tunetardis
@tunetardis@piefed.ca
- Comment on How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe? 1 week ago:
When I first started taking high school Latin, I thought any language with such an arcane grammar deserved to die. Later, I joked about how I was so relieved modern romance languages like French have abandoned all that, and he said “Well, we still have Romanian.” Now, I live in horror of visiting eastern Europe.
- Comment on Why do older files tend to have file extensions in all caps? 1 week ago:
Ah, you’re a gamer then.
- Comment on Why do older files tend to have file extensions in all caps? 1 week ago:
Well sonny, it’s because back then, media files would eat your entire drive in a hurry, so they had to be shouted out as a warning.
- Comment on Good luck dumbass 1 week ago:
Burglar laughs. Then sees another roomba approaching the first with a blasting cap. “Oh, shit.”
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
Oh I never got that far. It was all static. I supposed if I had kept plugging away it, I might’ve reinvented a 64-bit OpenCL eventually, but you have to understand the uphill climb it all was. Like I was shocked to discover at one point that while you could compile a 64-bit executable, the
malloclibrary function was still only 32-bit! I bitched about this to IBM tech support, and they said well you could write your ownmallocusingmmap. I mean yikes! - Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah! I mean to be fair, it was a full-fledged PowerPC single core in its own right. I’m pretty sure that generation had AltiVec (simd instructions), so you could theoretically do some number-crunching on it as well, but it had plenty to do already with managing memory I/O. And actually also network I/O for us, since I worked a bit on trying to combine the resources of more than one blade. But man, it just devolved into a giant mess in the end! I think I still have some PTSD from it :P
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, you know, that’s a good way of looking at it. It’s like each core could only access its own cache memory, and all the syncing to main RAM had to be done painstakingly in software. That would be a hardware function in any modern architecture. I can’t remember how big the caches were. I think they were bigger than a typical L1 at least, but not huge.
Anyway, it was not too horrible if you were just walking through an array sequentially applying some operation to it, but when you had to jump around memory, it became an absolute nightmare! Uuuugh…it’s all coming back to me now why we got nowhere with it.
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, the prospecting industry includes mining and oil/gas. I’m in the former. In the past, if you went to a trade convention, the oil/gas side would take up at least 2/3 of the floor space, but that’s kind of flipping around now. The electrification of the economy is bringing metals to the fore.
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
I guess you could say the Cell was as an 8-core CPU (well, 9, if you include the PowerPC in the middle) at a time when such things were unheard of, at least in the consumer space. So the theoretical performance if you could max out all those cores was through the roof. I have no doubt that’s what drew Sony to them for their next gen console.
But whereas all the cores of a modern 8-core chip can access the same RAM, in the Cell, only the PowerPC could access the main memory and each core had its own dedicated internal RAM, meaning you had to load both code and data into all the cores laboriously yourself using asynchronous DMA requests before executing the code, and then sync the results back using more DMA. It was a bit like GPU programming, I suppose, though within the cores, it felt more like a CPU in terms of the instruction set and what not, so kind of a hybrid approach I guess?
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
Well I’m in Canada, and almost everything is tied in with natural resources at some level. Lol
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
It’s a small company that does mineral surveying, but we’ve done a lot of R&D in the past that ranged from designing our own survey instrumentation to writing geophysical modelling software. The Cell thing was for the latter.
IIRC the Cell processor was built around an IBM PowerPC, but that wasn’t meant to do all the heavy lifting. Rather, it was supposed to be farmed out to these other processing nodes (I forget what they were called), almost like using a GPU for general computation. Now, the IBM consultant sold us on the Cell, saying they had an OpenCL library that would make all this much easier and hide the hardware details. LOL!
First of all, it was a 32-bit library. Maybe fine for a 32-bit console like the PS3, but our blades had 16 GB of RAM and it wasn’t going to cut it. So I had to dig into the guts of the architecture to get anything usable and, long story short, a summer went by and I little to show for my efforts.
Years later, we eventually got the program running on Threadrippers and that worked out much better!
- Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC 2 weeks ago:
That’s impressive.
At my work, we had these cell processor-based blade servers for a while. Basically the same chips as in a PS3 except they could handle double-precision floats. We wanted to use them for scientific modelling, but gave up eventually. They were such a bitch to program! I can only imagine emulating them must’ve been a nightmare.
- Comment on Do you think that Trump is the most hated U.S. president? 3 weeks ago:
This is the thing that gets me the most. A million Americans literally died under his watch. What more would it take to make a candidate unelectable for a 2nd term? I was gobsmacked to see it happen.
- Comment on Do you think that Trump is the most hated U.S. president? 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know about domestically, but if you look at him at an international level, he’s a slam dunk for that title.
- Comment on Do you think that Trump is the most hated U.S. president? 3 weeks ago:
I remember flying into Midland Texas during Trump’s first term and seeing a poster of Bush II with the caption “Bet you miss me now!”
- Comment on How does code that's meant to fix one bug break other features? 4 weeks ago:
This.
As much as you try to keep various modules in your program functioning as independently from one another as possible so that you can unit test the shit out of them, the whole system is far more complex and interdependent in the end.
And that’s just within your own code. Bring in external libraries, drivers, etc. and it’s easy enough for fixes downstream to affect what happens further up.
One thing I find interesting is there seem to be cultural differences between platforms. In Windows, for example, it’s super common to see multiple versions of the same library installed, and apps dependent on a specific version, even if it’s rather ancient. Linux/Mac tends to frown on this? There may a stable version and development version, but that’s about it. So the onus is more on the app developers to make sure their code works with the latest library.
It’s also important to note that it’s not always an unanticipated effect. There may be some need to change a library to no longer support a certain usage. In that case, the old usage is marked “deprecated” and anyone using the library is given a window of time to make adjustments to the new interface, but if they don’t get there on time, the patch breaks their program. And in some cases, the adjustments can be major, requiring what amounts to a total rewrite.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
It wasn’t until I tried running a Pokémon game in an emulator that I realized how small a save file can be. They’re in the kilobytes range, even though they have to store all game play and achievements, inventory, every Pokémon you’ve ever captured with full stats and even those you’ve only seen, etc. It must be some binary format with absolutely no fat in it.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
I figured it had something like 4k texture packs. I have a Steam Deck and don’t generally play anything at high res even when connected to a monitor. There ought to be a way to say hey limit the install to the res I’ll actually be using?
- Comment on How come people are stupid nowadays? Especially on social media 5 weeks ago:
The algorithm extrapolates stupidity.
- Comment on Why do companies require you to submit a resume but also put the same data into their forms? 1 month ago:
It’s for the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.
- Comment on What hot af take do you have that you think you will be HORRIBLY executed and shunned from society for? 1 month ago:
My brother started eating salads with bamboo chopsticks because it bothered him that a vinaigrette dressing brings out the metallic flavour in a fork. Then he realized they are much more practical for the reasons you mention and has become a huge advocate. They have become my preferred implement as well.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 month ago:
Thanks for that. It set me straight on a few things.
What do you think about microloans then (kiva, etc.)? Is that a better approach? I know it’s more grassroots than a gov program, and I don’t know how much of an effect they have in the grand scheme of things.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 month ago:
I’m interested in your take on the USAid funding cuts. It only made the news briefly where I am amid a long list of disruptions that have wreaked havoc closer to home, but I can’t help thinking this has to be one of the worst things that happened on a global scale?
- Comment on Why do I think music sounds better on my old MP3 player? 1 month ago:
Yeah the effect is most noticeable to me for thematic albums or something classical like a symphony. I really don’t want those interrupted!
And I feel like fewer bands are making thematic albums now because they don’t translate well to the phone experience. That’s a shame.
- Comment on Why do I think music sounds better on my old MP3 player? 1 month ago:
Others have covered the subtleties of how the sound could be reproduced on older players in a different way. But there may a psychological component as well? And I don’t just mean a nostalgia factor, though that could certainly be part of it.
One thing I miss is having a dedicated music player that will never interrupt my listening experience with a notification or anything like that. It’s the same reason I still prefer going to a theatre to watch movies. Zero distractions compared to a home screening and I feel like I can get far more immersed in it.
- Comment on I'd like to change my last name and want suggestions 2 months ago:
Ha! That’s a great idea!
Along those lines, have you considered the name Richmond? I ask a Chinese friend once why the Richmond district in Vancouver and the Richmond Hill suburbs of Toronto are basically China at this point. He said oh that’s easy! Richmond sounds like “rich man” to the Chinese ear. Who wouldn’t wanna live on Rich Man Hill?
- Comment on I'd like to change my last name and want suggestions 2 months ago:
Ooh that’s a tricky one! I looked it up and the most common character for it is a verb meaning something like to arrange for display? Good luck finding an English equivalent to that! There is a 2nd meaning of “old or ancient” which sounds a little more promising, though I can’t think of an English name with that meaning off the top of my head.
Apparently, Chen is the most common family name in Taiwan, and is really the same name as Chan, Tam, and Tran depending on where you live and what you speak. Not that that helps you any.
- Comment on I'd like to change my last name and want suggestions 2 months ago:
fwiw family names in English come typically come from several sources. They may be place names (e.g. London), descriptions of places (e.g. Ford: a shallow place where you can cross a river), occupations (e.g. Smith), or the name of a family business (e.g. if your name is Fox, your ancestor likely owned a tavern with a name like The Fox & Whistle or something random). If it’s an occupation that sounds too good to be true like King or Bishop, your ancestor was probably not royalty but served a royal estate.
Not that you need to follow any of that. Is there a Chinese ancestral name in your family you’re aware of? Maybe you could get it’s meaning and find a close English equivalent? I’m part Japanese myself, and Japanese family names are almost all of the descriptions of places variety. So say your name was Watanabe: a shallow place where you can cross a river. You might then choose to go with Ford as your English name? Just a thought.