Viewing profile — j_not_j

I was part of a group touring HP labs in the mid-1970s. They showed us how they computed the key dimensions and typography with an (HP) minicomputer, then had it print out the comm…

Went for a walk today. Found a $100 bill in the grass. No-one nearby to think it might belong to them.

Alpha had a lot of implementation problems, e.g. floating point exceptions with untraceable execution paths. Cray tried to build the T3E (iirc) out of Alphas. DEC bragged how good …

Ascending is all you need.

"wet coast" Slang for BC. It's a joke, because (coastal) BC is mostly wet. And BC is the westernmost province.

"brown toast". When ordering breakfast, such as eggs and toast. "You want white or brown toast?" Since most toast is toasted to a brown tone, the question confuses Americans (west-…

"off-sale" at a licensed premises means sale for off-premise consumption. In BC.

Wouldn't be worth the trouble to try. Why, you ask? How do you point it? Where do you point it? You have a "telescope" with a field of view of one-planets worth of pixels. But the …

Beebe publishes a lengthy bibliography. https://www.netlib.org/tex/bib/prng.pdf 758 pages and counting....

Downey published a (big-endian, SPARC) method in 2007: https://allendowney.com/research/rand/ And Lemire in 2017 asked the question https://lemire.me/blog/2017/02/28/how-many-float…

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Some comments, in random order: - your test codes are not reproducible: running twice generates different sets of numbers because they have unknown seeds. As a result, if you chang…

yes

See https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/01/just-how-big-are-nvi... They estimated $200k for a single NVIDIA GPU-based CPU complete with RAM and networking. That's where my number …

I don't for a minute believe Deepseek v3 was built with a $6M rental. Their paper (arxiv 2412:1947) explains they used 2048 H800s. A computer cluster based on 2048 GPUs would have …

Offtopic: OpenBSD has an installation ramdisk. Just boot that. See https://raby.sh/installing-openbsd-on-ovhs-vps-2016-kvm-mach... I've also seen "dd if=path/to/install/ramdisk /de…

Risk is about probabilities and hazards. This article is about absolutes and fear. To conflate the two is an obvious rhetorical trick that amounts to clickbait, approximately. "It'…

There is a real art to doing "benchmarks", more correctly called "synthetic benchmarks" since they don't reflect actual usage but are intended for comparisons. I had tried pgvector…

And he didn't repeat each test case 5 or 9 times, and take the median (or even an average). There will be operating system noise that can be in the multi-percent range. This is def…

OpenBSD source gets independent code reviews, and they run syzcaller continuously. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&w=2&r=1&s=coverity&q=b https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=1643…

There is a recent update to the blis alternative to BLAS that includes a number of RISC-V performance optimizations. https://github.com/flame/blis/pull/737

There are three more I have to use: 4x4 matrix: you are challenged with letter/number for row/column and must respond with the matrix entry. Not much better than totp; try to find …

See also The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Jain. The statistical parts are very good: self contained and with good explanations. Perhaps a weakness is there isn't…

Tubes. And diodes (see the BOM).