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sharpneli

2,671 karma · joined October 4, 2010

Low level graphics programmer. Vulkan, DX12 etc. History with gpgpu stuff too.
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sharpneli··on Russians are trying to flee – data from Google Trends
The tax income produced by those people is being used to fund the war. It is unfortunate but it's better to have a person become poor than another person being bombed.

Ín a world without nukes they would be bombed too right now, because wars have a tendency of doing that regardless of who fights.

sharpneli··on Defensive tactics from the modern history of urban warfare
Putin cannot really do much. West fully joining the war would mean nuclear exchange. But Puting ending the world due to weapons shipments? Very unlikely.
sharpneli··on Toyota to remanufacture cars up to three times in UK
Might be tricky, mostly due to how the transaxle works. Even if you find a space for the battery (the 2021 Rav4 PHEV has bit less ground clearance) the electrical motor of that generation might not be able to drive it on faster speeds without the ICE on. For normal city driving it might work just fine though, kinda like the old custom PHEV swaps for priuses.
sharpneli··on Toyota to remanufacture cars up to three times in UK
Salting is useless if it gets too cold. So it’s only done at max -7C or so (if memory serves right). Here in Finland the southern parts are a salth bath. But the colder northern parts are not salted, and that shows in the average rust levels of cars.
sharpneli··on C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)
The reason for sticking to standard is when inevitably someone will try to compile it with another compiler. It’s far easier just to stick to the spec instead of fixing non standard code.

For some reason it has been me several times doing the fixing as original dev thought it’s completely fine. I hope to save others the pain.

sharpneli··on Italian Courts Find Open Source Software Terms Enforceable
It would have been weird if they had been unenforceable. As that would mean there is no license to use it at all. And copyright law generally doesn’t work so that if you don’t have a license you are free to do whatever. It’s the opposite. No license, no use whatsoever.
sharpneli··on The danger of hidden functional roles
It’s the same in Finland. I’d hazard a guess that the reason behind it is that without it being forced people would be subtly pressed not to have the vacation.
sharpneli··on Italy wants an exception to Europe's gas-engine ban for Ferrari, Lamborghini
Where I live (Finland) hybrids on the other hand retain their value the best, with diesels being the worst. The fuel savings are so significant that people do flock to them.
sharpneli··on Emulating AMD Approximate Arithmetic Instructions on Intel
Normalizing a vector needs this. And it's super common as whenever you just want to have a direction you're likely going to need it. Your GPU also has a fast instruction for this because in graphics it's very very common operation.
sharpneli··on Kei Car
How do they prove it? Unless it’s by receipt from a radar gun which is how it works everywhere else.

We also require receipt, and there is no shenanigans with speed limits.

sharpneli··on Tesla plans to open its charging network to other EVs later this year
It’s not backwards compatible as in Type2 would be obsolete. Type2 is for AC charging (up to 22kW) and that what home chargers use. So it is not going away.

CCS just adds two large pins under the Type2 for DC charging. No sense to have those heavy pins when you’re charging from small 3.7kW home wallbox.

sharpneli··on Europe’s aggressive new emissions rules put gas engines on notice
https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar/All-time-by-Qu...

If you look by groups the effect is less. As an example Skoda Enyaq is from Volkswagen AG but it’s naturally not a Volkswagen branded product.

But yeah everyone and their dog is releasing EV’s now.

sharpneli··on Hacking a PC sound card to read temperature and liquid level sensors
Sound cards are indeed very underappreciated.

5 years ago when VR was the hype we measured latency using them. By syncing the audio stream to the high precision clock and basically putting in a photoresistor into the microphone port we could measure the latency of actually submitting a frame into the moment it physically appeared in the VR glasses.

sharpneli··on Can Northvolt solve Europe’s impending electric car battery problem?
The waste heat of some datacenters here in Finland is sold as heating service (we have a remote heat (kaukolämpö) network) so basically whenever houses need heating the datacenters make some money out of the waste heat.
sharpneli··on Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg
They generally do. As per the article this time was an accident.
sharpneli··on Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
It depends on what part. In Finnish we call it Joulu (deriving from Yule). There are tons of pagan traditions related to it still, even if it has been christianized.

Maybe in US it’s more strongly christian. But not necessarily everywhere.

sharpneli··on On Smoking
As a teenager one doesn’t really think the things you mentioned. And it was cool.

Source: Me. Smoked for 15 years. Stopped 6 years ago.

sharpneli··on Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists
Depends on what level. Historically it was an empirical observation that was taken in as an axiom to classical thermodynamics. So it couldn't be derived from other laws.

If we move to statistical mechanics we can derive the second law from probabilities. In essence it is possible for any system to break it, it's just very very improbable. Just like if you toss a coin billions of times. It's possible for you to get more, or less, than half of the tosses to be heads. It's just very very improbable to get anything more than very tiny deviations.

sharpneli··on Ampere switching to in-house CPU designs
Reminds me of the AMD ARM server boards, that happened way after Itanium and they still repeated the exact same mistake.

Basically there was no way of getting your hands on them. They were interested only in "Serious customers".

sharpneli··on Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
That's true. But in a way it just emphasizes how much energy Bitcoin wastes, so it's fine-ish.
sharpneli··on Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
It depends on what is counted there. It might be the total operations of the company. Offices, AC for offices and whatnot.

Especially when talking about CO2 emissions absolutely everything is included, including plane trips and whatnot.

sharpneli··on Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches Their Noses
It’s a financial thing. Porting to Linux costs money, that’s what it means.

Depending on the engine it can be quite a lot of time. Especially if you don’t already have a Vulkan backend.

Therefore if you don’t think the additional sales are worth the expense, including the opportunity cost of your devs, why bother?

sharpneli··on Negative interest: Danske Bank changes threshold for personal customers
Yeah. It’s only fair as the interest on accounts is at 0% in Finland.

If they would bring negative interest to normal acocounts they’d likely have to do the same with mortgages. Bringing it to euribor + margin.

sharpneli··on Negative interest: Danske Bank changes threshold for personal customers
Do the mortgages also have a negative interest rate or are they cappoed at 0?
sharpneli··on Global electric vehicles sales grew 41% in 2020
> (including plug-in hybrids and fully electric models)

This includes plugin hybrids, so it's not that 10% of cars sold in Europe are BEV's. Majority of those are actually plugin hybrids.

And this already gives us like 90% of the environmental benefits. Sure BEV is more environementally friendly. But with PHEV's we can get more total amount of electrical kilometers driven on the road. And one only needs to be able to charge at home, no need to care about charging infrastructure yet. But when it improves one can use it just fine.

Basically you drive your daily commute with electricity, but when you go to summer cabin then you can use gasoline as usual.

This is an example of Finland, registrations for last month (march 2021): 6197 pure gasoline cars (includes non chargeable hybrids) 2121 Plugin-hybrids (gasoline) 1139 diesel 789 BEV 78 Plugin-hybrids (diesel)

At this rate it won't take many years anymore until pretty much all the new cars sold here will be chargeable, even if some of em still have ICEs inside them too.

I'm just about to change my winter heating socket into a charging outlet, and move into plugin hybrid. It just makes so much sense here. Because due to high gas taxes when driving with electricity it costs around 20-30% of what it costs to drive with gasoline. So it's simply a no brainer in economical sense.

sharpneli··on EV Charging Infrastructure in America Still Sucks
As for the 3 and 4 it all depends on how it's made.

If its Volvo style PHEV then yes, correct. It has normal ICE and gearbox on front and electric motor on rear.

If it's Toyota style PHEV then no. Because then the comparison is not a gasoline car with gearbox etc but it's Toyota's classic hybrids that started with Prius. You basically just take that kind of hybrid, slap in a bigger battery and you're done. They already have electric motors in them instead of traditional gearbox.

5. Case in point: RAV4 Prime. That thing is cool.

sharpneli··on Has UML died without anyone noticing?
To be honest we actually figured even this one out.

It just requires a particle accelerator and the amounts are so tiny that it’s ridiculously expensive. But hey, we can still do it!

sharpneli··on Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part III
I agree with the nit.

> Simply put – Apple doesn’t need to care about Vulkan or OpenGL performance.

OpenGL and Vulkan allow an implementer to more easily make such specialized HW. But it doesn't assume it at all in any other way. If your HW is fast enough there is absolutely no need to implement specialized block for it without any performance penalty.

It's trivial to implement things like input assembler without specific HW, just issue loads. But it would be massive pain to go the other way around. Try to sniff what loads fit the pattern that could be tossed into fixed function input assembler. That's a no go.

This is the right way around to do things. As there is no performance penalty for "emulating" it, because there is nothing to emulate in the end.

sharpneli··on A new model for faster-than-light travel that uses conventional physics
The ftl part does need negative energy. Subluminal warp bubbles do not need negative matter.
sharpneli··on John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
They’re even more useless than that. They’re exactly like those webpages that sell you a certificate that you own a particular star.

It’s literally that. Someone giving you a slip of paper ”You own Mona Lisa” and nothing more. The actual piece of art is elsewhere. Copyrights are not affected etc.

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