jessermeyer

There are two degrees of separation here though: The software vendors and then the linux distros.

If you sell software that requires your clients to upgrade their system-wide security stack, so they might not. If it is statically linked, no need for them to.

There is obviously a trade off here, but categorically speaking, new releases introduce new bugs and security exploits too.

Not at a high level that is easy to express in a HN post, sorry. It's one of those "the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details".

Those are basically contradiction of terms. Orienting the program structure around the data necessarily requires control over memory layout and how it is interpretted.

We almost never hit technical limits in the renderer, streaming systems, etc. Instead, we found that pushing gameplay systems beyond the prototype stage would require more and more effort, as we'd encounter deep engine bugs, or the tooling simply did not cater to our use case.

We ended up implementing more and more tooling outside the engine, and there comes a point where UE4 became a IO/Rendering system. We'd've been happier if the engine were modular in design from the get-go.

I've worked on several. You haven't heard of them because none of them shipped due to issues with commercial engines (in particular Unreal Engine 4).

They are very difficult to use if the game play semantics are complicated and require lots of interaction with world state or world geometry. If you're making a common FPS, they are great.

There is always a minimum cost of moving data from one place to another. If you're computing on the GPU, the data must arrive there. The problem is that PCIE bandwidth is often a bottleneck, and so if you can upload compressed data then you essentially get a free multiplier of bandwidth based on the compression ratio. If the decompression time is faster than having sent the full uncompressed dataset, then you win.

But yeah, direct IO to the GPU would be great but that's not feasible right now.

I carefully chose my word "function" instead of "existence".

Give me two different universes where cognition exists but where the fundamental constants differ. Would you expect the ability to perform syllogism would be fundamentally biased to reflect the constants which brought about their existence?

I don't know how much bias the fine structure constant has on the function of cognition, but I think we can all agree that constats incompatible with higher level biological function like cognition would never produce arguments in favor of their typicality.

I think a single employee netting even a single digit percentage in a year's worth of effort in improved performance for all of Google is an astonishing accomplishment. Trivializing a "million dollars per month" improvement just says so much about how little programmers here realize their worth to technology companies, and intellectualize ways to justify it.

Early retirement and, to use rui's word choice, "earn a comfortable income" are not inconsistent.

But to your credit it does sound that rui saved Google (vastly) more money than they ever paid him.

Knuth had serious doubts in his college days, but ultimately decided it was "OK to believe in something unprovable." Which to me speaks to his humility.

Mathematicians I personally know well are stoutly religious. They describe the world of number and form and structure with the same kind of language the clergy describe God, and so there is some sense in which these are felt as aspects of the same thing.

I also know a number of engineers who are deeply religious, perhaps encouraged by recognizing "design" in nature, seemingly requiring a designer.

In my conversations with these people, their faith, while socially speaking is Christian, the specifics have hardly anything to do with traditional or orthodox theology. It's, as I perceive this, the only acceptable social structure available to them to live out these deep feelings of beauty and harmony in community.

If an engineer at a FAANG company reduced their global link times by even 10% they'd be promoted into early retirement.

Mold is an order of magnitude faster.