smarks

6 ms·

1.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 correlation between GPU power consumption (as indicated by
2.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 pixels. Unfortunately with most monitor settings the GPU po
3.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 bases that are stored in SCCS. They’re actually Sun CodeMana
4.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a
5.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 is quite striking.
6.
by smarks 4mo ago
Thanks for your explanation; it’s very helpful.
7.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 behavior of * always doing a FIN, run an o
8.
by smarks 4mo ago
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 destroyed only data, but it’s only a matter of time before some foo
9.
by smarks 6mo ago
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 sketch, but I never made the connection between them.
10.
by smarks 1y ago
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 available as a PDF on the web [3][4] and probably other pla
11.
by smarks 1y ago
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.
12.
by smarks 1y ago
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 mentioned https://interlisp.org&#x2F
13.
by smarks 1y ago
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 case, the “Wake for maintenance” option was
14.
by smarks 1y ago
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 back in early 1998: https://groups.google.
15.
by smarks 1y ago
“Somehow, Dark Helmet has returned.”
16.
by smarks 1y ago
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] regarding the performance impact of this sort of ch
17.
by smarks 1y ago
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 reference, the actual proposal that was accepted in
18.
by smarks 1y ago
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 affecting the correctness of the result. But it can't do that
19.
by smarks 1y ago
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 the stack, and TCO affects this. Removal of the SM thus remov
20.
by smarks 2y ago
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 for the case described in this article, which is about mult
21.
by smarks 2y ago
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 state. Another common source of comparator bugs is when people
22.
by smarks 2y ago
Hey! A fellow Wang 2200 veteran!
23.
by smarks 2y ago
Updated RFC for JSON: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8259
24.
by smarks 2y ago
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 necessarily a bad idea, in
25.
by smarks 2y ago
> 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 (actual Teletypes such as the ASR 33,
26.
by smarks 2y ago
Right, the point of being able to save a game was to pick up later where you had left off. However, the game attempted to prevent you from restarting from a saved game if you made a mistake or got killed or something. I think the scheme was
27.
by smarks 2y ago
Oh MANNNN I spent so much time playing rogue back in the day. I got decently good at it, but it was hard. I don't think I ever actually won. I do recall a strategy of clearing out the easier levels in order to gain treasure and magic i
28.
by smarks 2y ago
Like several others here, my first programming language was BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude. I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda th
29.
by smarks 2y ago
I've had some discussions with the author on this topic, some of which might have led to his writing this article. One of the issues we discussed is trying to do this with Java arrays or collections. As he observes, Java arrays have a
30.
by smarks 2y ago
Yes, very strange to see this flagged. Doesn't seem controversial at all.

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