Viewing profile — brucedawson

Unfortunate typo: the article says "Having placed the fresnel lens, we're not able to get an usable image on the whole 40x30cm sensor." but I think the "not" should be "now". Havin…

It's easy to make these 800V systems totally safe. You just have to combine this idea with the extremely sensible plan to put data centers in space and then there will be no worry …

I think that is correct, but yes, a delay-slot instruction that is always executed is easy to reason about. Speculative execution that gets real? shudder

It did not help that the performance of the Xbox 360 CPU (and Cell) was terrible. In-order execution without the crazy-high frequencies the CPU was designed for was a failure.

Author here: This is not a common problem. I think I was told that Alpha had basically the same bug but it is a bug, for sure. Speculative execution causing problematic side effect…

Part 2 is up: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/reflections-on-...

In 2021 I found an invisible memory leak in a tool (VS Code) that I have never used. This is the story of how.

I was surprised also when this happened, but pleased. The trust was nice. The fact that they needed to give me the symbols in order to understand the issue was surprising. Why coul…

Should it be my second law? https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lr24s...

Whoops! Good catch. That was supposed to be 12 furlongs. Apparently I have no intuitive sense of how long a furlong is so I didn't notice my typo

That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it …

Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still i…

It drives me crazy that Google Maps sometimes asks me where the entrance to a building is but it never seems to be clear about what it is asking. Where a pedestrian would enter? Wh…

And yet, as I mention in the blog post, Google Maps actually does understand how Vancouver's addresses work. It can find the location where a non-existent address would be if it ex…

Google Maps may not be able to understand every regional system but it _does_ understand the system in Vancouver. It then, apparently, makes it too easy for exceptions to this syst…

I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to …

Interesting. I don't know what it means but if I delete the postal code from the 138 address in the map you link to then it goes back to displaying the bad location (with the posta…

Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks …

Some AMD drivers leak handles to every process created. On a build system that creates tens of thousands of process this leaks tens of thousands of process handles with each one cr…

Author here: Linux has made progress in this area, but I think that Windows is still better. Maybe I'm wrong (I haven't used Linux in a while) but I think when Linux developers say…

Author here: I find it quite strange that my kids have lost their mother, but I have not. I still have both my parents. That's so backwards. Therefore I can't compare the grief of …