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LH0ezVT

LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works
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My legs are okay, and I gained Brouzouf

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It’s been a few years, but I’ll try to remember.

Usually (*), your CPU can address pages (chunks of memory that are assigned to a program) in 4KiB steps. So when it does memory management (shuffle memory pages around, delete them, compress them, swap them to disk…), it does so in chunks of 4KiB. Now, let’s say you have a GPU that needs to store data in the memory and sometimes exchange it with the CPU. But the designers knew that it will almost always use huge textures, so they simplified their design and made it able to only access memory in 2MiB chunks. Now each time the CPU manages a chunk of memory for the GPU, it needs to take care that it always lands on a multiple of 2MiB.

If you take fragmentation into account, this leads to all kinds of funny issues. You can get gaps in you memory, because you need to “skip ahead” to the next 2MiB border, or you have a free memory area that is large enough, but does not align to 2MiB…

And it gets even funnier if you have several different devices that have several different alignment requirements. Just one of those neat real-life quirks that can make your nice, clean, theoretical results invalid.

(*): and then there are huge pages, but that is a different can of worms

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No, not really. This is from the perspective of a developer/engineer, not an end user. I spent 6 months trying to make $product from $company both cheaper and more robust.

In car terms, you don’t have to optimize or even be aware of the injection timings just to drive your car around.

Æcktshually, Windows or any other OS would have similar issues, because the underlying computer science problems are probably practically impossible to solve in an optimal way.

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Get a nice cup of tea and calm down. I literally never said or implied any of that. Why do you feel that you need to personally attack me in particular?

All I said was that a supposedly easy topic turned into reading a lot of obscure code and papers which weren’t really my field at the time.

For the record, I am well aware that the state of embedded system security is an absolute joke and I’m waiting for the day when it all finally halts and catches fire.

But that was just not the topic of this work. My work was efficient memory management under a lot of (specific) constraints, not memory safety.

Also, the root problem is NP-hard, so good luck finding a universal solution that works within real-life resource (chip space, power, price…) limits.

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Except that the degree I did this for was in electrical engineering :(

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I wonder if it is possible to confuse the cameras. Figure out what criteria make a price lower (skin color? time of day? no idea), then dress up like that / wear a mask with a face printed on it or something.

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As someone else already said, you don’t see the target anyway. You focus on your sights, not the target, because unlike stuff like hunting, it’s much more important to line up the shot perfectly than keeping track of what you shoot at (the discs tend to not run away). And at 10m, the palm-sized target is just a black circle.

Iirc most people aim below the target on purpose (and adjust the sights) anyway. That stuff confuses the hell out of me when I pick up someone else’s gun. Is it set to aim dead center? Is it set to aim just below? Is it set to aim at 4.20 mm to 69° down to compensate for that dude’s preference? Who knows!

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Let’s carve our memes into stone and bury them for future archaeologists.

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Around 10k years before us, we developed from hunter-gatherer cavemen to neolithic city builders with irrigated farms, organized religion and and a feudal society in like 1000 years. That is also pretty quick. Sure, pyramids took a bit longer. But while pyramids are pretty damn impressive, no pyramids does not mean an “uncivilized” society.

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But isn’t that what genres like cyberpunk do? Technological progress (A(G)I, biotech, body modifications, true VR, you name it), but society is even shittier than now? Sure, it is to some degree a cautious tale, but I feel there are quite a lot of near-future hard-ish scifi visions around

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