xenadu02 (u/xenadu02)

xenadu02 commented on The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered righto.com/2025/12/8087-s... · Posted by u/elpocko

kens · 6 days ago

Author here for your 8087 questions...

xenadu02 · 6 days ago

If you happen to know... what was the reasoning behind the oddball stack architecture? It feels like Intel must have had this already designed for some other purpose so they tossed it in. I can't imagine why anyone would think this arch was a good idea.

Then again... they did try to force VLIW and APX on us so Intel has a history of "interesting" ideas about processor design.

edit: You addressed it in the article and I guess that's probably the reason but for real... what a ridiculous hand-wavy thing to do. Just assume it will be fine? If the anecdotes about Itanium/VLIW are true they committed the same sin on that project: some simulations with 50 instructions were the (claimed) basis for that fiasco. Methinks cutting AMD out of the market might have been the real reason but I have no proof for that.

xenadu02 commented on Why do some radio towers blink? jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/warrenm

skinwill · 2 months ago

I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't right. 4 lights was good, 3 meant you dropped a phase, and so on. I thought it was a pretty clever way of keeping light on all sides of the tower while being able to tell from a distance that a phase was out.

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power.

A machine shop should connect 1/3 of their lights to each phase so it is immediately obvious if a phase gets dropped. Lots of equipment will suffer on two of three phases but with lower performance or even damage.

xenadu02 commented on Sick: Indexed deduplicated binary storage for JSON-like data structures github.com/7mind/sick... · Posted by u/pshirshov

gethly · 2 months ago

It is a bit confusing that JSON is being mention so much when in reality this has nothing to do with it - except to showcase that JSON is not suitable for streaming whereas this format is.

Secondly, I fail to see advantages here as the claim is that it allows streaming for partial processing compared to JSON that has to be fully loaded in order to be parseable. Mainly, because the values must be streamed first, before their location/pointers in order for the structure to make sense and be usable for processing, but that also means we need all the parent pointes as well in order to know where to place the children in the root. So all in all, I just do not see why this is advantageous format above JSON(as that is its main complaint here), since you can stream JSON just as easily because you can detect { and } and { and ] and " and , delimiters and know when your token is complete to then process it, without having to wait for the whole structure to finish being streamed or wait for the SICK pointers to arrive in full so you can build the structure.

Or, I am just not getting it at all...

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

Most existing JSON parsers don't support streaming but that's not inherent in the format. It is definitely possible to stream writes easily but it's just as possible to stream parsing.

xenadu02 commented on Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia cnbc.com/2025/10/13/dutch... · Posted by u/piskov

Braxton1980 · 2 months ago

>China wants all the access to the rest of the world and wants everyone to buy their products... but they do not want to reciprocate.

There's a history with the West where they have been manipulated and taken advantage of in a way that the US never has.

It's possible their desire to force companies into partnerships is genuinely based on a fear of that happening again.

You say that China wants everyone to buy their products. There's also the implication that this is bad for the US economically. However China wouldn't benefit if their customers are poor.

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

> There's a history with the West where they have been manipulated and taken advantage of in a way that the US never has.

That's definitely possible but I think the cause is much simpler: initially they wanted to bootstrap their own industries and now nothing forces them to do anything different so they just continue with hyper-protectionist policies.

On the side of the west: Outsourcing to China is the new group-think. The new "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" for the MBAs. A box of Bandaids now says "made in china" on it. Bandaids are churned out entirely by machine. Packed entirely by machine. Boxed entirely by machine. By the millions per day. Human labor input is more or less irrelevant. Why outsource that to China? Because that's the only thing management knows how to do and the only thing so-called investors understand. It certainly isn't to save money or make the product better.

> However China wouldn't benefit if their customers are poor.

If I had a nickel for every time a government or leader adopts bad policies despite the obvious future negative consequences I'd be the world's richest person.

xenadu02 commented on Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse? animebythenumbers.substac... · Posted by u/zdw

redwall_hp · 2 months ago

I will still never complain about CrunchyRoll's apps after using HiDive for a few shows. It can't even remember shows I'm watching, let alone keep track of watched episodes, and insists on rendering subtitles with TVs' closed captioning system.

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

That's very true. Crunchyroll is just sad because it used to be good and feel like someone involved cared.

Funimation lowered the bar so much I thought it couldn't go lower.

Who knew HiDive would prove me wrong.

xenadu02 commented on Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend arstechnica.com/cars/2025... · Posted by u/gloxkiqcza

eldaisfish · 2 months ago

you are being generous. Tesla's software "mistakes" have killed several people. They needlessly try to reinvent the wheel in the name of innovation and end up ignoring decades of auto industry knowledge.

I do not trust them and never will. This is the #1 reason why every car is buy is just a car. I do not trust techbros with devices that can kill you, especially cars.

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

> you are being generous. Tesla's software "mistakes" have killed several people.

Citation needed.

In the early days of autopilot/FSD most of the fatalities were people doing stupid things like watching a movie or sleeping in the back seat. That's why it now has to monitor your face with a camera to detect whether or not you are watching the road - to stop people from being idiots.

However we must acknowledge that any change in the automotive space is going to lead to problems and some percentage of those are going to cause injuries. That is the nature of cars. They do not have the certification standards of aircraft nor the training of pilots. They can't and they won't.

It is also inevitable that autonomous driving is going to make different mistakes than a person would make. On a miles-driven basis it still produces fewer accidents and injuries than human drivers.

xenadu02 commented on Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia cnbc.com/2025/10/13/dutch... · Posted by u/piskov

roughly · 2 months ago

It gets a lot less contradictory when you realize the principles are window dressing for the interests.

Early America had no regard for intellectual property rights because all the good media came from abroad - then we built Hollywood and saw the light. The west pushes deregulation and free trade because we've got the money and the only thing that can keep us from sucking a market dry is government intervention. The Dutch just seized a company because a geopolitical opponent was using it to exercise leverage, which is also how TikTok became a sub-brand of Oracle.

Nation states will use whatever words are necessary to justify their actions, but the game is and always has been power, leverage, and interest. Given the rise of China, I'm guessing we're going to get a lot more opportunities to tut and shake our heads about how hypocritical western governments turn out to be with regards to national economic interests.

(And, to be clear, I'm not saying this is like it's a good thing. I'm not a government, I'm a person, so all I get is the pointy end of all this happy rhetoric.)

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

I think the issue is more complex than that but certainly vested interests / national interest is definitely one aspect of things.

The west and the US specifically has operated on an open market policy partly as a result of two world wars we got dragged into in relatively short order. Economic integration was thought to reduce the likelihood of another great war.

However what we have currently is a relatively developed economy (China) using currency manipulation and protective policies to prop up their own economy long after it has passed out of the "developing" phase. Plus massive and ongoing state investment and debt deferral. China effectively subsidizes massive amounts of economic activity that makes any US or EU tax breaks / protective policies look like chump change.

When you have such a large market participant behaving that way it is little wonder that people lose their faith in free markets and want to intervene. Including doing explicitly punitive things against China. It is an attitude of China's own making. After all... China will not allow you to buy a freakin' popsicle stand as a foreigner let alone a shipbuilding company or anything else.

China wants all the access to the rest of the world and wants everyone to buy their products... but they do not want to reciprocate.

xenadu02 commented on Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse? animebythenumbers.substac... · Posted by u/zdw

egypturnash · 2 months ago

Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me.

And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

They did the same thing to their developers a few years back from what I recall. That's why the app has bugs that haven't been fixed in years. For example the sorting options on your watch list are just garbage. They aren't remembered. And "recent activity" includes adding dubs in languages I have disabled in the UI - constantly causing old shows to pop to the top of the list making it useless.

Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since.

Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse.

It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.

xenadu02 commented on One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day earthsky.org/human-world/... · Posted by u/af78

rjbwork · 2 months ago

Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?

xenadu02 · 2 months ago

Modern end-of-life satellite designs are made to cause "rapid disassembly" very high up in the atmosphere to trigger high friction on as many individual components as possible - down to fasteners. This promotes completely re-entry burn up of everything so what reaches the surface is dust that settles back down to the surface (or ocean floor) and eventually gets compressed into rock (over millions of years). Basically back to where it came from.

Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.

xenadu02 commented on Supermicro server motherboards can be infected with unremovable malware arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/zdw

xenadu02 · 3 months ago

If you've never used the BMC on a server... it is all 100% garbage. Software mostly written by embedded folks who haven't got a clue. It is absolutely garbage software on the whole (and no matter what vendor you get the board from). Go ahead and hit up the web interface then do a bit of "View Source". If you are imagining the rest of that stack is any better than my friend have I got a Beautiful Bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!

If it were me I'd assume the majority of BMC firmware out there from all vendors: 1. Is full of many many exploitable vulnerabilities 2. To the extent they patch holes it will be whack-a-mole because the economics do not permit large investments in software quality. 3. Many server owners will never install a patch anyway.