mdspan

First time hearing about failfs. Does it have a niche use case or is it just for testing?

Operating systems code can definitely afford runtime checking if it's not too expensive in terms of performance. The Linux kernel has a WARN_ON macro that does exactly this. The tradeoff is worth it in a lot of cases if you're exchanging a small amount of performance for greater debug-ability or security.

Critical hardware bugs occur an order of magnitude less frequently than critical hypervisor/kernel bugs, which is why they always make the news. In general, they're also more difficult to exploit. We haven't seen any serious spectre or meltdown malware in the wild almost a decade later.

I think until something hardware-based like CHERI becomes widely deployed (which seems extremely unlikely in the near to mid term given), we're going to keep seeing VM escape CVEs pop up indefinitely.

That's not something that's unique to C++ though. For example, Rust has the same issue.

Right, which makes the one-shot task cost the same as the permanent solution in that case. So if you wanted to do this task even twice, you would still be better off creating the tool once and just using it. Imagine if proof assistants like Lean didn't exist. Research with AI would get a whole lot more expensive if it had to re-create Lean every single time you asked it to prove something.

That's not necessarily true. Vibecoding a simple JSON -> YAML converter to translate a 2MB JSON is going to be much cheaper than including that JSON in a prompt and burning hundreds of thousands of tokens. Besides, there's lots of cases where the math simply favors a bigger one-time cost rather than paying fees in perpetuity.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "don't interact with hardware much anymore"? If you compare modern drivers with similar ones from 20 years ago, for example, you'll find the modern ones tend to be quite a bit more complex.

Companies frequently get early access to frontier models.

Yeah, Framework seems to fit that niche well. Only thing is that Framework isn't a tech giant like Lenovo so I imagine it would be more difficult to source replacement parts.

I really miss the customization that older laptops offered, especially the socketed CPUs. I remember putting a i7-3840QM in my T430 and having it shut down due to overheating every few minutes to the point where I had to install the heat sink from the GPU model. Was fun tinkering around with it and I wish modern laptops had a similar level of hackability.

Worth noting the gap between floating point vs integer division isn't that bad on newer CPUs these days. On Zen5, for instance, DIVSD has a latency of 13 cycles vs 16 cycles for DIV.

I think they mean storing just an exponent instead of an exponent + mantissa. Makes multiplication much easier to implement.

Rite of passage for AI companies.