volta87

> Why would you even use floats when dealing with geometric data?

Perf? Which hardware does have support for math on fixed-integers? (e.g. sqrt, inverse sqrt, ray triangle intersection accelerations, etc.)

AFAIK branch prediction enables the attack by enabling speculative execution, but the data is not leaked through the branch predictor, but rather through the timing differences observed due to speculative loads bringing data to cache.

I guess if you remove the branch predictor, you might avoid spectre while keeping caches, but I think you can keep the branch predictor and remove caches to also avoid spectre.

The downside I see in keeping the caches is that you keep the _source_ of the timing differences, so an attacker just needs to find a different attack vector to create a new timing attack.

If you remove the caches, you kill the source of most timing attacks.

I'm not an expert on this though.

Use a CPU that does constant-time everything (e.g. has no caches). Most of the super-simple in-order RISC-V cores that are available on github will do. Just put one of them in an FPGA, and you are set up.

Most of those CPUs are designed by CS or EE students taking a computer architecture class, so... in a sense... one can argue that defending against Spectre-like attacks is actually super simple: just use a simple CPU design.

To actually become vulnerable to Spectre, you need a very complex CPU design, so in the same way, it can be argue, that making a CPU vulnerable to Spectre is actually hard, since it takes a lot of work to create such a CPU design.

Now, if what you want is a CPU that's both fast and secure, then I'm sorry to tell you that such thing cannot exist. Those two goals are at tension. You can either get a F1 or a tank, but no vehicle that offers the same amount of protection as a tank is going to be able to compete against a F1 car, and vice-versa.

The problem isn't tax evasion per-se, but rather logic inconsistencies.

For example, I've met quite a bit of people that don't want to pay any taxes. Yet they all want for them and their goods to be able to use roads for free, roads that are built and maintained with taxes.

That's actually ok: two incompatible goals just means you have to make a trade-off; welcome to engineering.

The problem is that none of them understand why they can't have both. In their minds, there is no trade-off to make, because they want both, feel entitled to both, and having both should be possible.

No idea why they are not able to understand that both things are incompatible. If there is some option that allows both that I am missing, they didn't manage to explain that.

LLVM does support tbaa! and noalias! metadata.

> How often does benchmark code have a function that takes two pointers that could potentially alias each other? If it's as rare as I think it is, it might not have that much of an impact on Rust's position in the benchmarks game.

Most C++ STL algorithms take iterators, that in many cases are just pointers in benchmarks because these often only deal with arrays. Hell most C standard APIs (e.g. memcpy) take multiple pointers.

I think that being able to write down the lifetimes in the language is beautiful.

You don't have to do it, but if you want to do it, being able to do so in a way that's verified and enforced by the toolchain beats doing so in a documentation comment.

Now every time I read a doc string saying that I need to "deepcopy" something in Python for some API usage pattern to work properly I cringe.

Probably because legislators have better things to do.

I don't speak on behalf of them, I saw this on Twitter back when it happened, e.g., check Aaron Turon's twitter feed from back then.

They truly rethought the driving experience right there.

which 23yo bmw do you own?

> Marginally so, under certain use cases.

My reality disagrees. I live in a place with a lot of snow, and pretty much see cars that have sliden off the highway every week. All of them are BMWs. And they are all required by law to have winter tires at least.

Winter tires do help, but there is a huge difference between RWD with good tires and 4 wheel drive (notice also that 4WD and AWD is not the same thing, and there are also different qualities).

(it just so happen that here, BMWs are the most popular rear wheel drive cars)

> Also, Tokio would not have been possible without Aaron Turon's and Alex Crichton's early involvement.

This feels like a slap in the face for some reason.

Aaron Turon is an extremely talented individual (their PhD thesis was a landmark contributionn). They are super kind and one of the nicest human beings I've ever met. They led the Rust Project until their involvement with Tokio caused them to drop off from Tech.

Alex Crichton is an extremely talented, kind, and hyperproductive individual, who after their involvement with Tokio dropped all async/await work and luckily "refocused" on WebAssembly.

If one is going to recap the road towards Tokio 1.0 and mention all the people that have left the Rust async ecosystem or Rust all together, you might as well spell things out.

There is a big difference between a BMW or BMW with M sport packet, and a BMW M.

The BMW Ms are actually developed by a different company (the BMW M company, which is different from the BMW company).

For some reason people think of them as being extremely similar, but anybody that has driven a BMW 3xx and a BMW M3 knows that there is a world between them.

Was there a blogpost? Or when/where was this announced?

Would be cool to be able to parametrize namespaces.

Same thought.

You are argumenting with a fallacy.

The OP argumentation might be incomplete, but is at least solid argument for why we won't need a quantum operating system.

If you believe there is or could be a need for a quantum operating system, _explain why_. If you don't know, that's ok.

But arguing that "The OP argument cannot be correct because other people made incorrect predictions about other stuff in the past" is pointless and useless.

Maybe some application of quantum computing appears in the future that requires a quantum operating system, or maybe there is one such application that already exists today and we don't know about. I don't know of any, and like the OP I also think of Quantum Computers as "accelerators" (like GPUs, FPGAs, Xeon Phis, ...) for certain class of problems.

> But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car"

Tesla disagrees. Full Self Driving is coming in 2015 ergh 2016 ergh 2017 ergh 2018 ergh 2019 ergh.. end of 2020...

Now the Tesla fanboys are saying that it will come in 2021.

Just look at the world we live in: it contains 6 billion people. If a small fraction of it is into buying a car or a game that will only work as advertised a decade after they buy it, you might still be able to sell the millions of cars, games, etc.

If you check out the news, the amount of people that's delusional is not a "small fraction", but actually closer to ~50% of the population.

I bought AIAIAI headphones decades ago, they work with all tech I use: I just plug them in, and they just work. No need to pair them with bluetooth, no nothing.

Since they are modular, they also have been a breeze to upgrade and repair. Need different cables? Better microphone? Its 20$ to upgrade that part of the headphone. Want to add bluetooth support? Can do that as well.

People buying and gifting pair of > 200$ headphones every year as if speakers are some kind of tech that gets outdated.

If you really care about audio quality and the environment, just buy a good pair of upgradeable headphones. They'll last you your whole life.