Mmm. This Q&A -- https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/M... -- suggests it's been kicking around as printing and journalism jargon since at least the 1980s, and I would expect probably earlier.
The city government tracks data on public realm trees, and has a nice map based visualization of it: https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environm... and if you zoom in you'll see that many of these are…
Yes, QEMU's JIT is a fairly easy target to beat. Notably if you are happy to specialize the design to "only x86 to aarch64" and "only usermode" there's quite a lot of gain to be made. QEMU's usermode support is a kind…
For a long time in the dialup era my "answering machine" was a US Robotics voice-capable modem attached to my home Linux PC, with some scripts to make it pick up after N rings, play a message, record whatever the caller…
Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that visit more than one city. Last time I…
Also, "why these 5 in particular" is definitely not obvious -- there are a great many possible "obvious in some sense but also true in an important way" epigrams to choose from (the Perlis link from another comment has…
If the team is that small and working on things that are that disparate, then it is also very vulnerable to one of those people leaving, at which point there's a whole part of the project that nobody on the team has a…
A fairly large category of the flaky CI jobs I see is "dodgy infrastructure". For instance one recurring type for our project is one I just saw fail this afternoon, where a gitlab CI runner tries to clone the git repo…
That's why I said "somebody else, without looking at it". Clean-room reimplementation, if you like. The functionality is not forever unimplementable, it is only not implementable by merging this AI-generated PR. It's…
If you're going to set a firm "no AI" policy, then my inclination would be to treat that kind of PR in the same way the US legal system does evidence obtained illegally: you say "sorry, no, we told you the rules and so…
Even if there isn't any 3rd party code, the whole process of going through the codebase to confirm there really isn't any 3rd party code, and generally getting the legal department to sign off on it, is a lot of work in…
I think Coccinelle is a really cool tool, but I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason. I've read through it multiple times, but I always end up having to find some preexisting script that does…
On the tangential question in the post: "The specification describes bits as combinations of 0, 1, and x, but also sometimes includes (0) and (1). I’m not sure what the parenthesized versions mean" the answer is that…
This is an important ISA feature -- an instruction encoding that is wasteful of its encoding space is one that has no room for future new instructions (or which has to encode the new instructions in complicated ways to…
This is a result of the market and its demands, not something specific to the architecture. In desktop and server, customers demand that they can buy a new machine and install a previously released stable OS on it. That…
It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start that syntax with the open brace will…
Ah, thanks for that correction -- I jumped straight from "depends on the history of conditional branches" to "branch predictor" without stopping to think that that would have been unlikely in the 386.
Yeah, I think random-instruction-sequence testing is a pretty good approach to try to find the problems you didn't think of up front. I wrote a very simple tool for this years ago to help flush out bugs in QEMU:…
Some of the 386 bugs described there sound to me like the classic kind of "multiple different subsystems interact in the wrong way" issue that can slip through the testing process and get into hardware, like this one: >…
I wasn't arguing that getting LLMs to do this is necessarily bad -- I just think it really is different from having in the past been able to ask other humans for help, and so that past experience isn't a reliable guide…
I think there are a couple of differences here: Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it for the important stuff, and the rest…
You can have either completely separate hot and cold taps, each with their own spout, or you can have a setup with separate hot and cold knobs and a single spout. For my bathroom sink I specified a two taps/one spout…
The fun thing about those thunderbolt cables is they have two Arm cores in them, one at each end...
Tape save and load seemed pretty reasonable on our system. It does depend rather on the tape deck you're using and also on getting the volume and tone settings right, though. We had the official TI tape deck for it.
I'm pretty sure my Dad got ours because they were being sold off very cheaply after TI pulled out of the home computer market. Like you I ended up learning BASIC on it because as an abandoned system all we had was a few…
Mmm. This Q&A -- https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/M... -- suggests it's been kicking around as printing and journalism jargon since at least the 1980s, and I would expect probably earlier.
The city government tracks data on public realm trees, and has a nice map based visualization of it: https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environm... and if you zoom in you'll see that many of these are…
Yes, QEMU's JIT is a fairly easy target to beat. Notably if you are happy to specialize the design to "only x86 to aarch64" and "only usermode" there's quite a lot of gain to be made. QEMU's usermode support is a kind…
For a long time in the dialup era my "answering machine" was a US Robotics voice-capable modem attached to my home Linux PC, with some scripts to make it pick up after N rings, play a message, record whatever the caller…
Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that visit more than one city. Last time I…
Also, "why these 5 in particular" is definitely not obvious -- there are a great many possible "obvious in some sense but also true in an important way" epigrams to choose from (the Perlis link from another comment has…
If the team is that small and working on things that are that disparate, then it is also very vulnerable to one of those people leaving, at which point there's a whole part of the project that nobody on the team has a…
A fairly large category of the flaky CI jobs I see is "dodgy infrastructure". For instance one recurring type for our project is one I just saw fail this afternoon, where a gitlab CI runner tries to clone the git repo…
That's why I said "somebody else, without looking at it". Clean-room reimplementation, if you like. The functionality is not forever unimplementable, it is only not implementable by merging this AI-generated PR. It's…
If you're going to set a firm "no AI" policy, then my inclination would be to treat that kind of PR in the same way the US legal system does evidence obtained illegally: you say "sorry, no, we told you the rules and so…
Even if there isn't any 3rd party code, the whole process of going through the codebase to confirm there really isn't any 3rd party code, and generally getting the legal department to sign off on it, is a lot of work in…
I think Coccinelle is a really cool tool, but I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason. I've read through it multiple times, but I always end up having to find some preexisting script that does…
On the tangential question in the post: "The specification describes bits as combinations of 0, 1, and x, but also sometimes includes (0) and (1). I’m not sure what the parenthesized versions mean" the answer is that…
This is an important ISA feature -- an instruction encoding that is wasteful of its encoding space is one that has no room for future new instructions (or which has to encode the new instructions in complicated ways to…
This is a result of the market and its demands, not something specific to the architecture. In desktop and server, customers demand that they can buy a new machine and install a previously released stable OS on it. That…
It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start that syntax with the open brace will…
Ah, thanks for that correction -- I jumped straight from "depends on the history of conditional branches" to "branch predictor" without stopping to think that that would have been unlikely in the 386.
Yeah, I think random-instruction-sequence testing is a pretty good approach to try to find the problems you didn't think of up front. I wrote a very simple tool for this years ago to help flush out bugs in QEMU:…
Some of the 386 bugs described there sound to me like the classic kind of "multiple different subsystems interact in the wrong way" issue that can slip through the testing process and get into hardware, like this one: >…
I wasn't arguing that getting LLMs to do this is necessarily bad -- I just think it really is different from having in the past been able to ask other humans for help, and so that past experience isn't a reliable guide…
I think there are a couple of differences here: Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it for the important stuff, and the rest…
You can have either completely separate hot and cold taps, each with their own spout, or you can have a setup with separate hot and cold knobs and a single spout. For my bathroom sink I specified a two taps/one spout…
The fun thing about those thunderbolt cables is they have two Arm cores in them, one at each end...
Tape save and load seemed pretty reasonable on our system. It does depend rather on the tape deck you're using and also on getting the volume and tone settings right, though. We had the official TI tape deck for it.
I'm pretty sure my Dad got ours because they were being sold off very cheaply after TI pulled out of the home computer market. Like you I ended up learning BASIC on it because as an abandoned system all we had was a few…