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Scuds

518 karma · joined February 24, 2014

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Scuds··on Why is the Rust compiler so slow?
Oh yes, apple hardware continues to improve and M4 pro still the single threaded champion of anything under 300 w.

FWIW - last stage where the binary is produced takes the longest and is single threaded and that's the largest difference between release and debug.

Scuds··on Why is the Rust compiler so slow?
I have a mac m4 pro and it's 2 minutes to compile all of Deno, which is my go-to for bigass rust projects.

```

> cargo clean && time cargo build

cargo build 713.80s user 91.57s system 706% cpu 1:53.97 total

> cargo clean && time cargo build --release

cargo build --release 1619.53s user 142.65s system 354% cpu 8:17.05 total

```

this is without incremental compilation. And it's not like you have to babysit a release build if you have a CI/CD system

Scuds··on -2000 Lines of code
I figured that articles like folklore are like an amusing movie file (say someone chopping a skin of a watermelon) that's repeatedly being passed around reddit.
Scuds··on -2000 Lines of code (2004)
management could have decided on a process change. Simple as that.

I get the sentiment though, "He blew management's mind so much they made an exception for him".

But, Folklore.org is a bit less onanistic than ESR's jargon file.

Scuds··on -2000 Lines of code (2004)
This being Lisa that's -2000 lines in 68k assembler. That's about as verbose as any real PL can ever get.

For what it's worth, here's quicksort in 5 lines of haskell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7717691/why-is-the-minim...

Scuds··on Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% Rust
"Seems like a waste of effort" in a vacuum yes, but

1 - GNU utilities is ancient crufty #IFDEF'd C that's been in maintenance mode for decades. You want code to handle quirks of Tru64 and Ultrix? You got it.

2 - Waving your hands around 'the community will take care of it' is magical thinking. C developers don't grow on trees. C tooling is kinda weird and doesn't resemble anything modern - good luck finding enough VOLUNTEER C developers to make your goals happen.

Scuds··on Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% Rust
you're just an end user, you don't have to maintain the suite.

In OSS every hour of volunteer time is precious Manna from heaven, flavored with unicorn tears. So any way to remove Toil and introduce automation is gold.

Rust's strict compiler and an appropriate test suite guarantees a level of correctness far beyond C. There's less onus on the reviewer to ensure everything still works as expected when reviewing a pull request.

It's a win-win situation.

Scuds··on Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests
there's a reason why people remember kent state.
Scuds··on RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines
there were crematoriums falling apart because of constant use. Morgues overflowing with coffins.

Three of my direct coworkers died from covid. One guy didn't get his sense of taste back for a year.

People just gasping to death in their bedrooms waiting for things to improve and only going to the overloaded ER when it's too late.

I'm an asthmatic, I've been close to that feeling where sub 90% oxygen saturation made me feel like death. Anything like 80% your lungs start to fail. You're dead in a hurry.

Scuds··on Asahi Lina Pausing Work on Apple GPU Linux Driver Development
jesus, when's 4chan going to turn up here?
Scuds··on Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
I'm kind of surprised that after all these years TF2 and Source are still separate entities. Like, is there any TF2-only code in Source that only runs if TF2 is the current mod?
Scuds··on Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
I thought Monolith worked on doom95.
Scuds··on You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
"3. your green field project growing into legacy project."

You do all this upfront design about how it's going to work and then "Oh god there's so many splinters and sharp corners, it's only getting worse and every new team onboarded to the framework needs to have their hands held, and management won't allocate time to address the tech debt."

Scuds··on The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access
that's one ep that sticks out in my mind - hardware hacking to dump a 2600 cartridge and build homebrew development hardware and then reverse engineering to figure out what's what.

Also the subtle flex of making the Donkey Kong girders on an angle when the 2600 is a 'race the beam' system where each scanline must be computed. Even modern homebrew remakes of Donkey Kong on 2600 have horizontal girders.

Scuds··on The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access
Digital archive means you won't have to, unless you want to see some yellowing paper.
Scuds··on Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years?
There are two versions of Ultima 1, the original has BASIC is basic with assembly and there is a remake in pure assembly. You can definitely tell the improvements the asm version brings with the overworld scrolling faster and the first person dungeons redrawing very quickly.

So - I'm guessing game logic of MECC Oregon was in Basic with some assembly routines to re-draw the screen. BTW original Oregon Trail was also 100% basic and a PITA to read. You're really getting to the edges of what applesoft basic is practically capable of with games like Akalabeth and Oregon

Scuds··on Linux from Scratch
I wonder what an equivalent "BSD from scratch" is like? Linux was assembled from a collection of parts while BSD is (reputably) a lot more 'designed from the ground up' Even a modern system like Fuchsia - what's that like to build from the ground up?

Or is it "You fool! Building your own kitbashed Gundam of an OS is the point."

Scuds··on Anti-mimetic tactics for living a counter-cultural life (2021)
Tell that to Q-anon or anyone whose sense of self-worth is derived from being able to see 'The Truth'.
Scuds··on Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
They built a Go store into their office in Bellevue,WA - it's got the freezers and shelves but it hasn't opened. They built a Four Star store into their HQ in Seattle, and they closed it a year later. There's several Amazon Books stores in the area, GONE. It's like their push for retail is a total dead-end.
Scuds··on Use GNU Emacs
I think my time is better spent improving my build and deployment environments instead of something like customizing my text editor. More of my work is in tying command line utilities together Maybe I don’t know what hardcore emacs use is like.
Scuds··on Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
lol the busses don't go through Laurelhurst. why not? Oh, people who ride the bus don't live there.
Scuds··on Software horror show: SAP Concur
I interviewed with them prior to the SAP acquisition back in 2017.

"We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements."

"You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?"

"Hey hey! You're the guy we want!"

Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired.

edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.

Scuds··on Usborne computer and coding books from the 1980s
My local library(US) had a few of these and I'd copied some BASIC programs them onto my Apple //c and didn't know why they didn't work all the time, specifically $CHR or anything involving peek and poke.

8 year old me knew there was something different about the comic art alongside the text, yet I couldn't explain what. Turns out - British!

The machine code books would have been useful at that time, but again, I'm 8 playing with a hand-me-down Apple with no other help. I don't know what I don't know and I have no mentorship and no internet or bbs access to download new stuff.

Kids today have access to all the video tutorials they could ever want.

e: God DAMN line numbers suck. And double god damn do line editors (think ed as opposed to vim) with no proper backspace.

Scuds··on US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supercomputer (2010)
UGH! All this infrastructure and all this work into a software platform and it's something that will be obsoleted in a few years by off the shelf GPUs built on an standard development environment backed by industry

That's the problem of building something super-cutting-edge on a grand scale - you run the risk of making a super evolved version of an evolutionary dead end.

Sure it sounds like a cool idea at the time, the Cell optimized SETI At Home demo around the PS3 launch ripped through work units far more quickly than any Intel system.

I wonder what became of the cluster once it was decommissioned? Military surplus PS3s anyone?

Scuds··on She went to sleep and woke up 30 years later (1998)
I hear ya. I was in bed for a two days after having my appendix removed and for a few days just walking felt like I was climbing stairs.
Scuds··on MetalNES: Transistor Level NES Simulation
go lil' electron beam, go!

9000 cycles/s / 1.79 MHz = 0.5% of realtime. The only time you ever see rendering a line at a time is single stepping through an emulator.

I wonder if this is how FPGA developers working in VHDL/Verilog see the world? https://www.patreon.com/posts/37038491 here's a short clip of the VRAM of a PSX rendering about half of a completed frame of Final Fantasy 7's battle screen.

Scuds··on 55,000 lines of Rust code later: A debugger is born
> In my opinion, debuggers are under-appreciated and under-invested tools in a programmer's arsenal.

Oh yeah - microsoft's time travelling debugger is under appreciated, even with their quality tooling. But, it's on the windows platform. So anything like this on Linux sounds like a very positive step forward.

Scuds··on The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme
not sure what this is ordering
Scuds··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
So what? Though he's an philosophical founder, the FSF has stagnated under his leadership over the decades.

It's like you're more in love with the Idea of the FSF than the FSF as it stands today, reflexively self-protecting its old guard and completely inhibited by the my-way-or-the-high-way attitude of RMS.

Scuds··on The failed heir: The Hyper Neo Geo 64
If you look at Sega or Namco hardware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sega_arcade_system_boa...

the 2000's and on is just console hardware with upclocked CPU/GPUs and more RAM, or outright x86 + Nvidia Windows PCs running some sort of Windows embedded.

Compare this to the Hyper, and it's a MIPS cpu with custom ASICs. A completely dedicated system that doesn't have any amortization in games for the home market. The last of an era.

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