Panchekha is on a roll lately, I just read all of his recent posts a week ago.
I really liked his AI vs Herbie series.
We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
51–60 of 359 posts
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#52Our capability to mispredict wouldn't have been different. We would have still picked the wrong size, and got stuck with scaling problems.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#53At the end: "Thank you to GPT 4o and o4 for discussions, research, and drafting."
At first I thought that was a nice way to handle credit, but on further thought I wonder if this is necessary because the base line assumption is that everyone is using LLMs to help them write.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#54This is ignoring the natural fact that we have 8 bit bytes because programmers have 8 fingers.
No, we still have 10. Real programmers think in octal. ;)
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#55At the end: "Thank you to GPT 4o and o4 for discussions, research, and drafting." At first I thought that was a nice way to handle credit, but on further thought I wonder if this is necessary because the base line assumption is that everyone is using LLMs to help them write.
Yeah, I don't remember ever thanking the spellchecker anything in the past. Maybe we are kinder to technology nowadays that we even credit it?
Thank you to Android for mobile Internet connectivity, browsing, and typing.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#56I thought the PDP 10 had 6-bit bytes, or at least 6-bit characters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code#DEC_SIX...
Notably the PDP 8 had 12 bit words (2x6) and the PDP 10 had 36 bit words (6x6)
Notably the PDP 10 had addressing modes where it could address a run of bits inside a word so it was adaptable to working with data from other systems. I've got some notes on a fantasy computer that has 48-bit words (fit inside a Javascript double!) and a mechanism like the PDP 10 where you can write "deep pointers" that have a bit offset and length that can even hang into the next word, with the length set to zero bits this could address UTF-8 character sequences. Think of a world where something like the PDP 10 inspired microcomputers, was used by people who used CJK characters and has a video system that would make the NeoGeo blush. Crazy I know.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#57Another interesting thought experiment would what if we went down to 6 bit bytes instead? Then the common values probably would be 24 and especially 48 bits (4 and 8 bytes), but 36 bit values might have appeared also in some places. In many ways 6 bit bytes would have had similar effect than 9 bit bytes; 18 and 36 bits would have been 3 and 6 bytes instead of 2 and 4 bytes. Notably with 6 bit bytes text encoding woul…
Some early mainframes used 6-bit characters which is why they didn't have lowercase.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#58When you stop to think about it, it really doesn't make sense to have memory addresses map to 8-bit values, instead of bits directly. Storage, memory, and CPUs all deal with larger blocks of bits, which have names like "pages" and "sectors" and "words" depending on the context. If accessing a bit is really accessing a larger block and throwing away most of it in every case, then the additional byte grouping isn't rea…
Byte addressing is really useful for string handling.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#59> But in a world with 9-bit bytes IPv4 would have had 36-bit addresses, about 64 billion total. Or we would have had 27 bit addresses and ran into problems sooner.
The first transition was to IPv4, and it was reportedly (I wasn’t in the workforce yet :-) relatively easy…
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2016/09/final-report-on...
Some more interesting history reading here:
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#60Today, we all agree that "byte" means 8 bits. But half a century ago, this was not so clear and the different hardware manufacturers were battling it out with different sized bytes.
A reminder of that past history is that in Internet standards documents, the word "octet" is used to unambiguously refer to an 8-bit byte. Also, "octet" is the French word for byte, so a "gigaoctet (Go)" is a gigabyte (GB) in English.
(Now, if only we could pin down the sizes of C/C++'s char/short/int/long/long-long integer types...)