Viewing profile — jessermeyer

There are two degrees of separation here though: The software vendors and then the linux distros. If you sell software that requires your clients to upgrade their system-wide secur…

There is obviously a trade off here, but categorically speaking, new releases introduce new bugs and security exploits too.

Not at a high level that is easy to express in a HN post, sorry. It's one of those "the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details".

Those are basically contradiction of terms. Orienting the program structure around the data necessarily requires control over memory layout and how it is interpretted.

We almost never hit technical limits in the renderer, streaming systems, etc. Instead, we found that pushing gameplay systems beyond the prototype stage would require more and more…

I've worked on several. You haven't heard of them because none of them shipped due to issues with commercial engines (in particular Unreal Engine 4). They are very difficult to use…

There is always a minimum cost of moving data from one place to another. If you're computing on the GPU, the data must arrive there. The problem is that PCIE bandwidth is often a b…

I carefully chose my word "function" instead of "existence". Give me two different universes where cognition exists but where the fundamental constants differ. Would you expect the…

I don't know how much bias the fine structure constant has on the function of cognition, but I think we can all agree that constats incompatible with higher level biological functi…

I think a single employee netting even a single digit percentage in a year's worth of effort in improved performance for all of Google is an astonishing accomplishment. Trivializin…

Early retirement and, to use rui's word choice, "earn a comfortable income" are not inconsistent. But to your credit it does sound that rui saved Google (vastly) more money than th…

Knuth had serious doubts in his college days, but ultimately decided it was "OK to believe in something unprovable." Which to me speaks to his humility.

Mathematicians I personally know well are stoutly religious. They describe the world of number and form and structure with the same kind of language the clergy describe God, and so…

If an engineer at a FAANG company reduced their global link times by even 10% they'd be promoted into early retirement. Mold is an order of magnitude faster.

Deeply and needlessly cynical. rui tried to fund a high-value software infrastructure project on its own merit and it's not feasible long term. So a change is required. Hardly a ba…

It's more that "construct the geometry" is a highly subjective exercise. :)

Large web companies like Google implement their own encryption stack anyway. On the BSD's I've used, LibreSSL is a standard kernel configuration option. I'll note on FreeBSD, Libre…

This piece accusing Watts of laziness is just as guilty. `It’s true that Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism, teaches that we are perfect just as we are, we have merely forgott…

As others have hinted to -- no userspace copies. No context switches. Vroom Vroom.

What makes you think culling triangles is going away? Ray tracing is usually done with a highly approximated volume or planar representation of the scene, which is then applied to …

Modern renderers: Use the GPU to decide what to render, and in a growing number of cases, will cull triangles in compute (software) instead of letting the fixed pipeline do it. The…

Unfortunately NASA has really tightened the hatches as of late, so I'm not aware of any. :(

There is but unfortunately I do not have access to it. You'll have to ask the SSAI recruiter.

Hi everyone, my group at NASA is looking to hire a US citizen junior programmer government contract to help assist with our mission to map every tree on the planet! If you're a US …