r00ty

Well for a gamer no real comment. But there is one metric Intel still trashes AMD in for the APU. Hardware video acceleration/encoding. The quality is objectively better on Intel Quicksync.

When getting a home box that also needed to do transcoding, Intel CPU was a requirement. My desktop development/gaming system? Ryzen + NVidia.

I’m on NVidia with blob driver, KDE Plasma on wayland on Arch. Yeah, standby to resume is like 50/50 the screen will come back. I just turned off stand-by and kept screen sleep only.

But I’m on desktop so less of a problem for me than it would be for a laptop user.

OK, look back at the original picture this thread is based on.

We have two situations.

The first is a dedicated system for providing navigation and other subsystems for a very specific purpose, with very specific hardware that is very limited. An 8 bit CPU with a very clearly known RISCesque instruction set, 4kb of ram and an bus to connect devices.

The second is a modern computer system with unknown hardware, one of many CPUs offering the same instruction set, but with differing extensions, a lot of memory attached.

You are going to write software very differently for these two systems. You cannot realistically abstract on the first system, in reality you can’t even use libraries directly. Maybe you can borrow code from a library at best. On the second system you MUST abstract because, you don’t know if the target system will run an Intel or Amd CPU, what the GPU might be, what other hardware is in place, etc etc.

And this is why my original comment was saying, you just cannot compare these systems. One MUST use abstraction, the other must not. And abstractions DO produce overhead (which is an inefficiency). But we NEED that and it’s not a bad thing.

Exactly my point though. My original point was that you cannot compare this. And the main reason you cannot compare them is because of the abstraction required for modern development (and that happens at the development level and the operating system you run it on).

The Apollo software was machine code running on known bare metal interfacing with known hardware with no requirement to deal with abstraction, libraries, unknown hardware etc.

This was why my original comment made it clear, you just cannot compare the two.

Oh one quick edit to say, I do not in any way mean to take away from the amazing achievement from the apollo developers. That was amazing software. I just think it’s not fair to compare apples with oranges.

It does. It definitely does.

If I write software for fixed hardware with my own operating system designed for that fixed hardware and you write software for a generic operating system that can work with many hardware configurations. Mine runs faster every time. Every single time. That doesn’t make either better.

This is my whole point. You cannot compare the apollo software with a program written for a modern system. You just cannot.

Wait a second. When did I say abstraction was bad? It’s needed now. But when you are comparing 8bit machine code written for specific hardware against modern programming where you MUST handle multiple x86/x86_x64 cpus, multiple hardware combinations (either via the exe or by the libraries that must handle the abstraction) of course there is an overhead. If you want to tell me there’s no overhead then I’m going to tell you where to go right now.

It’s a necessary evil we must have in the modern world. I feel like the people hating on what I say are misunderstanding the point I make. The point is WHY we cannot compare these two things!

Except it’s not nonsense. I’ve worked in development through both eras. You need to develop in an abstracted way because there are so many variations on hardware to deal with.

There is bloating for sure, and of course. A lot is because it’s usually much better to use an existing library than reinvent the wheel. And the library needs to cover many other use cases than your own. I encountered this myself, where I used a Web library to work with releases on forgejo, had it working generally, but then saw there was a library for it. The boilerplate to make the library work was more than I did to just make the Web requests.

But that’s mostly size. The bloat in terms of speed is mostly in the operating system I think and hardware abstraction. Not libraries by and large.

I’m also going to say legacy systems being papered over doesn’t always make things slower. Where I work, I’ve worked on our legacy system for decades. But on the current product for probably the past 5-10. We still sell both. The legacy system is not the slower system.

I did a routine upgrade on my mbin server, where I had an old version with changes I made myself.

Well turns out I upgraded something (probably redis) that broke symfony that broke everything.

So I had a fun afternoon upgrading to the latest mbin version. I mean I needed to anyway but my hand was forced.

Yep sometimes an innocent looking update will change your weekend plans.

Anyways, any reason not to use ssh?

It’s a different world now though. I could go into detail of the differences, but suffice to say you cannot compare them.

Having said that, Windows lately seems to just be slow on very modern systems for no reason I can ascertain.

I swapped back to Linux as primary os a few weeks ago and it’s just so snappy in terms of ui responsiveness. It’s not better in every way. But for sure I never sit waiting for windows to decide to show me the context menu for an item in explorer.

Anyway in short, the main reason for the difference with old and new computer systems is the necessary abstraction.

And twitter / x most likely have a similar rule. And musk could have achieved similar by just banning the account.

There’s no reason to give it to Jones. He doesn’t own any of the applicable ip any more. Maybe there’s an argument if he tried that.

Now see, I don’t like it but the simplest thing would be for musk to ban the account right now.

He’s not circumventing anything then. Ownership of the account was transferred, that twitter, a private entity chose to ban it is their business.

It’s not worth arguing about. The website and ip is the juicy thing, being able to make satirical info wars programming and products is where it is at. Maybe, maybe there would be a case if musk allowed Jones to make a new account with the same name or otherwise handed it to him.

No. If valve cancel your steam account, you lose your games and they owe you a big fat zero.

Same goes for all accounts with assets attached.

Sad to say, but in this case it is musk’s platform and his rules.

If he wants to go home and take his ball too. Tough luck.

Doesn’t seem right, but it is legal and already happened on multiple platforms multiple times.

I don’t think “creatives” are more active than anyone else. For the number of users, the threadiverse has a higher ratio of activity I think and it’s generally more positive here than places like reddit. Maybe it’s a similar thing. The demographic that are likely to move, are just making similar content and that makes it look more active.

Sort of when it clicked for me, was when I realized that your code needs to be a tree of function calls.
I mean, that’s what all code is anyways, with a main-function at the top calling other functions which call other functions. But OOP adds a layer to that, i.e. objects, and encourages to do all function calls between objects. You don’t want to do that in Rust. You kind of have to write simpler code for it to fall into place.

Yes, this ties in with what I’m saying though. You need a paradigm shift in your design philosophy, which is hard when you come from a Cx background.

I also think that in OO there shouldn’t be much cross contamination. It happens (and it happens a lot in my personal projects to be fair) but when well designed it shouldn’t need to be. In C# for example it should be the case that rather than a function owning a resource, a class should. So when using an object between classes you take it as a reference from a method in one class and pass it into a method to another class rather than call that class and make it a dependency of that class too. In this way you would have a one way dependency, rather than a two way.

This kind of thinking has moved into creating objects in rust. Also I think yes within a same class the idea of a function (that isn’t static) accepting an object that is part of the class that was returned by another function in the case class feels very wrong from a Cx style point of view. If we knew we were going to do that, we’d just make it a class level variable and use it in both functions.

Like I say, just another way of thinking and I’m not there yet.

The bingo one actually uses crossbeam channels instead of mutexes, so that’s nice. I haven’t looked too closely at it though.

The C# original uses the equivalent of read/write locks. But I found it problematic to work the same way in rust and then discovered the communication option was far easier to implement and actually avoids holding up threads. So went with that. Much easier and much faster in execution I think.

I don’t think you can do too much about the Spectrum one if you want to keep the two threads, but here’s what I would change related to thread synchronization. Lemmy doesn’t seem to allow me to attach patch files for whatever reason so have an archive instead… dblsaiko.net/pub/tmp/patches.tar.bz2 (I wrote a few notes in the commit messages)

In reality I’m never likely to remake the CPU project in rust. Firstly because I’d need to entirely re-engineer it because it’s extensively using hierarchical classes, which just doesn’t work the same way in rust. And I’m not sure traits would allow me to do things in even close to the same way. But if it were to work with a CPU emulator they need to share the memory, and also the CPU needs its own thread.

So basically it’s channels indexed by channel number and name? That one is actually one of the easy cases. Store indices instead:

This was something I was thinking about the other evening. I needed to get the index to remove some other data anyway and wondered if I’d be better off having a master vector and usize lookups for that data store. It’s one extra lookup, but by index it’s the tiniest and the speed isn’t a real issue anyway. It’s replacing perl scripts pulling data from mysql. It couldn’t possibly run slower than that :P

Thanks for the commentary though and I think I’m going to make the changes to use indices to lookup data. I wanted to re-order the way things are done a bit anyway. The problem I see potentially is that the lookups probably need to be regenerated every time I delete something. But actually I think that since it is rebuilt from a file on load. Maybe I just remove the items from the lookups and leave them in the vector. Since next run they would be gone anyway.

Going to second other comments. Even without archinstall. It feels like it will be harder than it is. Umm, just save yourself a bit of time and configure the network and install a console editor (nano/vim whatever) while in the chroot (if going full manual). It was a minor pain to work around that for me.

There are pages discussing how to do everything (helps to have a laptop with browser, or a phone to look them up). At the end, you generally know exactly what you installed (OK no-one watches all the dependencies), and I’ve found any borks that happen easy to fix because I know what I installed.

The current thing I’m working on (processor for iptv m3u files) isn’t public yet, it’s still in the very early stages. Some of the “learning to fly” rust projects I’ve done so far are here though:

https://git.nerfed.net/r00ty/bingo_rust (it’s a multi-threaded bingo game simulator, that I made because of the stand-up maths video on the subject).
https://git.nerfed.net/r00ty/spectrum_screen (this is a port of part of a general CPU emulation project I did in C#, it emulates the ZX spectrum screen, you can load in the 6912 byte screens and it will show it in a 2x scaled window).

I think both of these are rather using Arc<RwLock<Thing>> because they both operate in a threaded environment. Bingo is wholly multi-threaded and the spectrum screen is meant to be used by a CPU emulator running in another thread. So not quite the same thing. But you can probably see a lot of jamming the wrong shape in the wrong hole in both of those.

The current project isn’t multi-threaded. So it has a lot of the Rc/Rc<RefCell> action instead.

EDIT: Just to give the reason for Rc<RefCell> in the current project. I’m reading in a M3U file and I’m going to be referencing it against an Excel file. So in the structure for the m3u file, I have two BtreeMaps, one for order by channel number and one by name. Each containing references to the same Channel object.

Likewise the same channel objects are stored in the structure for the Excel file that is read in (searched for in the m3u file structure).

BTreeMaps used because in different scenarios the contents will be output in either name order or channel order. So just better to put them in, in that order in the first place.

The problem with rust, I always find is that when you’re from the previous coding generation like myself. Where I grew up on 8 bit machines with basic and assembly language that you could actually use moving into OO languages… I find that with rust, I’m always trying to shove a round block in a square hole.

When I look at other projects done originally in rust, I think they’re using a different design paradigm.

Not to say, what I make doesn’t work and isn’t still fast and mostly efficient (mostly…). But one example is, because I’m used to working with references and shoving them in different storage. Everything ends up surrounded by Rc<xxx> or Rc<RefCell<xxx>> and accessed with blah.as_ptr().borrow().x etc.

Nothing wrong with that, but the code (to me at least) feels messy in comparison to say C# which is where I do most of my day job work these days. But since I see often that things are done very different in rust projects I see online, I feel like to really get on with the language I need a design paradigm shift somewhere.

I do still persist with rust because I think it’s way more portable than other languages. By that I mean it will make executable files for linux and windows with the same code that really only needs the standard libraries installed on the machine. So when I think of writing a project I want to work on multi platforms, I’m generally looking at rust first these days.

I just realised this is programmerhumor. Sorry, not a very funny comment. Unless you’re a rust developer and laughing at my plight of trying to make rust work for me.

I’ve been using thinkpads as a work laptop since they were branded IBM Thinkpad. So, I have nothing further to comment.

This does tally up with what I’ve been hearing. Where I’m at there’s been a few hires straight into senior. I’ve not heard of an official junior freeze. At the same time it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new one.

The problem, as I commented prior, is that if we no longer bring in junior devs to gain this kind of experience, we lose the flow of junior -> senior. But in most places, the people making the decisions won’t consider anything beyond the end of the current fin year.