Const-me

7 ms·

1.
by Const-me 7d ago
I think nuclear winter is a fake invented by cold war propaganda. If tomorrow we detonate all nukes available, the amount of dust in the atmosphere won’t even approach a large volcanic eruption. Volcanic eruptions occasionally inject litera
2.
by Const-me 20d ago
For the last few months, I’ve been working on a vendor-agnostic inference library. Have 3 backends so far: legacy D3D11 for compatibility, D3D12, and Vulkan 1.3. I have reasons to believe nVidia deliberately crippling Vulkan API for their c
3.
by Const-me 1mo ago
I would add than SSE1 and SSE2 are now required parts of AMD64 instruction set. All 64-bit PC processors are required to support them both. For that reason, modern compilers are ignoring x87 FPU when building 64-bit binaries. Instead, they
4.
by Const-me 1mo ago
Before Vista, we did not have window previews in task bar and alt+tab. We didn’t have a good multimedia framework based on the hardware codecs: media foundation arriving with Vista wasn’t a coincidence. It was hard to capture and encode des
5.
by Const-me 1mo ago
“aren't truly using a fully shared memory pool” I think with AMD iGPUs I have here (GCN 5.1 and RDNA3 generations) it’s actually unified, at least on Windows 10. The difference between the reserved portion and the rest of the memory is
6.
by Const-me 1mo ago
There’s a reason why all modern desktop environments are designed the same way: power efficiency when multitasking. Imagine you have 3 windows visible at the same time: a videogame rendering at the refresh rate of the display 144 Hz, a vide
7.
by Const-me 1mo ago
True, but many modern computers are using unified memory. On such systems all memory is almost equal, despite often reported differently. For example, on my 5 years old laptop with integrated AMD GPU, windows 10 calculator in default state
8.
by Const-me 1mo ago
10 MB is not too bad for a GUI app. If the app is full screen, display is FullHD and has 8 bit depth, that's almost 8 MB memory for the back buffer alone. Enable HDR and pixels become 8 bytes RGBA16_Float instead of 4 bytes BGRA8_Unorm
9.
by Const-me 3mo ago
I agree. In the past, I have successfully used Debian and Alpine for embedded. Never needed to compile OS kernels or standard DLLs, other people already did and published in these package repositories.
10.
by Const-me 3mo ago
Why is that HEVC video extension is required? As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expec
11.
by Const-me 3mo ago
> typical crystals in the 10-100MHz range I think most quarts watches oscillate at 32 kHz = 2^15 Hz, high precision quartz watches at 8.4 MHz = 2^23 Hz. > The actual problem is stability over temperature Apparently, designers of these
12.
by Const-me 3mo ago
> A typical PC clock is +/-100ppm. After 1 hour that's 0.36s Are you confident in these numbers? They add up to 52 minutes of drift/year. Good modern quartz watches specify 5 seconds/year drift, almost 3 orders of mag
13.
by Const-me 3mo ago
> On which image does the gradation appear more even? It’s the second one! Can’t reproduce. Tested on two monitors on my desk, designer-targeted Benq and cheap laptop. On the Benq, darkest 3 segments are indistinguishable, the 4-th one b
14.
by Const-me 3mo ago
“Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?” Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these comp
15.
by Const-me 3mo ago
On modern processors, floating point addition often has equal performance to floating point multiplication. For example, on AMD Zen4 it’s 3 cycles latency and 0.5 cycles throughput. I’m not sure that trick going to work in the context of co
16.
by Const-me 3mo ago
Might be jurisdiction. Let’s say a person who is not a Polish citizen committing and broadcasting a crime outside of Poland, then trying to enter Poland. IANAL but I think this law sends that person to jail as long as the video is accessibl
17.
by Const-me 3mo ago
> let alone more performant Not anymore. On modern hardware, the only operation where integers win is single cycle add/sub. For the rest of operations (multiplication, division, square roots, etc.) floating point is faster, sometime
18.
by Const-me 3mo ago
Good article. Worth noting C# standard library handles most of that complexity, no regular expressions required. Call System.Net.Mail.MailAddress.TryCreate, if successful read Address property to find the normalised address.
19.
by Const-me 3mo ago
Cool trick, but personally I don’t trust C bitfields. When I need something like that, I usually create C++ class or C# structure with a single private uint64 field, and public methods to extract or manipulate the logical fields. Because th
20.
by Const-me 3mo ago
None so far. When I try to use these language models in the primary areas of my expertise like SIMD or GPGPU they fail to do any good. When I ask them to implement some general-purpose stuff, the output is too low quality to be useful in my
21.
by Const-me 4mo ago
> Performance should not be priority #1. Security should be. For a web browser, or a server in a bank, sure. For anything else, questionable. > adding a sandbox around a memory-unsafe codec is going to be way more expensive In modern
22.
by Const-me 4mo ago
The AVX2 SIMD version is not ideal. Too many instructions, and it needs constant vectors. I would rather do it like that https://godbolt.org/z/cn6YKbfYd
23.
by Const-me 4mo ago
> decode (GEMV) is memory bound Decode with batch size 1 is GEMV. Batching makes the decode GEMM too.
24.
by Const-me 4mo ago
> Most of those FLOPS are constrained by memory bandwidth I believe inference with large enough batch size is almost always compute bound, simply due to algorithmic complexity. Each step of tiled matric multiplication with square tiles o
25.
by Const-me 6mo ago
While data centres indeed have awesome internet connectivity, don’t forget the bandwidth is shared by all clients using a particular server. If you have 100 mbit/sec internet connection at home, a computer in a data centre has 10 gbit&
26.
by Const-me 6mo ago
Based on the title, I expected the article to be about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
27.
by Const-me 7mo ago
Indeed, but these normal APIs have runtime costs for bounds checking. For some use cases, unsafe can be better. For instance, last time I used a memory-mapped file was for a large immutable Bloom filter. I knew the file should be exactly 4G
28.
by Const-me 7mo ago
I think C# standard library is better. You can do same unsafe code as in C, SafeBuffer.AcquirePointer method then directly access the memory. Or you can do safer and slightly slower by calling Read or Write methods of MemoryMappedViewAccess
29.
by Const-me 7mo ago
> no variable-length columns Both varchar and varbinary columns work fine there. Blobs are indeed missing. > data loss on restart That’s OK, collections in memory do as well yet we use them pretty much everywhere. > Unlogged tables
30.
by Const-me 7mo ago
I like engine=memory tables. Compared to data structures found in programming languages, memory tables are more powerful: arbitrary columns, indices. The DB server solves concurrency with transactions and row-level locks; need B-tree primar

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