vnorilo (u/vnorilo) - Readit News

vnorilo commented on Dependable C dependablec.org/... · Posted by u/RossBencina

arghwhat · 11 days ago

Java also targets an abstract machine model (JVM) - such statement really doesn't mean much.

Assembly is not about corresponding to exactly which gates open when in the CPU. It's just the human writable form of whatever the CPU ingests, whereas C is an early take on a language reasonable capable of expressing higher level ideas with less low-level noise.

I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

vnorilo · 10 days ago

>I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

With genuine respect, I believe this type of insinuation is rarely productive.

Someone might still have silly opinions, even if they have been paid to write assembly for 8-24-64 bit cisc, risc, ordered and out of order ISAs, and maybe compilers too. Peace :)

vnorilo commented on Dependable C dependablec.org/... · Posted by u/RossBencina

IshKebab · 11 days ago

> And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Nobody claimed that. It corresponds to the instructions the CPU runs and their observable order.

Also it's really only x86 that uses micro-ops (in the way that you mean), and there are still plenty of in-order CPUs.

vnorilo · 10 days ago

sure, I was thinking of large OO cores. "Correspondd to the instructions the cpu runs and their observable order" is how I'd characterize C as well, but to each their own.

vnorilo commented on Dependable C dependablec.org/... · Posted by u/RossBencina

flohofwoe · 11 days ago

> And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

It's still much closer to the input machine code compared to what compiler optimizer passes do to your input C code ;)

vnorilo · 10 days ago

I have empathy for this having written compiler passes for 10ish years of my career. But as I've studied register renaming, speculative branch prediction and trace caches I would no longer agree with your last sentence. It's fine though, totally just an opinion.

vnorilo commented on Dependable C dependablec.org/... · Posted by u/RossBencina

_kst_ · 11 days ago

I see a huge semantic gap between assembly language and C.

An assembly language program specifies a sequence of CPU instructions. The mapping between lines of code and generated instructions is one-to-one, or nearly so.

A C program specifies run-time behavior, without regard to what CPU instructions might be used to achieve that.

C is at a lower level than a lot of other languages, but it's not an assembly language.

vnorilo · 11 days ago

And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Both ISA-level assembly and C are targeting an abstract machine model, even if the former is somewhat further removed from hardware reality.

vnorilo commented on Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI research.google/blog/lear... · Posted by u/FromTheArchives

CodeMage · 3 months ago

"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting.

But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't.

Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful.

Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.

vnorilo · 3 months ago

When I was in third grade, I decided I want to make computer games to get more of them. Dad got me started with GW-Basic turtle graphics and I made pictures with them - usually non-functional title screens for my games.

At some point I had made a small space ship and was able to make it turn around with the wonderful angle command [1]. However, I could not figure out how to make it move "forward" regardless of the angle.

I was also attending an after hours computer graphics club, mostly about Deluxe Paint, taught by a 20-something student (who much later went on to found a GPU company and got acquihired by ATI/AMD). He would help me occasionally, and in this case he took a tiny slip of paper and wrote down a couple of lines about sin and cos. No questions, no explanations, no gatekeeping.

Just like that I internalized this foundational piece of trig - later when it arrived in school maths it was easy and obvious for me. I had a practical application, but even more I think was because it started as a need I had, and when given to me, felt like a gift and an enabler.

Still much later I studied Seymour Papert's pedagogy and understood I had lived it. I consider myself fortunate.

1: http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/draw.html

vnorilo commented on You know more Finnish than you think dannybate.com/2025/08/03/... · Posted by u/infinate

ummonk · 4 months ago

Interesting how accurately it has preserved some early Germanic forms verbatim. Wonder if Finnish has been relatively conservative in the same way that nearby Lithuanian is a relatively conservative Indo-European language.

vnorilo · 4 months ago

Finnish has been very peripheral and isolated due to geography. It is closely related to Estonian, but remains much more similar to their common archaic root, while Estonian has streamlined and developed due to more contact and exchange.

(Disclaimer: Finn)

vnorilo commented on AI driven drop in human web traffic economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/vnorilo

vnorilo · 5 months ago

In my experience search engines have rapidly deteriorated - probably because of the SEO arms race - and LLMs often feel like search engines used to feel back when they worked. Who knows what will happen once all the marketing attention shifts towards influencing LLM output.

vnorilo commented on Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-... · Posted by u/thomas_witt

IshKebab · 5 months ago

> They're just not especially performant

What? Mutable strings are more performant generally. Sometimes immutability allows you to use high level algorithms that provide better performance, but most code doesn't take advantage of that.

vnorilo · 5 months ago

Not in general. Immutable strings can be deduplicated, leading to a different performance tradeoff that is often quite good. This is mentioned in TFA.