AernaLingus [any]

  • 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: May 6th, 2022
  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Poop KnifeEnglish
    19·
    2 days ago

    Davis states that the original source of the tale was Olayuk Narqitarvik. It was allegedly Olayuk’s grandfather in the 1950s who refused to go to the settlements and thus fashioned a knife from his own feces to facilitate his escape by skinning and disarticulating a dog. Davis has admitted that the story could be “apocryphal”, and that initially he thought the Inuit who told him this story was “pulling his leg”.

    That’s a long payoff for a practical joke, but totally worth it.

    Also, unsurprisingly, they won the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize in Materials Science (lol) for this one (video of the ceremony, Ig Nobel “lecture” from the lead author (also the primary pooper))

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettoMemes@midwest.social•Been there
    01·
    2 months ago

    I went through a phase in my late teens/early 20s where I had major bladder shyness. There were a few times in especially high pressure situations (e.g. right after a movie or during a break in a football game) where I just stood there for 30 seconds with no results and was like “welp I guess I’m just gonna have to hold it until I get home.” I honestly don’t think I had any major psychological shift, since I was and still am majorly anxious, but thankfully it waned over time and I can now piss in peace.

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettoLinux@lemmy.ml•The Linux kernel has been accidentally hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores for nearly 20 yearsEnglish
    191·
    10 months ago

    There’s a variable that contains the number of cores (called cpus) which is hardcoded to max out at 8, but it doesn’t mean that cores aren’t utilized beyond 8 cores–it just means that the scheduling scaling factor will not change in either the linear or logarithmic case once you go above that number:

    code snippet 
    /*
 * Increase the granularity value when there are more CPUs,
 * because with more CPUs the 'effective latency' as visible
 * to users decreases. But the relationship is not linear,
 * so pick a second-best guess by going with the log2 of the
 * number of CPUs.
 *
 * This idea comes from the SD scheduler of Con Kolivas:
 */
static unsigned int get_update_sysctl_factor(void)
{
	unsigned int cpus = min_t(unsigned int, num_online_cpus(), 8);
	unsigned int factor;

	switch (sysctl_sched_tunable_scaling) {
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_NONE:
		factor = 1;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LINEAR:
		factor = cpus;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LOG:
	default:
		factor = 1 + ilog2(cpus);
		break;
	}

	return factor;
}

    The core claim is this:

    It’s problematic that the kernel was hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores (scaling factor of 4). It can’t be good to reschedule hundreds of tasks every few milliseconds, maybe on a different core, maybe on a different die. It can’t be good for performance and cache locality.

    On this point, I have no idea (hope someone more knowledgeable will weigh in). But I’d say the headline is misleading at best.