There will always be many gaps in peoples knowledge. You start with what you need to understand, and typically dive deeper only when it is necessary. Where it starts to be a problem in my mind is when people have no curiosity about what’s going on underneath, or even worse, start to get superstitious about avoiding holes in the abstraction without the willingness to dig a little and find out why.
Readit NewsMobiusHorizons commented on Nobody knows how the whole system works surfingcomplexity.blog/20... · Posted by u/azhenley
MobiusHorizons commented on Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC harshanu.space/en/tech/cc... · Posted by u/unchar1
It's really cool to see how slow unoptimised C is. You get so used to seeing C easily beat any other language in performance that you assume it's really just intrinsic to the language. The benchmark shows a SQLite3 unoptimised build 12x slower for CCC, 20x for optimised build. That's enormous!
I'm not dissing CCC here, rather I'm impressed with how much speed is squeezed out by GCC out of what is assumed to be already an intrinsically fast language.
I mean you can always make things slower. There are lots of non-optimizing or low optimizing compilers that are _MUCH_ faster than this. TCC is probably the most famous example, but hardly the only alternative C compiler with performance somewhere between -O1 and -O2 in GCC. By comparison as I understand it, CCC has performance worse than -O0 which is honestly a bit surprising to me, since -O0 should not be a hard to achieve target. As I understand it, at -O0 C is basically just macro expanding into assembly with a bit of order of operations thrown in. I don't believe it even does register allocation.
MobiusHorizons commented on SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023) xorvoid.com/sectorc.html... · Posted by u/valyala
> Big Insight #2 is that atoi() behaves as a (bad) hash function on ordinary text. It consumes characters and updates a 16-bit integer.
I could have sworn I remembered atoi() being defined to return 0 for invalid input (i.e. text not representing an integer in base ten).
That would be true of one using a libc, but in a boot sector, you only have the bios, so the atoi being referenced is the one defined in c near the beginning of the article
MobiusHorizons commented on SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023) xorvoid.com/sectorc.html... · Posted by u/valyala
Would and how much would it shrink when if, while, and for were replaced by the simple goto routine? (after all, in assembly there is only jmp and no other fancy jump instruction (I assume) ).
And PS, it's "chose your own adventure". :-) I love minimalism.
The “fancy jump” is the branch instruction. As far as I know all ISAs have them. Even rv32i which is famously minimal has several branch instructions in addition to two forms of unconditional jump. Branches are typically used to construct if / for / while as well as && and || (because of short circuiting) and ternary (although some architectures may have special instructions for that that may or may not be faster than branches depending on the exact model). Without it you would have to use computed goto with a destination address computed without conditional execution using constant time techniques.
MobiusHorizons commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
Putting solar roofs on a building? For a car company?
In comparison to datacenters in space yes. Solar roofs are already a profitable business, just not likely to be high growth. Datacenters in space are unlikely to ever make financial sense, and even if they did, they are very unlikely to show high growth due to continuing ongoing high capital expenses inherent in the model.
MobiusHorizons commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
Remember how he argued for Tesla’s Solarcity acquisition because solar roofs?
Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.
Solar roofs are much more practical to be honest.
Why are space data centres physics defying?
Not physics defying, just economically questionable.
The main benefits to being in space are making solar more reliable and no need to buy real estate or get permits.
Everything else is harder. Cooling is possible but heavy compared to solar, the lifetimes of the computer hardware will probably be lower in space, and will be unserviceable. The launch cost would have to be very low, and the mean time between failure high before I think it would make any economical sense.
It would take a heck of a lot of launches to get a terrestrial datacenter worth of compute, cooling and solar in orbit, and even if you ship redundant parts, it would be hard to get equivalent lifetimes without the ability to have service technicians doing maintenance.
MobiusHorizons commented on Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings antirender.com/... · Posted by u/iambateman
For the bridge, I love how it added a bunch of electrical wires along the top. Imo that’s not very realistic, given there are tons of better places to run wires on a bridge, but somehow it does look substantially more realistic. Even though it seems to be trying to make everything look sad I honestly find the results more inviting because they look lived in.
MobiusHorizons commented on PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible redgamingtech.com/playsta... · Posted by u/croes
I have a samurai game, Kengo 3, that I really liked on PS2. I still have that CD at my parents'. Can anyone recommend me a PS2 emulator?
If you have a Mac aethersx2 it works great on Apple silicon
MobiusHorizons commented on Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust” kerkour.com/turso-sqlite... · Posted by u/unsolved73
The article talks about this. If you have a project that starts small and an in-process DB is fine, but you end up needing to scale up then you don't have to switch DBs.
Thanks. Serves me right for commenting without reading the article.