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I wish everyone would just have an option to see the navigation the the gauge cluster.

I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.

Is there a technical reason why apple doesn’t allow HDR to be selectively turned off? I’m surprised this is still not at least an accessibility option.

Compilers can’t really, in a meaningful way, change the layout of your data in memory. And you do need to think about your memory layout to get any benefit from SIMD. You’ll notice a lot of compiler auto vectorization insert many instructions just to shuffle data around to get to a usable layout, which negates much of the benefit.

Lenovo is the “weird exception” because thinkpads have always had the Fn key on the bottom left. Just like they still keep the track point.

I would presume most people buying a thinkpad don’t want to buy “the vast majority” of laptops.

I had no idea they used the Plan 9 file server for accessing files in WSL. I wonder what the original reasoning for choosing 9P was.

That and a reset button.

For GeForce cards you can get similar behavior by setting “Prefer maximum performance” which disables some of the low power states.

Designated initializers is one area where C feels much more expressive than C++. And that feature has been standard since C99.

The Coca Cola company still makes advertisements, even though everyone already knows about Coke. You have to keep your name in the top of your target audience’s mind.

Vulkan is a pain for different reasons. Easier to install sure, but you need a few hundred lines of code to set up shader compilation and resources, and you’ll need extensions to deal with GPU addresses like you can with CUDA.

Except it’s actually called “cooked mode” [1] and predates the use of the slang.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_mode https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/

Software wants to be installed in C:\Program Files so that other software can’t modify their installation without admin permissions. Of course to do that your installer needs to be run as administrator which makes the whole thing rather silly.

The OS then provides a native API to return a user's age bracket (not full date-of-birth)

Call the API every day, when the age bracket changes you can infer the date-of-birth.

Even the function names are identical :/

I mean it kind of is considering that's comparable to a 5070 which has 672 GB/s? Benefit of NVIDIA being the only one using GDDR7 for now I guess.

I've always assumed minifiers were a kind of lossless compression. I guess this optimization makes it lossy? Even if we can't tell the difference between oklch(0.659432 0.304219 234.75238) and oklch(.659 .304 234.752) they're still different colors.

When you're using a programming language that naturally steers you to write slow code you can't only blame the programmer.

I was listening to someone say they write fast code in Java by avoiding allocations with a PoolAllocator that would "cache" small objects with poolAllocator.alloc(), poolAllocator.release(). So just manual memory management with extra steps. At that point why not use a better language for the task?

This comment assumes game companies throw away all their code and start from scratch on their next title. Which is completely untrue, games are built on decades old code, like most software. There is absolutely a need for maintainable code.

we had an unusual discussion about a Python oddity

There are so many discussions about "X language is so weird about it handles numbers!" and it's just IEEE 754 floats.

For a graphics programmer acos(dot(x, y)) always raises an eyebrow. Since most of the time you actually want cos(theta) and even when you think you need the angle you probably don’t.

Not in this case because the dependencies are the same:

Naive: https://godbolt.org/z/Gzf1KM9Tc

Horner's: https://godbolt.org/z/jhvGqcxj1

Compilers cannot do this optimization for floating point [1] unless you're compiling with -ffast-math. In general, don't rely on compilers to optimize floating point sub-expressions.

[1] https://godbolt.org/z/8bEjE9Wxx

After all of the above work and that talk in mind, I decided to ask an LLM.

Impressive that an LLM managed to produce the answer from a 7 year old stack overflow answer all on its own! [1] This would have been the first search result for “fast asin” before this article was published.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/26030435

But RISC-V is a _new_ ISA. Why did we start out with the wrong design that now needs a bunch of extensions? RISC-V should have taken the learnings from x86 and ARM but instead they seem to be committing the same mistakes.

Just turn on a light?

Rust programmers can take advantage of the srgb crate

I don’t like the NPMification of Cargo. Do you really need to pull in a dependency for something like this?

it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.

Dividing a float by zero is usually perfectly valid. It has predictable outputs, and for some algorithms like collision detection this property is used to remove branches.

Would defer be considered hidden control flow? I guess it’s not so hidden since it’s within the same function unlike destructors, exceptions, longjmp.