Room 208

Elaborate Burn

Posts from September 2013

@mnxmnkmnd wrote:

a1616da once more
d69589f line endings
b97ea85 renames
e9d7c07 some notes in preaparation for moving out init
acb94d4 make renames work
f169acf more rename
94c444e this is sad
5cfe32d semicolons
1aaadf9 typos
d251997 lineendings in Run were screwed up
845ccd4 this log is going to look funny when i'm not involved
27f695e holy hell do i hate line endings

lab’s going well. breaking new ground. major advancements

It might be time for you to learn the dark art of rewriting your Git history. Speaking for myself, if it weren’t for git commit --amend and git rebase -i, people would think I wrote all my code drunk.1

  1. I do, but that’s not important. 

The Slow Winter (PDF)

James Mickens reminisces about when hardware architecture was easy and fun in ;login: magazine:

Anything that you invented would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,” and you’d think, “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would never work, but then you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would wake up the next morning and read their newspapers and the headlines would say OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE. You’d give your buddy a high-five and go celebrate at the bar, and then you’d think, “I wonder if we can make branch predictors even more accurate,” and the next day you’d start XOR’ing the branch’s PC address with a shift register containing the branch’s recent branching history, because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything and get something useful, and you test the new branch predictor, and now you’re up to 96% accuracy, and the branches call you on the phone and say OK, WE GET IT, YOU DO NOT LIKE BRANCHES, but the phone call goes to your voicemail because you’re too busy driving the speed boats and wearing the monocles that you purchased after your promotion at work.

Glitch News

News photos, mostly from Japanese sources, as they might be interpreted by a malfunctioning JPEG renderer. Above: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

FIGURE 8.16: Humans generally exhaust their execution stack much more rapidly than computers do.

(Servant × Service, episode 10.)

@theaudientvoid writes:

I’m currently having an on going freakout about grad school (despite it being at least two years away) and I was looking up info on the GRE, and apparently the math part doesn’t include any calculus questions. So, I could theoretically have taken it right out of high school?

In theory, yes. Almost everyone I asked about the GRE before I took it told me it was little more than a slightly more difficult version of the SAT, and my experience actually taking it largely bore that out. In practice, most schools only accept GRE scores dating later than five years prior to application, and very few people come out of high school thinking “I want to spend the next decade of my life at university!” so it rarely happens.