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_notreallyme_ commented on I Ported SAP to a 1976 CPU. It Wasn't That Slow   github.com/oisee/zvdb-z80... · Posted by u/weinzierl
_notreallyme_ · 2 months ago
Optimizing code on MMU-less processor versus MMU and even NUMA capable processor is vastly different.

The fact that the author achieves only a 3 to 6 times speedup on a processor running at a frequency 857 faster should have led to the conclusion that old optimizations tricks are awfully slow on modern architecture.

To be fair, execution pipeline optimization still works the same, but not taking into account the different layers of cache, the way the memory management works and even how and when actual RAM is queried will only lead to suboptimal code.

_notreallyme_ commented on A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour   jhiblog.org/2024/10/28/a-... · Posted by u/Thevet
idoubtit · 10 months ago
I can agree with the "lyrical philosopher" quote, but for anyone with a background in science that think that Bruno Latour was a "serious man", I suggest reading the book that made him famous: "Science in Action". It's so bad that it's funny. Out of his 7 rules for studying experimental science, the third one is outstanding:

> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. (Science in Action)

Bruno Latour was among the selected few that were criticized in Sokal and Bricmont's "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science".

_notreallyme_ · 10 months ago
I've had him as a sociology teacher in the early 2000s, specifically on this subject (controversies).

It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...).

It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...

_notreallyme_ commented on France's oldest treasure hunt has been solved   goldenowlhunt.com/... · Posted by u/femtozer
supergarfield · a year ago
The French Wikipedia page doesn't talk about it, but the quoted text from the English Wikipedia page involving an iron bird (and not a bronze owl) is accurate. Here's the official report of finding it: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0511/4586/7430/files/pv.co... (liked from https://editions-chouettedor.com/pages/documents-officiels).
_notreallyme_ · a year ago
Oh, thanks for the links.

What it says it that the statue should have been in bronze, but is instead in "ferrous metal" and must have been replaced around september 2005.

Anyway, the idea was that the golden one was not buried, only a "pass-out" one.

_notreallyme_ commented on France's oldest treasure hunt has been solved   goldenowlhunt.com/... · Posted by u/femtozer
vlovich123 · a year ago
> In 2021 Michel Becker became the official organiser of the treasure hunt, obtaining the sealed envelope containing the hunt solution from the family of Régis Hauser. Becker journeyed with a legal bailiff to check that the owl prize was still buried at the location revealed in the solution. He reported that when he dug at the spot he found the owl missing and instead found a rusty iron bird. He replaced this rusty bird with a new bronze owl so that the treasure hunt could continue

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Trail_of_the_Golden_O...

Sounds like somebody actually had already solved it?

_notreallyme_ · a year ago
The english version is weird. It was planned from the beggining that they would bury a bronze owl.

The bronze owl was to be exchanged with the precious metal one. In the french news, they specifically mentioned that the bronze one was found.

If you think about it, it makes more sense. The co-founder was given the rights to the original treasure hunt because he is the owner of the valuable owl. He is the one who financed the whole thing.

_notreallyme_ commented on Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot   github.com/misprit7/foosb... · Posted by u/misprit7
tectec · a year ago
The tables I've seen with one goalie have raised corners so that the ball doesn't get stuck there. You see it more on budget tables in my experience.
_notreallyme_ · a year ago
Or on official tables according to the International Table Soccer Federation.

From what I've seen during my travels, there are lot of variations for foosball tables. Each countries seem to have their own variations.

_notreallyme_ commented on Paris's Catacomb Mushrooms (2017)   atlasobscura.com/articles... · Posted by u/jihadjihad
surfingdino · a year ago
> Paris is very complicated underground. Besides the quarries there are the sewers, catacombs, some underground lakes, reservoirs, etc. It is definitely a complicating factor when planning new metro tunnels.

I wonder if the French are considering digging underneath all those obstacles? Seems to be the way London has gone with the Elizabeth Line. Although that may still be shallower than Paris' quarries and lakes.

_notreallyme_ · a year ago
> I wonder if the French are considering digging underneath all those obstacles?

The problem is the Seine phreatic zone, which starts usually between 15 to 25m below the surface. Some GRS galleries are actually completely inundated and others have a level of water that varies between the seasons.

In order to have some metro going underneath the Seine river, they had to freeze it first. It is not an easy task, so there must be a real advantage to going under the Seine.

_notreallyme_ commented on Citation Needed – Wikimedia Foundation's Experimental LLM/RAG Chrome Extension   chromewebstore.google.com... · Posted by u/brokensegue
jimbobthrowawy · a year ago
It really shouldn't, considering they have a rule about not using primary sources.
_notreallyme_ · a year ago
Yes, they explicitly classify wikipedia as a tertiary source [1].

Wikipedia is good for finding secondary source, and then primary sources by following the links.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Primary_Secondary_an...

_notreallyme_ commented on Latency numbers every programmer should know   samwho.dev/numbers/?fo... · Posted by u/iamwil
mlyle · a year ago
> I've been a developer for embedded systems in the telecom industry for nearly two decades now

On big computers, cycles are squishy (HT, multicore, variable clock frequency, so many clock domains) and not what we're dealing with.

If we're making an architectural choice between local storage and the network, we need to be able to make an apples to apples comparison.

I think it's great this resource is out there, because the tradeoffs have changed. "RAM is the new disk", etc.

_notreallyme_ · a year ago
then, why not just using qualifiers ? from slowest to fastest. You might not know that, but you can develop bare metals solution for HPC that are used in several industries like telecommunication. Calculation based on cycles are totally accurate whether the number of cores...
_notreallyme_ commented on Latency numbers every programmer should know   samwho.dev/numbers/?fo... · Posted by u/iamwil
karmakaze · a year ago
The title is missing "Latency" which would show many other results on searching. My go to is this one[0] because it's plain text and shows "Syscall" and "Context switch".

  Latency numbers every programmer should know

  L1 cache reference ......................... 0.5 ns
  Branch mispredict ............................ 5 ns
  L2 cache reference ........................... 7 ns
  Mutex lock/unlock ........................... 25 ns
  Main memory reference ...................... 100 ns             
  Syscall on Intel 5150 ...................... 105 ns
  Compress 1K bytes with Zippy ............. 3,000 ns  =   3 µs
  Context switch on Intel 5150 ............. 4,300 ns  =   4 µs
  Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network ....... 20,000 ns  =  20 µs
  SSD random read ........................ 150,000 ns  = 150 µs
  Read 1 MB sequentially from memory ..... 250,000 ns  = 250 µs
  Round trip within same datacenter ...... 500,000 ns  = 0.5 ms
  Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD* ..... 1,000,000 ns  =   1 ms
  Disk seek ........................... 10,000,000 ns  =  10 ms
  Read 1 MB sequentially from disk .... 20,000,000 ns  =  20 ms
  Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA .... 150,000,000 ns  = 150 ms

  Assuming ~1GB/sec SSD
[0] https://gist.github.com/nelsnelson/3955759

_notreallyme_ · a year ago
I don't get how expressing these numbers in time unit is useful ?

I've been a developer for embedded systems in the telecom industry for nearly two decades now, and I had never met anyone using something else than "cycles" or "symbols" until today... Except obviously for the mean RTT US<->EU.

_notreallyme_ commented on How to make a better default Firefox UI   github.com/black7375/Fire... · Posted by u/black7375
lopkeny12ko · 2 years ago
My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570

Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship this "feature" AND remove the option to opt out of it.

Some users prefer it. And that's fine! But don't take away my god damn option and force it down my throat.

_notreallyme_ · 2 years ago
Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that. You can check with chrome, and indeed it behaves like firefox.

For the user hostility, there argument was that people who dislike the new behavior do not have telemetry enabled, and thus they do not deserve to have the features they want. It's quite ironic considering firefox main advantage is their privacy oriented model...

u/_notreallyme_

KarmaCake day173August 12, 2018View Original