brucedawson

9 ms·

1.
by brucedawson 5mo ago
Unfortunate typo: the article says "Having placed the fresnel lens, we're not able to get an usable image on the whole 40x30cm sensor." but I think the "not" should be "now". Having "not" reverse
2.
by brucedawson 6mo ago
It's easy to make these 800V systems totally safe. You just have to combine this idea with the extremely sensible plan to put data centers in space and then there will be no worry about when "someone pulls out a rackmount unit&quo
3.
by brucedawson 6mo ago
I think that is correct, but yes, a delay-slot instruction that is always executed is easy to reason about. Speculative execution that gets real? shudder
4.
by brucedawson 6mo ago
It did not help that the performance of the Xbox 360 CPU (and Cell) was terrible. In-order execution without the crazy-high frequencies the CPU was designed for was a failure.
5.
by brucedawson 6mo ago
Author here: This is not a common problem. I think I was told that Alpha had basically the same bug but it is a bug, for sure. Speculative execution causing problematic side effects is a deal killer. Speculative execution, however, can caus
6.
by brucedawson 10mo ago
Part 2 is up: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/reflections-on-...
7.
Finding a VS Code Memory Leak(randomascii.wordpress.com)
95 points by brucedawson 11mo ago|17 comments
8.
by brucedawson 11mo ago
In 2021 I found an invisible memory leak in a tool (VS Code) that I have never used. This is the story of how.
9.
by brucedawson 1y ago
I was surprised also when this happened, but pleased. The trust was nice. The fact that they needed to give me the symbols in order to understand the issue was surprising. Why couldn't they find the calls in their source? Or analyze th
10.
by brucedawson 1y ago
Should it be my second law? https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lr24s...
11.
by brucedawson 1y ago
Whoops! Good catch. That was supposed to be 12 furlongs. Apparently I have no intuitive sense of how long a furlong is so I didn't notice my typo
12.
by brucedawson 1y ago
That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it can't possibly reliably give you correct
13.
by brucedawson 1y ago
Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced. So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be
14.
by brucedawson 1y ago
It drives me crazy that Google Maps sometimes asks me where the entrance to a building is but it never seems to be clear about what it is asking. Where a pedestrian would enter? Where a car would enter? Driving directions are a wonderful th
15.
by brucedawson 1y ago
And yet, as I mention in the blog post, Google Maps actually does understand how Vancouver's addresses work. It can find the location where a non-existent address would be if it existed. But for addresses like 138 W 6th Ave it chooses
16.
by brucedawson 1y ago
Google Maps may not be able to understand every regional system but it _does_ understand the system in Vancouver. It then, apparently, makes it too easy for exceptions to this system to get encoded in their database and makes it too hard to
17.
by brucedawson 1y ago
I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed. If my fix
18.
by brucedawson 1y ago
Interesting. I don't know what it means but if I delete the postal code from the 138 address in the map you link to then it goes back to displaying the bad location (with the postal code restored). This smells like some weird caching,
19.
Street address errors in Google Maps(randomascii.wordpress.com)
147 points by brucedawson 1y ago|160 comments
20.
by brucedawson 1y ago
Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading
21.
by brucedawson 2y ago
Some AMD drivers leak handles to every process created. On a build system that creates tens of thousands of process this leaks tens of thousands of process handles with each one creating a zombie process and wasting about 64 KB. This leak c
22.
AMD-driver zombie-process leak consumes GB of memory(yngve.vivaldi.net)
7 points by brucedawson 2y ago|2 comments
23.
by brucedawson 2y ago
Author here: Linux has made progress in this area, but I think that Windows is still better. Maybe I'm wrong (I haven't used Linux in a while) but I think when Linux developers say that they have excellent support for debug symbol
24.
by brucedawson 2y ago
Author here: I find it quite strange that my kids have lost their mother, but I have not. I still have both my parents. That's so backwards. Therefore I can't compare the grief of losing a parent to that of losing a spouse, and ev
25.
by brucedawson 2y ago
Thanks. It's not really a consolation, but it does give me some happiness.
26.
by brucedawson 2y ago
My employer (Google) gave me four weeks of grief leave. That plus four weeks of cobbled-together vacation and unpaid time off was invaluable for giving me the time to deal with logistics and bureaucracy and then have some healing time. I am
27.
by brucedawson 2y ago
"Die Broke" is similar. I read it ten years ago and it completely changed my attitude towards money. At least partially because of it I just gave my adult kids (28 and 30) as much money as I could as an early inheritance. It has w
28.
by brucedawson 2y ago
Author here. I do recognize my immense privilege. I was even able to turn the dial a significant distance towards life before my wife died. I had dropped to 80% time (32 hours a week) and stopped managing and was working from home so that I
29.
by brucedawson 3y ago
Blame the bible. God created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh, which was Saturday. The real question is why the weekend was defined as straddling the last and first days of the week. Weird.
30.
by brucedawson 3y ago
Yeah, I was a bit imprecise there. I didn't expect a difference of exactly 32, but I did expect something of that magnitude.

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