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swiftcoder

@swiftcoder@mastodon.social

Recovering software engineer. Graphics, Procedural generation. Future farmer.

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mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I am (unfortunately) on a Macintosh. A program is segfaulting, and I need to run in a debugger to find out why. I run lldb executable-name, and then "run". It prints:

error: the platform is not currently connected.

I do not know what this means. Googling for this error message turns up various things involving iOS and XCode, but I am not using either of those things, I am using lldb at the command line.

What should I do?

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@glyph @mcc yeah, I recommend always setting up new Macs from scratch. Even without silicon changes, I’ve had so many problems like this with cruft leftover from older OS versions…

swiftcoder, to rust
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

I guess a stealth MacOS update decided I don't get to use anymore... How's your Monday?

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

Reinstalling rustup from scratch appears to have fixed things, but I can't say I'm thrilled that my operating system decided to spontaneously excommunicate my compiler toolchain

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@mo8it Fedora never let me connect to WiFi, so it's a bit swings and roundabouts 🤣

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Say I am developing an Android app. I have the source, I built it myself.

It has a problem where occasionally Android pops up a box saying "[App] isn't responding. * Close app * Wait".

I would like to know what the app is doing when this occurs— stack traces, 1 second of profiling, something.

I expect if I tap "Close app", it should drop something useful in the logcat. I've nabbed a logcat within 120 seconds however and see nothing involving "crash" or "ANR".

What should I do to debug this?

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc The most common approach would be to hookup the app to Firebase Crashlytics, and then your ANR traces will end up in the cloud.

I think your odds of getting ADB connected and logcat running before the ANR falls out of the buffer are slim-to-none. Although connecting ADB over wifi and just having your PC continually spool logcat to a file the whole day might work?

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc Have you explored the /data/anr/ directory? In theory a copy should be stored there for each ANR (unclear what the timeline for eviction is, however)

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc hah. Almost all my Android experience is from the OS development side of things, so our devices tend to all be rooted

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

This is cool. A lot of people misunderstand what “real time” means — generally, “late is an error”. For example, he wants to use it in games, where at 60 fps, you have 16.6ms to do all computations and render the screen. Lateness causes lag. Or worse, in a fly-by-wire steering system, late means difficulty steering a multi-ton vehicle.

in a RT system, you need to be able to statically calculate how long all compute will take. Most memory allocators don’t work like that

https://github.com/pcwalton/offset-allocator?tab=readme-ov-file

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@kellogh And these days, 16.6ms is luxury. People keep shipping 240Hz gaming monitors - 4.1ms per frame 😱

swiftcoder, to random
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

All my USB-C to HDMI cables appear to only be capable of 4K 30Hz... So much for "one connector to rule them all"

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

One of these cheap USB-C to HDMI cables tops out at 4K 30Hz, the other goes all the way to 4K 120Hz. Can you tell which is which?

fasterthanlime, to random
@fasterthanlime@hachyderm.io avatar

Told Siri "let's listen to some new stuff" and I noticed only 20 minutes later that it's been playing this 70s fusion band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuff_(band)

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@fasterthanlime I tend to think they are also much less willing to hang their brand on non-determinism than many other tech firms. LLMs are cute when they work, but the failure modes are also pretty severe. Siri may be dumb, but he's also quite consistent...

onepict, to random
@onepict@chaos.social avatar

I have one pint of good milk, but somehow I managed to order UHT bio milk 🤦‍♀️

Apparently I can make bread and yogurt with it so it's not a total waste but I can't abide UHT in tea.

Ugh. Hopefully this pint is good.

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@onepict it's weird, almost all milk here in Spain is UHT as well. Have to go to the big supermarket in the city to reliably find fresh milk

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@onepict Could be, but these days the powerr grid is as relaible as anywhere else, and I live on the edge of a dairy farming region, so I don't get it at all 😅

floooh, to random
@floooh@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

About last retoot: Interesting!

Mach is taking a shot at a WebGPU-like API in pure Zig, with Zig as shading language:

https://machengine.org/pkg/mach-sysgpu/

IMHO this makes a lot of sense, the native WebGPU implementation libraries turned out to contain quite a bit of fat.

TBH looking at Dawn I was rolling around that idea in my head too (WebGPU without the shader compiler isn't all that much code, and I would have moved that offline like in sokol-gfx).

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@floooh Part of the problem here is that WebGPU took some decisions that make runtime shader compilation mandatory (i.e. there are pipeline states that have to be implemented by changing the shader compilation on various backends). If those states could be eliminated, everything could become a lot simpler

swiftcoder, to random
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

There’s a voice in my head suggesting a $4,000 MacBook upgrade to… be able to build machine learning docker images without hating my life. Feels like we took a wrong turn somewhere along the way

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

One part of me says “this is the primary tool of my trade, amortised $1,000/year is damn cheap”. The less rational part says “if I were a carpenter, many of my tools would outlive me”

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

‪(side-effective of growing up poor, I guess. Took me a full day to introspect why I feel this way about a work-related purchase. Can‘t ever turn the “save a penny” voice off, even in cases where it doesn’t make sense)‬

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@jonikorpi I'm with you on the downside of laptops. Unfortunately, I'm fairly locked into the Mac ecosystem for web+ML, and desktop macs are perenially worse than their laptop counterparts...

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

call me pedantic, but if you're going to make a change that causes merge conflicts in 82 files, you should first send a headsup to the team, and possibly offer to help resolve merge conflicts

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@kellogh when I was at FB, they were actively modifying the programming language we were using (Hack), by doing monorepo-wide automated refactors of all code as syntax features were introduced/deprecated.

You really didn't want to let your local branch sit stale for more than a couple of days 😱

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

does someone know if a VM-based tool to containerize code execution? (but like, actually contained). mainly for 3rd party code

i’m thinking that docker’s API is nice, but containers aren’t as contained as VMs are. maybe something based on firecracker?

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@kellogh what level of malice are you looking to contain? And how much much control over the 3rd party code do you have (I.e. do you control the build and packaging process)?

toxi, to generative
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng avatar

Re-added/ported more agent behavior building blocks today, incl. path following and path attraction (both for open/closed geometries). In total there're now 7 freely combinable behaviors, each weighted and so usable as soft/hard constraint.

Here's an example of path following (here a Hilbert curve) and separation only...

Several hundred agents (represented as colored circles) are moving along a 2D path (Hilbert curve). Each agent also has a white line overlay to visualize its current velocity vector

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@toxi I have had it in the back of my head to build a text renderer on this principle for ages...

djlink, to random
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

please don't make default game settings uncapped FPS/no vsync, a lot of people won't check for those settings and just puts extra pressure on hardware.

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@sebsauvage @djlink Less so these days. 120Hz displays are becoming common even for mobile and non-gaming desktops. Ideally turn on vsync by default, and let the driver deal with capping to the monitor refresh rate.

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@sebsauvage @djlink I personally don't like my wordprocessor (or my mouse pointer) to run at 60fps, given the option. Some folk seems to perceive it more or less than others - like the awful flickering of 50Hz lightbulbs 🤷‍♀️

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@sebsauvage @djlink It still makes movement/animations choppy for some folks. You can hide this with a nice motion blur, but now you end up spending the GPU processing you saved by cutting the frame rate

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Here's a picture. Quickly count how many players are on each of the two teams, then answer the poll in the following comment.

swiftcoder,
@swiftcoder@mastodon.social avatar

@TomF You've apparently located the one form of colour-blind that I do not suffer from 😂

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