stephencanon

20 ms·

1.
by stephencanon 7d ago
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system
2.
by stephencanon 13d ago
I would assume that the state law protects parents against a city adding a restriction in their municipal code.
3.
by stephencanon 13d ago
Gated communities, by their nature, attract and encourage the sort of busybodies who think that everyone needs to be protected from everything.
4.
by stephencanon 13d ago
Our neighborhood in the northeast US does the same (minus the hard prohibition against parents going with them). Our 5 and 9 year old walk to school daily, usually picking up the neighbors' kids (6, 6, 10, 9, 7, 7) along the way. If we
5.
by stephencanon 2mo ago
That’s exactly the same rule with more words (postfix = right, prefix = left).
6.
by stephencanon 2mo ago
This comes up every so often, and while it's sort of almost true and attractive, it isn't actually correct. The correct rule is "follow the C grammar". An easier to remember and also correct rule is "start at the id
7.
by stephencanon 2mo ago
It's very cool. Thank you!
8.
by stephencanon 3mo ago
"Centrist" in practice means "more or less content with the status quo." That is fundamentally a conservative position orthogonal to any notion of "facts".
9.
by stephencanon 3mo ago
The work discussed in this post shipped in the OS last year (fall 2025), so nothing here is dependent on very recent changes.
10.
by stephencanon 3mo ago
Field hockey is almost exclusively a girls sport in the US, while boys have (American) football in the fall. Both draw from the potential pool of soccer players in US middle and high schools.
11.
by stephencanon 4mo ago
“in a real race we have no actual chance of winning” is an absolutely wild thing to say in response to a link to a real race in which the human has won the last few years in a row.
12.
by stephencanon 4mo ago
What sort of engineering standards are these Cybertrucks built to? Oh, very rigorous engineering standards. The wheels aren't supposed to fall off for a start.
13.
by stephencanon 5mo ago
We have a ground-source heat pump for our ADU. We did it because we were curious about just how efficient we could make the house, but I don't expect that it will ever break even financially vs a modern air-source system with resistive
14.
by stephencanon 5mo ago
Prior to the current generation Intel designs, Apple’s branch predictor tables were a good deal larger than Intel’s IIRC, so depending on benchmarking details it’s plausible that Apple Silicon was predicting every branch perfectly in the be
15.
by stephencanon 5mo ago
Must be the water.
16.
by stephencanon 5mo ago
The CORE-MATH project authors, most of whom are French academics (including the author of the linked paper). I don’t know of any interesting work in this space that came out of Red Hat, why do you suggest them?
17.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
"I'd like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God" is the usual example. Yes, you can reorder the list to remove the ambiguity, but sometimes the order of the list matters. The serial comma should be used when necessary to remo
18.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
That would fall under "more constrained", due to process limits.
19.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
Enlarging a branch predictor requires area and timing tradeoffs. CPU designers have to balance branch predictor improvements against other improvements they could make with the same area and timing resources. What this tells you is that eit
20.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
Your students should be able to figure out if a computation is exact or not, because they should understand binary representation of numbers.
21.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
You can often eke something out for order-four, depending on uArch details. But basically yeah.
22.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
For throughput-dominated contexts, evaluation via Horner's rule does very well because it minimizes register pressure and the number of operations required. But the latency can be relatively high, as you note. There are a few good gene
23.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
When Intel specced the rsqrt[ps]s and rcp[ps]s instructions ~30 years ago, they didn't fully specify their behavior. They just said their relative error is "smaller than 1.5 * 2⁻¹²," which someone thought was very clever beca
24.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
For the asinf libcall on macOS/x86, my former colleague Eric Postpischil invented the novel (at least at the time, I believe) technique of using a Remez-optimized refinement polynomial following rsqrtss instead of the standard Newton-R
25.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
Ideally either one is just a library call to generate the coefficients. Remez can get into trouble near the endpoints of the interval for asin and require a little bit of manual intervention, however.
26.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
Newer rsqrt approximations (ARM NEON and SVE, and the AVX512F approximations on x86) make the behavior architectural so this is somewhat less of a problem (it still varies between _architectures_, however).
27.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
These sorts of approximations (and more sophisticated methods) are fairly widely used in systems programming, as seen by the fact that Apple's asin is only a couple percent slower and sub-ulp accurate ( https://members.loria.
28.
by stephencanon 6mo ago
Yann is definitely more well-known outside of academia. Inside academia, it's going to depend a lot on your specific background and how old you are.
29.
by stephencanon 7mo ago
Mechanically, you're probably right, but the screen-centric controls of the newer generation are _awful_ by comparison to the F generation's physical buttons and dials (this isn't BMW though, it's the whole industry). My
30.
by stephencanon 7mo ago
Our (~2015) 3-series controls are just about perfect. Where they differ from Honda/Toyota's controls that I am also very familiar with, they're noticeably better now that I'm familiar with them. Everything is really well

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