tlb

42 ms·

361.
by tlb 3y ago
As far as we know, there's no way to exactly simulate physics on a digital computer. So any simulation would be a numerical approximation. If we're in such a universe, it would have consequences for understanding physics. For inst
362.
by tlb 3y ago
The real prize is to deshittify the content on the web. Ignoring copyrights for a moment, it should be possible to rewrite pages in 1000s of sites down to just the information. StackOverflow could just have the Q&As, news sites could ju
363.
by tlb 3y ago
If it were me, as soon as I found a civilization in my simulation, I'd shut down all the dust clouds and run many versions of the civilization. The big limitation of studying our civilization from the inside is that we only see one pat
364.
by tlb 3y ago
There are several proposals, like looking for anisotropy in physics as evidence of a grid coordinate system. Perhaps some day a more precise measurement will find something, but not yet.
365.
by tlb 3y ago
An argument against simulation is that our universe seems gratuitously large. Why have billions of whole other galaxies in it? Given a finite computing budget, you'd expect whoever's running the simulation to want to simulate more
366.
by tlb 3y ago
That's the case now, but things can change. YouTube was originally not much of a platform for listening to music, and probably tried to make the same argument that it was all discovery. Now it's a common alternative to Spotify, so
367.
by tlb 3y ago
It might be good enough to detect a large number of accesses to any single row and then initiate a complete refresh. This wouldn't be triggered often by normal software. Most exploits have to use cache flush instructions, and with mode
368.
by tlb 3y ago
Another approach was basically a speaker connected to a carbon microphone, which compressed loosely packed carbon granules to change its resistance. They were used as repeaters in long distance telephone lines as early as 1904: https:&#x2F
369.
by tlb 3y ago
You can't throw down a claim like "Before the 1920's there was no way to amplify electrical signals" here without some pushback. The triode theoretically dates from 1906, but took a while to be usable. There were various
370.
by tlb 3y ago
It makes sense to put it in the DRAM controller for many reasons. One is that the DRAM silicon process is optimized for memory but terrible for logic. Also, a DRAM bank is several chips in parallel to get the data bus width, and they would
371.
by tlb 3y ago
LPDDR4 and above are supposed to have a feature to detect too many accesses to the same few rows and initiate a refresh cycle. Implementation quality may vary.
372.
by tlb 3y ago
I'm curious about this myself. Every Mac I've had since OSX came out in 2001 has been copied from the previous Mac. So there are probably some turds in the config swimming pool.
373.
by tlb 3y ago
Back in the 90s I tried to do something clever with page tables. But at the time, some architectures like PA-RISC used virtually tagged caches and it was very hard to make it work on such systems. Can we assume that we’ll never see such a m
374.
by tlb 3y ago
Thanks for talking publicly about this. Thousands of interesting people take this route (also, me) but not many blog about it. My lawyers originally described this category as "for internationally recognized people such as Nobel prize
375.
by tlb 3y ago
Do you have some recommended devices that follow that rule?
376.
by tlb 3y ago
So, suppose you walk into your local grocer and today the carrots are from East Dursley. Last week they were from North Grimsby. How does that affect your buying decision? There are at least 1000s of distinct terroirs that any given crop mi
377.
by tlb 3y ago
I expect cleaning aircraft factories requires more training and care than cleaning typical industrial facilities. They have to be trained in avoiding foreign object damage, for example. And aircraft assembly has a lot of vertical dimension,
378.
by tlb 3y ago
A user can only downvote (or upvote) a given comment once, so the most a user with a grudge can do is reduce your average comment score by 1. Also, comments become unvotable after a while (I think a month).
379.
by tlb 3y ago
I hung around the local computer store and lurked on BBSs in the early Apple 2 era, and people with serious computers (16 bit, S100 bus, CP/M) definitely scoffed at this 8-bit toy with not even a floppy drive. People will scoff at anyt
380.
by tlb 3y ago
The aerodynamic benefit of flying in ground effect is fairly small, and the disadvantage is that rogue waves can just randomly splash that high. The current plane's wingspan is 65 feet, which probably means it flies about 32 feet (half
381.
by tlb 3y ago
The IPv6 people must have known that : was a common way to separate IPv4 and port numbers. IPv6 was standardized 4 years after the URL format which used a colon to denote a port number.
382.
by tlb 3y ago
Is there a canonical definition of these ages? It seems like a useful way of making analogies between industries/mediums. If there isn't, maybe you could make some sort of website to explain...
383.
by tlb 3y ago
Yes, though it's not a great market. Usage tends to be low (they sit in a drawer) so there's not much follow-on app store revenue, and developers don't target your platform. "Developers! stomp Developers! stomp Devel
384.
by tlb 3y ago
Part of what made the 90s internet exciting was the sense, whenever I found a useful site, that I too could make such a site. I could probably get v1 going in an afternoon, and it would be (partly) fun. I guess I could also make a 2020s con
385.
by tlb 3y ago
180k developers is a lot. 180k consumers is barely a market. I think it's mostly developers, though. I ordered one, to try some immersive data visualization stuff.
386.
by tlb 3y ago
> "the choice of letters SHOULD NOT affect the meaning of a mathematical statement" I mean, that ship sailed a long time ago. You can't understand any modern math or physics (or ML, or CS) paper without depending on variab
387.
by tlb 3y ago
It's feasible to have compilers automatically figure out how to use novel ISA features. But designing a microarchitecture & logic based on a proposed ISA is still years of expert human labor, so it's hard to evaluate the perfo
388.
by tlb 3y ago
I wrote a big visualization application with WebGPU and I'm happy with the choice. It's much cleaner than OpenGL, without as much complexity as Vulkan or Metal. It runs on Mac & Linux, and I got a demo version working in the b
389.
by tlb 3y ago
Passenger jets need it because the center of gravity can vary a lot depending on passenger and cargo loading. A spy plane could probably be built with almost zero variation, with some careful fuel tank management.
390.
by tlb 3y ago
This topic has been studied extensively. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition#S... for a summary.

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