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mastax

6,420 karma · joined January 15, 2015

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mastax··on GCC 15.1
Do distros have tooling to deal with this type of change?

I imagine it would be very useful to be able to search through all the C/C++ source files for all the packages in the distro in a semantic manner, so that it understands typedefs and preprocessor macros etc. The search query for this change would be something like "find all union types whose first member is not its largest member, then find all lines of code where that type is initialized with `{0}`".

mastax··on Some __nonstring__ Turbulence
It’s still shocking to me that there’s no official kernel CI.
mastax··on YAGRI: You are gonna read it
Also System-Versioned Tables in MariaDB: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/system-versioned-tables/
mastax··on A new form of verification on Bluesky
One of the use cases of Old Twitter was official announcements from public figures and organizations. It is useful to know if the announcement that “life has been found on mars” from “NASA” is actually from the real National Aeronautics and Space Administration account.
mastax··on Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation
Intel acquired Altera in December 2015 for $16.7 billion in cash.
mastax··on Zig's new LinkedList API (it's time to learn fieldParentPtr)

    new Node<TStruct>[16];

    new TStructContainingNode[16];
What’s the difference?
mastax··on Zig's new LinkedList API (it's time to learn fieldParentPtr)
> The new version isn't generic. Rather, you embed the linked list node with your data. This is known as an intrusive linked list and tends to perform better and require fewer allocations.

I don’t get this. In the generic version the data is embedded with the linked list node, so there’s only one allocation per node. ‘T’ isn’t a pointer (or doesn’t have to be) there’s no indirection between data and node.

mastax··on PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)
MySQL logical replication isn’t quite foolproof but it’s vastly easier than anything PostgreSQL offers out of the box. (I hope I’m wrong!)
mastax··on A love letter to the CSV format
ASCII has characters more or less designed for this

0x1C - File Separator

0x1D - Group Separator

0x1E - Record Separator

0x1F - Unit Separator

So I guess 1F would be the "comma" and 1E would be the "newline."

mastax··on Closing the Chapter on OpenH264
So they decided to just ignore the patent problem? Fair, I guess, that’s what other open source projects do.

Why hasn’t canonical been sued by MPEG-LA et.al? Are they no redistributing compiled FFMPEG for commercial purpose?

mastax··on MRubyD: A new mruby virtual machine implemented in pure C#
Unity, surely.
mastax··on The SeL4 Microkernel: An Introduction [pdf]
I’ve seen this argument play out many times. I believe the next line is: “QNX proved that micro kernels can be fast given clever message passing syscall design.”

“I remember running the QNX demo disc: an entire graphical operating system on a single 1.44MB floppy! Whatever happened to them?”

“They got bought by blackberry, which ended as you’d expect. QNX had a lot of success in automotive though.”

“Nowadays Linux and Android are dominant in new cars, though, proving once and for all that worse is better.”

exeunt. End Scene

mastax··on When you deleted /lib on Linux while still connected via SSH (2022)

    chattr +i /lib/ld-linux.so.2
Sounds tempting.
mastax··on Memory safety for web fonts
X86 has a strong memory model, so tearing isn’t an issue for 64-bit or smaller quantities. Other architectures (ARM) are different.

AIUi

mastax··on Rust on the RP2350 (2024)
thejpster, where do I know that username from...

Ah, he wrote most of embedded-sdmmc-rs which I used quite a bit. Jonathan, if you see this, thanks!

mastax··on Zlib-rs is faster than C
The benchmarks in the parent post are comparing to zlib-ng, which is substantially faster than zlib. The zippy claims are against "zlib found on a fresh Linux install" which at least for Debian is classic zlib.
mastax··on Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution with Neural Heat Fields
It just looks like a strong sharpening filter.
mastax··on Tariffs Are Proving 'Big Headache' for Tech Giants, Says Foxconn
That’s how it is at DigiKey and some other B2B focused distributors.
mastax··on My 16-month theanine self-experiment
Not to put too fine a point on it but if there are blind trials showing no effect and non-blind trials showing an effect, my conclusion would be the effect is a placebo.
mastax··on Apple M3 Ultra
Tariffs perhaps?
mastax··on Why Can't We Screenshot Frames from DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?
From what I remember of the windows video apis there is a system for decoding DRM content where you need to use special types of buffers which can’t be mapped to the CPU. There’s special interfaces in MediaFoundation (decoding) DXGI (buffer/device interop) and Direct Composition.

Maybe there are holes or the browsers aren’t doing it properly or it only applies to the MS proprietary DRM.

mastax··on Microsoft is killing Skype
If you have a decent connection I find just using Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) over VPN (Tailscale) works really well.

The value prop for the proprietary services like TeamViewer for me is they work much better over poor connections and cross platform. (Are there any decent RDP servers for Mac/Linux? In any case it’s another thing to have to install.)

mastax··on AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
It seems very silly to me to change the naming scheme just for the 9000 series when they're going to have to change it again for the next series. Well I suppose they could pull an Intel and go with RX 10070 XT next time. I guess we can be thankful that they didn't call it the AMD Radeon AI Max+ RX 9070 XT.
mastax··on AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/lates...

Looks like on Linux the only GPUs which are currently officially supported are the 7900 series.

https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-windows/en/lat...

On Windows the official support covers most (all?) of the discrete desktop 7000 and 6000 series.

mastax··on AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
So about 20% better value than Nvidia comparing MSRPs. Not terrible but that’s what they offered last generation and got 10% market share as a result. If the market price of Nvidia cards remains 20-50% above MSRP while AMD can hit their prices, then maybe we have a ballgame.
mastax··on Rethinking the C Time API
I wasn’t aware that on non-x86 platforms long double is often implemented with quadruple precision. I had assumed it was an x87-specific hack. On ARM64 windows/macos long double is apparently 64-bits which could be a problem.

Personally something about that solution is unsatisfying. Feels like it’d be slow, even though that wouldn’t matter 95% of the time. I’d rather have 128-bit integer of nanoseconds.

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

mastax··on Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
IIRC at the last PC trade show (the one in Taipei) one of the GPU+Motherboard makers was showing a prototype system where the PCIe slot had an additional slot behind it just for power, so no cables were required. Of course then that additional power needs to get into (and flow across) the motherboard somehow.
mastax··on Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
I bought a bunch of 28 TB Seagate Exos drives refurbished for not that much money. I still can't believe that 28TB drives are even possible.
mastax··on Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
It is tricky but possible. It is being done in the data center for certain hyperscalers. I wonder if Oxide Computer is doing it also, they mentioned a high voltage DC bus I think. https://epc-co.com/epc/about-epc/gan-talk-blog/post/14229/48...

19V is pretty standard in notebooks so 19-24V could probably be done with fairly little trouble. 48V would entail developing a whole new line of capacitors, inductors, power stages (transistors), and controllers.^1

^1: yes, of course, 48V compatible components exist for all of those. But the PC industry typically gets components developed for its specific requirements because it has the volume.

mastax··on Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
If the new 12V-2x6 connector was incompatible with the old 12VHPWR connector, they should have (and would have) made it physically incompatible. They didn’t. You cannot blame the user for doing something which is specifically allowed by design.
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