Viewing profile — rwallace

Eh. There are certainly things wrong with today's economy, starting with housing being treated as a financial asset, which encourages laws that create an artificial scarcity of it.…

Ah! So let me paraphrase to make sure I understand. In your experience, the real use case of denormals is not that you want to compute with them. It's that they are a useful error …

The one way I know of for denormals to arise in real calculations is when you have a process that converges on zero. In which case, values will pass through the denormal range on t…

Because they believed only a small fraction of customers would care a lot about a better Basic interpreter, whereas the vast majority would care about price. As for giving things a…

I didn't know about that event. What did he say to get booed that time?

I looked into that, concluded the spoiler is Specter. Basically, you have to have out of order/speculative execution if you ultimately want the best performance on general/integer …

Happy new year from Ireland!

Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code", fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of language. But please leave it at that, instead of also insu…

I showed up too late to catch more than the tail end of the minicomputer era. I'd like to learn more about the computers that predated the 8-bit micros I fondly remember. There is …

In general, if a program is not a Web browser, I do not want that program getting clever with displaying a URL as an active link. Just show it as the URL, https prefix and all, so …

Fair enough! If you ever have the time and inclination to write it up as a blog post or such, I would love to read it.

I disagree with your second sentence above. I think it is shallow dismissals that are inappropriate here. Conversely, I have upvoted a number of long explanations of interesting to…

Or unless delete is a rare operation. So yeah, to make the best decisions here, you need to know expected numbers as well as expected access patterns. As far as I can see, you are …

No problem! As to what would be better - this is also a reply to your sibling comments above - I don't have a single across-the-board solution; the equivalent of std::vector everyw…

To clarify a couple of things: I'm aware of the reasons Linux uses doubly linked lists. I'm still of the opinion this design decision made a lot of sense in the 1990s, and would ma…

Yes, that was exactly the reason. CJK unification happened during the few years when we were all trying to convince ourselves that 16 bits would be enough. By the time we acknowled…

I read that paragraph, but my reading of it was different from yours. As far as I can see, it only discusses training time and experience. No mention of time for sleep. Though yes,…

In several similar incidents, it was clear that the, or at least a major, cause of the accidents, was that the officers on watch had been forced to work overtime and deprived of sl…

I predict that it will never make sense for artificial neural networks to directly generate machine code, for most of the same reasons it doesn't make sense for biological neural n…

That's an interesting question about the number of levels of address translation. Does anyone have numbers for that, and how much latency and energy an extra layer costs?

I'm not aware of any CPU invented since the late eighties that doesn't have paged virtual memory. Am I misunderstanding what you mean? Can you expand on where you are getting the 4…

As I understand it, the philosophy dates from centuries before that, and was inspired at least in large part by the frequency of earthquakes there.

I'd like to apply, but the job pages just offer 'see open positions' in a loop, no clear way to get to an application form, and the 'contact us' page doesn't accept a Gmail address…

I'm seeing quite a few people on this site recently talking about their Kagi subscriptions, claiming it is sufficiently better than Google to be worth the money.