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librasteve

912 karma · joined July 15, 2023

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librasteve··on US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut
back in the day, i worked for Energis (#3 wholesale telco in the UK) … we had about 2.2m active subscribers and ran a fibre backbone.

one day the backbone (E1 bidirectional ring iirc) was broken north of london … my boss drove out to find that travellers had entered the field, opened the inspection cover in the ground, stood a pole for their clothes line and filled with cement

very savvy, he didn’t let on that we had about £1m revenue per day close to collapse and convinced them to hang their clothes somewhere else (perhaps a few quid changed hands)

librasteve··on NATS second glitch this month causes more disruption
NATS is the main UK air traffic control service
librasteve··on Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
ah yes, I stand corrected

the 1064 was the vanilla IEEE P754 64-bit pipeline and the 1067 added Intel bus interface

librasteve··on Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
at Weitek, we built the 1167 at about the same time as the 80287, we lined up compiler guys such as Green Hills to support our alternative coprocessor ASM (the instruction bus was memory mapped in the 80286 address space IIRC) … several folks would hand code inner loops eg for LINPACK, but already by this time the compiler tech was important to fully use the pipeline … loop unrolling, dead code elimination and so on.
librasteve··on Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
nope
librasteve··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Please ban chess playing computers. -signed members of the chess federation
librasteve··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
oh, so that’s where all the aliens are … up and cruising around at .99g
librasteve··on Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue
I recall that most Tory voters in the 1980s were "sold" on the idea of privatisation (and had real horror stories in relation to eg phone line installation delays).

One of the ideas was to widen share ownership to the average bloke. Sure - that never happened (although many average pensioners maybe hold Macquarie via an investment fund).

This "class" actually, in general, are very angry about regulatory capture and we blame the class of woke bien pensant "leaders" who back scratch and go in and out of the media, the lobby, the civil service, NGOs and the privatised utilities scratching each others' backs and telling us all we are idiots. [Rory Stewart being their patron saint]

librasteve··on Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue
I hate how the UK sewage system has failed. I agree that a good share of the blame lies with the for profit asset stripping owners. But just blaming 1980s Thatcher privatisation lets the government off the hook. The regulators (Ofwat and the Environment Agency) have watched this happen from the sidelines and failed to apply the law. Every “non exceptional” spill is a criminal offence with potential jail term, including actions of corporate conspiracy. The are 10,000s river and sea spills per year. Where is the punitive action? Why are the perps walking free? This is the soft corruption of the lobby and revolving door appointments (head of a water company one year, boss of the EA the next). Sure the only way to fix it now is (uncompensated) nationalisation, but the regulators have failed to anpply the regulations and are as much to blame.
librasteve··on Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue
AI jokes would be funnier methinks
librasteve··on Why getting your hands dirty is good for you
yes, I’m so delighted by this quality content I want to up my licence fee
librasteve··on Can AI design circuit boards yet?
I fancy making a custom ARM or RISC-V chip design, is AI any good for that?
librasteve··on The death of San Francisco's Market Street
we visited old friends a couple of years ago (we lived in SF in the late 80s) … knowing the city quite well we decided to take BART from SFO downtown. our first notable experience of the decline was a drug user injecting on the BART station platform as our train pulled in. not sure I would point a finger at the removal of cars!
librasteve··on Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect
and Aristotle
librasteve··on What is your AI era PowerPoint alternative?
ok … thanks - i’m really hoping that I can delete PowerPoint though since it makes all my app appreciation nerves shudder
librasteve··on What's within a 10-minute walk in 50 European cities
Nice idea … did they consider warping the map, I wonder. Not sure why parks in London rank an E or F on the “daily life” scale
librasteve··on NASA: Fill in a name, and you can have an exclusive coordinate in the universe
here is a product preview .
librasteve··on Roget's Thesaurus
https://web.archive.org/web/20180402044113/https://viz.co.uk...
librasteve··on My Business Is Dying
It’s fascinating to read all the tech feedback in the comments here, but I think this business is failing because it has yet to achieve true product market fit.

Any half decent product, with a nice website, a real solution and some SEO can get in front of say 100,000 prospects these days. Here I imagine discovery is mainly from Googling “convert bank statements”, and conversion from prospects to client is straightforward for 1-2% of views.

But a conversion niche like this is dynamic - you basically luck into it and unless you actively find and occupy niches faster than the competition discovers them and stomps on you, your “business” is on a time fuze. For example, if someone like Xero where this is a feature discovers the keyword combo and does some paid ads. Or if Google pushes AI results up and your page goes below the fold. My expectation is that this latter situation is happening everywhere as Google AI search starts to strangle everything.

Leverage AI to be your CMO. It should be telling you things like (i) your product is likely perceived as too technical to break into the general market, (ii) you need a much better handle in target customer profile (demographic, messages), (iii) you need a customer relevant sustainable USP and (iv) you need a distinctive and memorable brand. The ultimate win is to create market pull from customer to customer recommendations.

librasteve··on Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)
Well even in deep pipelined FPUs (I'm thinking Weitek 1167 for example), the "divide" instruction is microcoded ... this chip had a full IEEE P764 64-bit single cycle barrel shifting MAC ... but divide was built via a special "3-bit and guess" kind of long division that was microcoded. MAYBE someone has built a hardcoded divider these days - but that would be a waste if good transistors in typical instruction mix.
librasteve··on Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)
the von Neumann bottleneck
librasteve··on Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)
yeah, i have the notion that a grid would be good enough
librasteve··on Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)
wonders how ARM did that - the MIPS R2000 came in at ~115k and the 80286 ~134k

anyway - say you want 50% of the transistors for on chip RAM these days, then thats

100 billion / 50 thousand = 2 million ARM 1s

clocking at say 3GHz

6e15 MIPS = 6 peta MIPS

so if you could run code on it, you would get a 10,000x speed up ;-)

librasteve··on Z80–The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive
excellent point
librasteve··on Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)
interesting to be reminded that an 8080 (8 bit datapath) took 4,800 transistors

an Apple M5 Max is 100,000,000,000 transistors (ok it’s 18 CPU + 40 GPU cores) by comparison so 17 million 8080 equivalents

librasteve··on Orbital Construction Pioneers
errr… I think that was his Father
librasteve··on Theory of Fluids Enters the 21st Century
A nicely framed article that helps to explain emergent theories such as Navier-Stokes.
librasteve··on Show HN: Programmable timer web app (for gym workouts or stretching sessions)
nice work … would love to have this on my apul watch
librasteve··on Let's all meet up in the Y2K
yeah, then NatSemi integrated Ethernet onto a single chip and game over TR
librasteve··on Let's all meet up in the Y2K
yeah, Madge was a (UK based) 2nd source of IBM Token Ring kit … MAUs, CAUs and so on iirc

much better determinism than Ethernet CSMA/CD

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