.
by titzer 3y ago
> Most graduates of Computer Science programs can, perhaps with some trouble, implement a half decent C compiler in a weekend or two. I see you have not met most graduates of Computer Science programs. > for any given piece of hardwa
951.
by titzer 3y ago
We used to be limited by what our stomachs could carry, but every leap in technology amounted to storing up more food and resources for later, or consuming them conspicuously for social status, particularly to attract mates. So nowadays not
952.
by titzer 3y ago
Very interesting research that is 100% oversold in the popular media. Look at the original paper and listen to the reconstructed audio samples (at the end): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/
953.
by titzer 3y ago
A better link, not paywalled: https://www.science.org/content/article/hear-classic-pink-fl...
954.
by titzer 3y ago
Here's one example from 2016: https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance
955.
by titzer 3y ago
> EDIT: And I guess the answer for "why not fix SunSpider specifically?" is that once you've done the work to turn it into something worth optimizing, it no longer bears any resemblance to the original. It probably looks a
956.
by titzer 3y ago
I understand the logic, but I never understood why we (and I mean, collectively, the JS VM engineers across the browser vendors) didn't just rewrite the benchmark (or fix it) and name it SunSpider 2. I suggested this many times. It&#x2
957.
by titzer 3y ago
Speaking from the perspective of a (former) V8 engineer, SunSpider is crappy benchmark, and I can't believe people still track it. It has misdirected JavaScript performance engineering work for going on 15 years now, leading to all kin
958.
by titzer 3y ago
> My favorite is a missile. This might be apocryphal, as software for this class of embedded system almost certainly doesn't dynamically allocate anything; probably doesn't even use pools. I have a friend who works on missile s
959.
by titzer 3y ago
You have to understand that national security letters (NSLs) are the tip of the spear here. If the target of surveillance is sufficiently bad or scary, the government has tools and absolutely will use them to get this information. Once that
960.
by titzer 3y ago
I have.

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