Viewing profile — smarks

I don't know, but I did observe differences in power consumption caused by all sorts of unexpected things. At some point during all my fiddling with this stuff, I discovered a corr…

Oh yeah, I forgot about the graphics. I had (and still have) a 4k external monitor. Naturally I wanted the MBP to drive the monitor with a resolution that took advantage of all the…

I saw this title and I immediately thought “SCCS”. Indeed, the article is a deep dive into the SCCS data structures. Cool! I actually still use SCCS… sort of. I have some old code …

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated cra…

I took another look at L.H.S. and the buildings have rather more octagons than hexagons. There’s even a decagon-shaped building. Still, the symmetric geometry of the architecture i…

Thanks for your explanation; it’s very helpful.

Part 2 shows this comment from the Linux TCP code: /* As outlined in RFC 2525, section 2.17, we send a RST here because * data was lost. To witness the awful effects of the old beh…

I rewatched this recently; I think it held up well. It’s probably re-entered the zeitgeist given the recent developments in “AI” and “agents”. So far accidents seem to have destroy…

Oh! This is a great explanation, thanks. I remember your original exchange (and I found it baffling and uncharacteristic), and I remember the William Shatner SNL Trek convention sk…

I believe the definitive analysis of the Therac-25 incident was written by Nancy Leveson, first in IEEE Computer,[1] and later as an appendix of her book.[2] The appendix is freely…

Thanks for posting this. The Leveson article is IMO the definitive study on this incident. I’m going to repost at top level for emphasis.

You encountered this book in 01996? Is that around the time of the Norman Conquest? I'm assuming you're using octal here. Myself, I haven't used octal since 03677. :-) I see you me…

There's a meta-problem here, which doesn't seem to have been discussed. How did the setting change in the first place? The article says: > Then, seemingly out of nowhere... > In my…

This is a very old argument. Xah Lee wrote the linked article around 2008, but previously he had posted "Why we have cons?" on comp.lang.lisp (and comp.lang.scheme) all the way bac…

“Somehow, Dark Helmet has returned.”

All this is true. Note also that the C++ folks are putting a serious effort into reducing UB. See the "safe by default" section of this writeup [1]. See also my other comment [2] r…

I'm a bit distant from this stuff, but it looks like C++26 will have something like -ftrivial-auto-var-init enabled by default. See the "safe by default" section of [1]. For refere…

There are similarities in the problems, but there are also fundamental differences. With inlining, the JVM can always decide to deoptimize and back out the inlining without affecti…

The security manager was removed (well, “permanently disabled”) in Java 24. As you note, the permissions available at any given point can depend on the permissions of the code on t…

ConcurrentModificationException is typically thrown from an iterator when it detects that it’s been invalidated by a modification to the underlying collection. It’s harder to check…

Interesting. I haven’t seen an infinite loop either, but I can imagine one if a comparator tries to be too “clever” for example if it bases its comparison logic on some external st…

Hey! A fellow Wang 2200 veteran!

Updated RFC for JSON: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8259

Good reference! Turns out this internet draft has been turned into an official, informational RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413 I don't think Postel's Law was nece…

> Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless teletypes Ah yes, the proverbial "glass TTY." There were a few years in the late 1970s where printing terminals …