Viewing profile — pm215

Alpha punts handling of denormals, infinities and NaNs to software emulation, but that wasn't particularly unusual: some sparc CPUs and early implementations of Arm VFP floating po…

Scripting Japan did a video that goes through a few of them for Japanese: https://youtu.be/gjB79s4oCkc

I suspect it's a mix of historical reasons (#! support was added pretty early, in 1980 or so, when the unix development philosophy I think tended quite strongly to "do the simple t…

Mmm. This Q&A -- https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/M... -- suggests it's been kicking around as printing and journalism jargon since at least the 1980s, an…

The city government tracks data on public realm trees, and has a nice map based visualization of it: https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environm... and if you zoom…

Yes, QEMU's JIT is a fairly easy target to beat. Notably if you are happy to specialize the design to "only x86 to aarch64" and "only usermode" there's quite a lot of gain to be ma…

For a long time in the dialup era my "answering machine" was a US Robotics voice-capable modem attached to my home Linux PC, with some scripts to make it pick up after N rings, pla…

Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that …

Also, "why these 5 in particular" is definitely not obvious -- there are a great many possible "obvious in some sense but also true in an important way" epigrams to choose from (th…

If the team is that small and working on things that are that disparate, then it is also very vulnerable to one of those people leaving, at which point there's a whole part of the …

A fairly large category of the flaky CI jobs I see is "dodgy infrastructure". For instance one recurring type for our project is one I just saw fail this afternoon, where a gitlab …

That's why I said "somebody else, without looking at it". Clean-room reimplementation, if you like. The functionality is not forever unimplementable, it is only not implementable b…

If you're going to set a firm "no AI" policy, then my inclination would be to treat that kind of PR in the same way the US legal system does evidence obtained illegally: you say "s…

Even if there isn't any 3rd party code, the whole process of going through the codebase to confirm there really isn't any 3rd party code, and generally getting the legal department…

I think Coccinelle is a really cool tool, but I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason. I've read through it multiple times, but I always end up having to …

On the tangential question in the post: "The specification describes bits as combinations of 0, 1, and x, but also sometimes includes (0) and (1). I’m not sure what the parenthesiz…

This is an important ISA feature -- an instruction encoding that is wasteful of its encoding space is one that has no room for future new instructions (or which has to encode the n…

This is a result of the market and its demands, not something specific to the architecture. In desktop and server, customers demand that they can buy a new machine and install a pr…

It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start tha…

Ah, thanks for that correction -- I jumped straight from "depends on the history of conditional branches" to "branch predictor" without stopping to think that that would have been …

Yeah, I think random-instruction-sequence testing is a pretty good approach to try to find the problems you didn't think of up front. I wrote a very simple tool for this years ago …

Some of the 386 bugs described there sound to me like the classic kind of "multiple different subsystems interact in the wrong way" issue that can slip through the testing process …

I wasn't arguing that getting LLMs to do this is necessarily bad -- I just think it really is different from having in the past been able to ask other humans for help, and so that …

I think there are a couple of differences here: Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it…

You can have either completely separate hot and cold taps, each with their own spout, or you can have a setup with separate hot and cold knobs and a single spout. For my bathroom s…