Hacker News: MobiusHorizons

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

MobiusHorizons — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:34:09 +0000

By MMIO semantics do you mean explicit load and store instructions? I’ve never felt that pointer reads or writes were lacking descriptiveness here. I would argue the only surprising thing is that they might be optimized out (which is what volatile prevents).

Volatile on a non pointer value is not for MMIO, though, that’s typically for concurrency like with interrupts.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app"

MobiusHorizons — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:33:47 +0000

The UK also has much stricter training requirements prior to being granted a license, among other differences. I don't think we can pin all the differences on the yearly MOT.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Freelang – a Libc-free, direct sys/kernel call language with weird concurrency"

MobiusHorizons — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:06:08 +0000

Sounds very similar in its approach to magic or hiding as golang. Also the no libc approach is similar, although I believe go was forced to use libc on the BSDs and maybe osx due to the syscall interface not being a stable public interface on those targets

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Clusters become personal (like PCs did)"

MobiusHorizons — Sun, 17 May 2026 07:00:39 +0000

I get how running in a container or vm would help with that, but why would you want to cluster multiple of them? Are you isolating the agents from one another?

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

MobiusHorizons — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:43:58 +0000

Does spelling it out help? From memory, it is a security competition where participants compete to gain certain objectives. I think capture the flag may explain how scoring is kept, but it wouldn’t help me find out what it is, given that capture the flag is also just the name of a game people play outside by running, or in laser tag or in certain video games.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

MobiusHorizons — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:51:53 +0000

I’m not a fan of Apple’s monopoly, but is there really much innovation left on mobile? I dont seem to find huge innovations on android. What in your opinion is the App Store preventing?

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Clusters become personal (like PCs did)"

MobiusHorizons — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:41:31 +0000

Wouldn’t it be cheaper / less complex to scale vertically (eg a large workstation or medium size bare metal server) instead of using clusters? My understanding is that clusters are primarily useful when you want to share a resource from a pool across unpredictable usage, which becomes a moot point once the cluster is personal.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut down"

MobiusHorizons — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:29:21 +0000

yep, that is what I meant by the DMCA, but I should probably have been more clear.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

MobiusHorizons — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:41:24 +0000

I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

MobiusHorizons — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:50:00 +0000

Authoritarian has nothing to do with elections, it has everything to do with the ability of people without positions of power to influence those in power without retribution. Most countries have elections, these days, but there is no lack of authoritarian rulers staying in power for decades and jailing or murdering their opposition.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

MobiusHorizons — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:25:26 +0000

Are you saying engineers and scientists don’t own companies? That’s an odd thing to say on a forum that’s basically dedicated to exactly that outcome.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

MobiusHorizons — Wed, 06 May 2026 06:30:09 +0000

I don’t believe they actually make the hardware. I know sytem76 always just rebadges Clevo hardware. You were basically paying for Linux to be preinstalled and for the Linux focused support.

EDIT. Actually it looks like I was wrong about that. They do apparently at least make their own chassis’s unsure about the motherboard’s or screens though.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "UAE Leaves OPEC and OPEC+"

MobiusHorizons — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:40:05 +0000

I believe they are in opec+

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Trump fires NSF's oversight board"

MobiusHorizons — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:04:38 +0000

My understanding is that the national science foundation supports scientific research presumably through grants. Academia is already having a lot of funding troubles, so this likely means things will get worse in the academic sciences.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group"

MobiusHorizons — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:47:40 +0000

The article claims the photo was shared in a private group chat. I think the image only became public because of the arrest and subsequent media interest. BDA from social media posts is a very real risk, but that is not what happened here.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Fuck the cloud (2009)"

MobiusHorizons — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:25:41 +0000

If you actually mean offshore as in located in a different country or especially a different continent, then that is a terrible idea for latency for many forms of computation. There are acceptable use cases, eg when round trips are infrequent and average latency is already high like batch workloads or some forms of LLM, but even then closer compute is pretty much always a better experience.

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

MobiusHorizons — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:26:32 +0000

I mean yes, but that would require demand right? The demand is currently for building data centers, should you just wait around for better things to be in demand? It’s definitely a strategy, but it doesn’t seem like the obviously necessary strategy

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'"

MobiusHorizons — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:07:05 +0000

From the readme:

> Note: This project is still heavily in development and is at an early stage.

> Compiling and running simple shaders works, and a significant portion of the core library also compiles.

> However, many things aren't implemented yet. That means that while being technically usable, this project is not yet production-ready.

Also projects like rust gpu are built on top of projects like cuda and ROCm they aren’t alternatives they are abstractions overtop

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical"

MobiusHorizons — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:40:11 +0000

I think you are conflating microcode with micro-ops. The distinction into the fundamental workings of the CPU is very important. Microcode is an alternative to a completely hard coded instruction decoder. It allows tweaking the behavior in the rest of the CPU for a given instruction without re-making the chip. Micro-ops are a way to break complex instructions into multiple independently executing instructions and in the case of x86 I think comparing them to RISC is completely apt.

The way I understand it, back in the day when RISC vs CISC battle started, CPUs were being pipelined for performance, but the complexity of the CISC instructions most CPUs had at the time directly impacted how fast that pipeline could be made. The RISC innovation was changing the ISA by breaking complex instructions with sources and destinations in memory to be sequences of simpler loads and stores and adding a lot more registers to hold the temporary values for computation. RISC allowed shorter pipelines (lower cost of branches or other pipeline flushes) that could also run at higher frequencies because of the relative simplicity.

What Intel did went much further than just microcode. They broke up the loads and stores into micro-ops using hidden registers to store the intermediates. This allowed them to profit from the innovations that RISC represented without changing the user facing ISA. But internal load store architecture is what people typically mean by the RISC hiding inside x86 (although I will admit most of them don't understand the nuance). Of course Intel also added Out of Order execution to the mix so the CPU is no longer a fixed length pipeline but more like a series of queues waiting for their inputs to be ready.

These days high performance RISC architectures contain all the same architectural elements as x86 CPUs (including micro-ops and extra registers) and the primary difference is the instruction decoding. I believe AMD even designed (but never released) an ARM cpu [1] that put a RISC instruction decoder in front of what I believe was the zen 1 backend.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12

New comment by MobiusHorizons in "What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical"

MobiusHorizons — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:49:42 +0000

That's not really how it works. There are only a few companies on the planet that are licensed to create their own cores that can run ARM instructions. This is an artificial constraint, though and at present China is (as far as I know) cut off from those licenses. Everyone else that makes ARM chips is taking the core design directly from ARM integrating it with other pieces (called IP) like IO controllers, power management, GPU and accelerators like NPUs to make a system on a chip. But with RISC-V lots of Chinese companies have been making their own core designs, that leads to flexibility with design that is not generally available (and certainly not cost effective) on ARM.