Viewing profile — TomatoCo

This author also has other things like: A compiler that emits only `mov` instructions and another compiler that deliberately messes with the control flow so that, if disassembled, …

There's plenty of arguments that mass scrapers have compute to spare but it seems to me that if Anubis makes it 100x more expensive to scrape then, for any given scraping budget, t…

I've mostly been running LLMs on my own hardware so the phrase "been at it for about 20 minutes" gave me pause. My first instinct was to ask "but on what hardware?" but I suppose o…

I've usually been more annoyed at the surprise dissonance of "was that an anime girl on kernel.org?" than annoyed at the delay.

I'm picturing something like RUST servers, where the admins get to set their own rules and resource multipliers to facilitate the particular part of gameplay that they want.

On one hand, sure, the entire point of a programming language is to make complex ideas able to be expressed in simpler abstractions. On the other hand, we can damn well try.

In the USA you'll get buttloads of mail urging you to do things such as confirm your home warranty at risk of not being covered. With addresses that says "RE: (your mortgage provid…

You'll see some scripting languages (ab)use this. Where the native "number" type is a 64 bit float and only one NaN bit pattern is a real NaN. The others smuggle a pointer to an ob…

Vaguely reminds me of that planet in Hitchhiker's Guide that started to lose too much mass to tourists leaving. So, > Thus today the net balance between the amount you eat and the …

On a metal as soft as copper I imagine that texture'll last about 30 minutes after it's issued to the soldier.

One of my favorite clips to give a sense of scale for rockets is this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u748VALt4 I show someone and then I tell them, that's not the rocket ex…

This road seems to lead to the exclusion of third party app stores and/or the ability to load apps that aren't signed by Google/Apple.

Going by Fabien Sanglard's cheat sheet (who I trust uncritically) https://fabiensanglard.net/usbcheat/index.html it looks like 3.2 actually is a broader term than expected. Maybe t…

It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering pro…

The term I've seen a lot is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place So I'd probably rewrite that code to first find the ulp of the larger of the abs of a and b and the…

There should be an opposite thruster for each axis. I wonder if the short bursts were due to heating limits.

The space shuttle, too, was able to communicate. I imagine the smaller the craft the smaller the angle you can "speak" out of and, below a certain size, it just doesn't work.

You can't do software updates securely, but it strikes me that compromising the revocation process is a good thing. Suppose you can use a key to sign a message saying "stop using t…

This reminds me of Magicore Anomala, a side scrolling game being made for the 1985 Atari. I wish there was a way to know how people contemporary to the release of the Atari or the …

Wouldn't that be the play, though? Get a buttload of bitcoin, turn it into real money, then destroy bitcoin. If you found a break in bitcoin you wouldn't rely on keeping your wealt…

I think translation should be the only exception. It might even need to be, given how all automated translators use LLMs these days. The only alternative I see is to have people po…

Conservation of angular momentum. Once everything is in it, and it's spun up, it won't stop.

You have to generate random bytes with sufficient entropy to avoid collisions and you have to have a consistent way to serialize it to a string. There's already a standard for this…

Now that Google and Apple have to (more-or-less) allow other app stores, I wonder if Valve is bankrolling FEX with the intent of selling games on mobile?

As a power user I agree, but how do you avoid it being like the Vista UAC popups? Everyone expects software to auto update these days and it's easy enough to social engineer someon…