
nothing ever changes
ficus
29 posts


nothing ever changes

Why does everybody want managers to be ICs? Please someone explain this to me from first principles.

Today in the Argument, I complain that I read hundreds of thousands of words of @edzitron and I think he makes too many arguments to make the strongest forms of any of them. Featuring several incredibly long footnotes, such as:

one of the coldest shots in nba history. up 3-1 in the series. tied 115-115. sent their asses home at the buzzer. doesn’t get colder

In the 90s, Hitachi came up with a bizarre way to conserve memory bandwidth. Their SuperH architecture, intended to compete with ARM, was a 32-bit architecture that used…16 bit instructions. The benefit was really high code density. If you can fit twice as many instructions into every cache line, the CPU pipeline stalls way, way less. This was *really* important for embedded devices, which were often extremely bandwidth constrained in the era. Sega famously used the processors for the Dreamcast, and ARM actually ended up licensing their patents for Thumb mode! I think perhaps the weirdest thing about SuperH was its concept of “upwards compatibility”. The ISA itself is a microcode-less design, all future instructions were trapped and emulated by older chipsets. It’d be slow…but you could run future code on very old chips! Very neat design, a massive success through the 90s and 2000s, that slowly faded.

美味えええええええ! これ美味い! これあれだ!プリングルスのサワークリームオニオンの味だ! 全く想像してなかった! 「好きな人は何にでもかけて食べる」って意味がわかった 確かにこれは美味い!

Getting controllers (infrared LEDs) + SLAM with the same set of headset cameras was fun (basically touched every layer of the stack) Other fun one was getting Quest 2 to ~$300 while preserving lens interaxial adjustment. Changed a continuous adjustment system to a discrete 3-position one (making the sensing cheap), and combined an idea from camera modules by putting a plastic window a cm+ above the display to block dust/dirt from landing in-focus even if it got past the sliding seal.