Hacker News: speedstyle

New comment by speedstyle in "Everyone should know SIMD"

speedstyle — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 01:33:03 +0000

To your virtual memory comment, the kernel can only do as it's told, but allocators can indeed tell it to shuffle pages around in virtual memory. On Linux that's `mremap` [0], and `realloc` implementations [1] use it for large enough Vecs (apparently 128kiB for glibc and musl). macOS' libmalloc will try to map new pages that extend large allocations in-place, but memcpy elsewhere if existing virtual mappings are in the way. I don't think Windows' HeapReAlloc does either, but they might reserve a larger virtual region and incrementally commit it or something to similar effect.

[0] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mremap.2.html

[1] https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/malloc/mallocng...

New comment by speedstyle in "How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks"

speedstyle — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:48:08 +0000

Yes, this is noticeably worse than the original. The first sentence is rhythmically stilted and carries less impact. "is" to "acts" is not stylistic, we're no longer discussing the nature of the object but its behaviour. 'squeezing into a generic shape' is a transformation, each piece of writing stamped into conformity, whereas 'forcing into the same generic shape' must be pulled from a grammatical reading where all writing is being packed into one box. I think "writing produced by a lazy prompt from someone" is a wash, depends if they want to further detach the writer's agency from the result (and it still isn't produced by the prompt); I do prefer "unwilling" for the original tone; but it's certainly blander writing overall. If I came across it I'd even discount some of the metaphors and choices that are still present – since it's clearly written by AI, or a marketing copywriter, I'd guess they were "polish" rather than attempting to convey any particular connotation or nuance.

New comment by speedstyle in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

speedstyle — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:16:29 +0000

They commissioned 78 GW of new capacity in 2025, but actual coal-fired generation fell slightly (by 90 TWh, ie 10 GW). It might rise again, but it's expected to peak by 2027–28. And of course they added 440 GW of renewable capacity, 64% of global installations.

I certainly agree there's other motives (renewables even net them significant trade, like EVs) but it's not as though 'caring about' climate impacts requires selfless virtue, they stand to lose $trillions/year like everyone else.