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greatfilter251

14 karma · joined July 23, 2023

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greatfilter251··on Balcony Power Plant
While imagining what the article might be about, I realized that there's a massive arbitrage opportunity in the residual pressure in municipal water service at the faucet outflow.
greatfilter251··on People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts
Same: I generally don't mind being alone with my thoughts, but given the opportunity to experience (presumably) very safe electric shocks, I would take the novel opportunity.

Such studies may all be flawed in assuming very low utils in designed negative stimuli.

greatfilter251··on Secret identities in Dwarf Fortress (2017)
The early-access game Shadows of Doubt also has extensive secret-knowledge mechanics which must be carefully managed, with the additional complication that it ideally wants to keep in sync the knowledge of the player and the player character.

I had an opportunity to play it for a few hours. It's not perfect - it didn't always keep up with my deductions, and on one instance it leaked unknown info via the UI - but on the whole it succeeded at a convincing mechanic.

greatfilter251··on Bit-Stealing Made Legal
> In this article, we present a new approach to specify the data layout of rich data types based on a dual view: > a source type, providing a high-level description available in the rest of the code, along with a memory type, > providing full control over the memory layout.

Oh wow, I've been thinking along these exact lines for a few years; looks like I should have acted sooner! Not that I have any realistic route to be published, arxiv notwithstanding, so it's exciting to see the concept taken up institutionally, and in prestigious ones at that.

I have elsewhere called the concept "programmable pattern matching": when you declare an ADT constructor/variant, you are essentially simultaneously defining a function and a pattern. We already understand how to make functions with custom logic (duh) so the novel contribution is to give the pattern custom logic. And indeed, one possible implementation, which seems very different from the ideas pursued by the article, is to define a function whose signature matches that of the ADT's destructor a la dependently-typed languages (e.g. Lean), except the input is an integer/bitvector of some size instead of an element of the ADT.

To get a better sense of why this is a very exciting idea, check out the development of niche support in Rust enums over the years (e.g. sizeof::<Option<NonNullU8>>() == sizeof::<u8>(), sizeof::<Option<&T>>() == sizeof::<&T>()). The basic concept is there: we want to simultaneously enjoy ADTs which are the best type-safety/memory-safety invention since the invention of types themselves, while enabling every possible trick to save memory as cache lines (or, indeed, elements in the vector/SIMD register file) become a more and more valuable commodity for performance.

greatfilter251··on BasicBlocker: ISA Redesign to Make Spectre-Immune CPUs Faster (2021)
It would most likely still be possible to measure that the cache lines were occupied, which is enough to leak (other) data by treating it as addresses.
greatfilter251··on Court strikes down limits on filming of police in Arizona
This right is still one which exists on paper only. All a cop has to do is mistake your cell phone for a gun and murder you, which they have shown they have no hesitation to do. Phone optional.
greatfilter251··on Oracle Attorney Disagrees That ZFS-Linux Combination Is a GPL License Violation
Timestamp? Text summary?
greatfilter251··on IRS says agents will no longer knock on taxpayers’ doors unannounced
> The agency said it would only send officers unannounced in unusual circumstances

They'll still do it, they're just promising not to do it to any right-thinking people.

greatfilter251··on Elixir is still safe
> Practitioner perceptions are formed through personal experience, and not based on empirical evidence

The disagreement here is rooted in the empirical worldview. Empirically, "rarely" and "never" cannot be (reliably) distinguished, and so adherents of this worldview fail to distinguish claims which are meant to distinguish them.

greatfilter251··on STX – C++17 and C++ 20 error-handling and utility extensions
I'm not familiar with a pause instruction in a modern isa. Sounds like x86 crap.

I'm talking about wfi, wfe, and friends.

greatfilter251··on Now Everyone Can Be a Math Person (Thanks to Covid)
Ick. This blog celebrates a very non-equitable outcome.
greatfilter251··on New Body Cam Data Exposes the True Scale of NYPD Violence Against Protesters
> $9950

Structuring, really?

greatfilter251··on STX – C++17 and C++ 20 error-handling and utility extensions
> how can we provide a mutual exclusion mechanism on the bare hardware?

This is a bit misleading. It's easier to provide mutual exclusion on bare hardware than in an OS; just do a spinlock, except with modern ISAs the core doesn't even spin.

Presumably core doesn't offer this because it's a massive footgun for devs new to multithreading who would not understand why this is unacceptable to use in an OS-hosted process.