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Taren

11 karma · joined December 3, 2014

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Taren··on Does a compiler use all x86 instructions? (2010)
The cases where such a cpu would be efficient are already the places where a normal cpu is extremely fast. So it would also fail in the same ways, pipeline stalls and all. If you need to wait for the answer to one computation to know what to do next any additional cores won't add speed.

A good part of the complexity of current cpus comes from features like branch prediction, speculative execution and so on so removing features wouldn't make them drastically simpler. Many of the truly rarely used instrucctions aren't build in hardware and therefore don't contribute to the complexity of the cpu anyway. Others are rarely used but add huge speed boosts for important special purpose tasks, think os kernel.

Taren··on There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But isn't it essentially just taking away time as a factor which is pretty much what predicting via determinism would do?

Maybe the general definition of free will most people seem to go with just doesn't deal with weird edge cases because it basically developed to fit reality.

Taren··on There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But if your actions still could change randomly with your personality, memories and everything else that defines you how would that allow for free will?

Say the universe is perfectly deterministic. You could look into the future by simulating everything perfectly but why would that prohibit free will? Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?

Taren··on Welcome to the Python Engineering blog
I heard from a couple people that they don't exactly want to learn Fortran. Python stays out of your way and there is a major ecosystem around it by this point.
Taren··on A CEO's Guide to Emacs
I feel that optimizing your work flow to minimize context switches is worthwhile, though. Doesn't have necessarily anything to do with one another but even getting your thoughts out without grabbing your mouse or mashing shift-right half a dozen times help me tremendously.
Taren··on Announcing .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 RC
Yeah, they copied a lot of the syntax over. To the point that there is an alias for curl by default. Probably a good thing, though.
Taren··on Announcing .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 RC
Alright, let's be fair here. If you have a sensible execution policy set which you basically have to the first time you use powershell it is only:

Invoke-WebRequest https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.ps1 | Invoke-Expression

or this for short:

iwr https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.ps1 | iex

Also, the powershell package manager is quite nice. So far it is basically chocolatey for me but if there are some more it can handle in the future... https://github.com/OneGet/oneget/issues/77

Taren··on The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease
Apperently it started at $1, was raised to $1.25 in 2008 an now they are planning for $1.90 which'd likely skyrocket absolute poverty numbers.