(Intro thread ⬇🧵)
Hai , I'm Fouad! I'm an adult (2003) and I use they/any
This account is sfw but I might interact and follow suggestive and NSFW accounts (no repost/posting nsfw content thou)
Tech/Blorbo/DND/Art/Game dev twt please interact! New friends are always welcome!
I love looking at old crazy ideas in expired computer patents.
Modern CPU Branch Predictors are invisible. You, as a dev, can’t really see *what* paths the CPU is guessing…it’s all a bunch of AMD/Intel/Apple secret sauce.
For a brief moment in the 80s, there was this wacky proposition of storing the prediction IN the opcodes themselves.
If you don’t understand why that’s insane, bear with me for a second.
Imagine your binary has an ordinary if statement, that compiles down to a jump if equal instruction (JE). You run your program, and let’s say the if statement evaluates as true 99% of the time.
This patent suggested the CPU would then EDIT the running binary, in memory, to a new “JE-probably-taken” instruction, which upon subsequent execution would just assume true.
That might not sound that wild, until you realize the entire structure relies on the branch predictor itself being self modifying code, which you’d then be able to see / evaluate with a debugger! In other words, you’d have a compiled binary, that would then radically change at runtime where you could see all the hints!
The idea ended up not working; a few years later CPU’s started gaining instruction caches, and the round trip back and forth to rewrite the binary in memory would be much too slow. Weird to think about though, to me it feels like it would have been kinda JVM-y / V8ish but at a much much lower level of abstraction.
Il a changé la façon dont on pense les paysages. Presque personne ne connaît son nom.
J'ai appris avec tristesse la disparition de Dominique Soltner.
Ce nom ne vous dit peut-être rien, mais ses travaux ont transformé la compréhension des paysages agricoles.
UN FIL 1/8
I got payed legal minimum for this matrix now I have to spend the 4 other months of my internship trying to find patterns . Bit it's okay I get to spend my time however I want so it's worth it
@haichogoris AH OUI ça dois peux être être Anubis ou quelque chose à cause du wifi du CROUS qui fait croire à tout les sites que je suis une IA. Merci du coup j'ai crû que j'avais enfin perdu la boule à cause de la recherche scientifique
Désolé les gars j'arrive pas à savoir si j'hallucine ou si c'est vrais donc je demande au peuple mais c'est moi au HAL a un écran de chargement avec une anime girl dessus des fois? Ou c'est la fatigue qui a enfin raison de moi? Je jure c'est la deuxième fois que je la vois
informing oomfs I also have a priv I am much more active in but it's kinda boring slop like it's not priv priv it's just cool kids club where I yap about things far less presentably than on here