smat's comments

smat | 4 months ago | on: Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28

Check out Asahi Linux, they run on Apple Silicon and have translation for 32 and 64 bit x86, so they even go further than what Rosetta achieved. Open Source as well.

smat | 6 months ago | on: Formally verifying a floating-point division routine with Gappa – part 1

A very interesting read.

The article states that they added a computational correction step which is run whenever a result might be incorrect but skip it most of the time.

I am wondering whether this might cause problems for small real-time systems that do not have an FPU. If the runtime cost of an operation depends on the input, it is very hard to figure out whether deadlines can be met in all operation conditions.

smat | 9 months ago | on: The scientific “unit” we call the decibel

Great post, the fusion of scale with unit is a mess.

When using it as a factor, for example when describing attenuation or amplification it is fine and can be used similar to percent. Though the author is right - it would be even more elegant to use scientific notation like 1e-4 in this case.

For using it as a unit it would really help to have a common notation for the reference quantity (e.g. 1mW).

But I guess there is no way to change it now that they are established since decades in the way the author describes.

smat | 1 year ago | on: Why fastDOOM is fast

While this gives an impressive boost in performance, it also means that frametimes are around 10% longer when the status bar has to be updated.

Overall this can mean that in some situations the game feels not as smooth as before due to these variations.

Essentially when considering real time rendering the slowest path is the most critical to optimize.

smat | 2 years ago | on: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

I could see that in the coming years the value of Waymo for Google is not actually in collecting revenue from transportation fees but to collect multi modal data to feed into its models.

The amount of data that is collected by these cars is massive.

smat | 2 years ago | on: Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 Mod

You also pay for quality control. Cheaper brands often have decent audio quality on average but high variation in between individual pairs of headphones. They also tend to fall apart after 1-2 years of use in my experience.

smat | 2 years ago | on: The last days of Berlin’s gas streetlamps

You can modulate the brightness without flicker, you can try it yourself with a lab power supply.

It is just that filtering the output of the regulator is “expensive” as you need a relatively large capacitor. If this is omitted in combination with a low frequency PWM, you will experience flicker.

smat | 3 years ago | on: MusicLM: Generating Music from Text

I would argue that the people who use AI generated assets and combine them for a bigger thing such as a video game are still artists. They are simply realizing their vision on a higher level.

smat | 3 years ago | on: Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robot Atlas can now grab and toss

Boston dynamics also published a making of video. There it is explained why the luggage scenario is still far away: The robot has perfect knowledge of the object it is transporting (size and weight distribution). In order to be able to transport any object, the control algorithms need to be able to estimate themselves where to grip an object and what the objects weight distribution is.

Still, the results are very impressive.

smat | 3 years ago | on: Zen4's AVX512 Teardown

Very interesting read. The author notes that double pumping the 512 bit instructions to 256 bit execution units appears to be a good trade-off.

As far as I understood ARMs new SIMD instruction set is able to map to execution units of arbitrary width. So it sounds to me like ARM is ahead of x86 in flexibility here and might be able to profit in the future.

Maybe somebody with more in-depth knowledge could respond whether my understanding is correct.

smat | 3 years ago | on: Hollywood’s visual effects crisis

I am also curious how this period in movies will hold over time. Older movies with more practical effects (such as Star Wars) still have a very crisp look to them while newer movies look blurry and bloomy due to the heavy post processing.
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