Recent submissions

Comment · 6 months ago
An interface can have many ipv4 addresses as well. It's just not that common, so many people believe they'd need vlans to achieve that.
Comment · 7 months ago
well.. openflow is pretty much dead, too inflexible, too slow. The whole control/user plane split is an attempt of the classical router vendors to keep their proprietary boxes. It adds complexity as it requires to synchronize the state of some controller with some data plane box.

P4 was a great idea, but there's not much hardware that supports it.

fd.io / vpp is an impressive stack for software-only routing. Like all SW-only solutions, it suffers from high power consumption and packet rate variability. At today's packet rates, you always have to ask 'how many CPU instructions / cycles are required to perform this or that function per packet'.

Comment · 10 months ago
Hm, some things compilers do during optimization would have been labelled AI during the last AI bubble.
Comment · 11 months ago
It's much simpler. In the EU, truckers have to do mandatory 45 min breaks after 4 1/2 hours of driving. With the latest truck generation, this is enough time to recharge to get through the rest of the shift. 400 kW charging is sufficient in this scenario. No wasteful expensive H2 or fancy battery swapping technology required.
Comment · 11 months ago
IQ tests are a bit absurd if one looks at the changing definitions of intelligence over the past century.

Someone in the 1920s/30s would call the ability to solve equations or play chess well as signs of high intelligence. Not so long ago, translation of natural languages was considered a task requiring a good level of intelligence.

Each progress in AI changes the definition of intelligence as we realize that a machine finally able to do task X is not really as intelligent as we thought it had to be.

And today the AI/robotics industry struggles to build a machine that can perform the job of a room cleaner. Beating grand masters at chess was far easier.

Comment · 1 year ago
I did once fly as a guest with a winch start, and yes it is something. The ascend is pretty steep and the acceleration is powerful. The pilot did not find good lift and we had to land shortly after. My stomach did not like his curving around looking for lift, so I wasn't too unhappy about the short flight.
Comment · 1 year ago
My late father was a maintenance technician for those things. He hated it when programmers did smart instruction placement to optimize drum timing. When the drum speed was a little off, they called him to calibrate it so their programs would run fast again.
Comment · 1 year ago
forth would come to mind, some people have build surprising stuff with it though I find it too low-level.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Actually, every browser supporting webrtc datachannel supports SCTP over UDP.
Comment · 1 year ago
I don't understand the difference to TCP here. If the path is not congested but the receiving endpoint is, the receiver can control the bandwidth by reducing the window size. Ultimately, it is always the sender that has to react to congestion by reducing the amount of traffic sent.

RPC is something of a red flag as well. RPCs will never behave like local procedure calls, so the abstraction will always leak (the pendulum of popularity keeps swinging back and forth between RPC and special purpose protocols every few years, though).

Comment · 2 years ago
AFAIK, an ebpf function can only access memory it got handed as an argument or as result from a very limited number of kernel functions. Your function will not load if you don't have boundary checks. Fighting the ebpf validator is a bit like fighting Rust's borrow checker; annoying, at times it's too conservative and rejects perfectly correct code, but it will protect you from panics. Loops will only be accepted if the validator can prove they'll end in time; this means it can be a pain to make the validator to accept a loop. Also, ebpf is a processor-independent byte code, so vectorizing code is not possible (unless the byte code interpreter itself does it).

Given all its restrictions, I doubt something complex like a graphics driver would be possible. But then, I know nothing about graphics driver programming.

Comment · 2 years ago
"Schematics work really well for capturing information that's independent of time, .." This spells out what always irked me about graphical software.
Comment · 2 years ago
The fun really starts if you have a CPU using big endian and a bus using little endian..

Back in the late 1990s, we moved from Motorola 68k / sbus to Power/PCI. To make the transition easy, we kept using big endian for the CPU. However, all available networking chips only supported PCI / little endian at this point. For DMA descriptor addresses and chip registers, one had to remember to use little endian.

Comment · 2 years ago

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