Brendan Dolan-Gavitt Profile picture
Sep 7 12 tweets 4 min read
Heyyy, so remember how I scanned all those x86-64 pkgs to see if they changed the behavior of floating point math related to handling of subnormal/denormals? And how I didn't bother to check other CPU archs because surely it was a weird x86 thing? Well...
Let's just take a quick look through the gcc source to see if there are any other implementations of crtfastmath.c, just to be safe. Oh. Oh no. Image
Well, probably they aren't setting CPU floating point state right? Let's just look at them one by one. How about sparc? Image
My sparc is a little rusty so let's check the manual to find out what "nonstandard" means... well this looks familiar. Bit 22, when set to 1, caus...
How about MIPS? Also enables flush-to-zero via a hardware register. Image
Alpha? Same story. Maps denorms to zero as well as underflowed outputs. Image
Itanium was Intel's famously ambitious (and failed) attempt to redesign an architecture from the ground up. Did they take the opportunity to fix this bit of global state? Nope. Image
[The comment above that constant is my own annotation; the original was undocumented, so I had to go to the IA64 manual to decode the bitfield.]
Loongson is a CPU architecture from China, that is pretty similar to MIPS, and indeed it is similar in this respect too: Image
But enough with all these old and weird obscure CPUs. How about ARM, which had shipped 100 billion chips as of 2017? I bet you can guess whether it, too, sets FTZ. (community.arm.com/arm-community-…) Image
Well, ARM is a product of its time (1985) and really a victim of its own success. When they had a chance to redo things in the move to 64-bit (AArch64), maybe they changed this? Welp. Image
In conclusion, I wish I hadn't looked

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More from @moyix

Sep 5
Uhhhhhh Image
But the issue it links to is 10 years old?? github.com/pypa/pip/issue…
Friends, I may have flown too close to the sun on this one
Read 13 tweets
Apr 11
First attempt at a decompiler using the new dataset, training going okay so far! I need to hack up fairseq so it saves more often than once per epoch, it makes me nervous to go 18+ hours between checkpoints
First epoch finished, will have to see how it did 👀
Also starting a run w/ bigger model. I think I'm still doing something wrong, because I can only fit ~300M params on 2xA6000 GPUs (48GB each) even with model parallelism and AMP. But during training it claims I have like 30GB free (gb_free=32.2). Config: gist.github.com/moyix/3182dc46…
Read 5 tweets
Apr 8
BIG personal news! My Erdős–Bacon number is now 7:
— My Erdős number is 4: Me→Wenke Lee→Richard Lipton→Noga Alon→Paul Erdős
— My Bacon number is 3: Me–<After We're Over>→Chris Mollica–<Westworld>→Evan Rachel Wood–<Digging to China>→Kevin Bacon

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91…
Many thanks to my brother @Peckinpal, who abused his personal connections to put me in as an extra on "After We're Over", directed by @forty9ernate. You can see here that I was clearly a key part of the film Image
If anyone with a defined Sabbath number wants to collab let me know, I have 0 musical ability aside from whistling
Read 4 tweets
Feb 10
I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions. It didn't get very many of them right (10/100), but it's almost spookier to me that it gets most of them *approximately* correct??
Full result table here; settings were temperature 0.1, top_p = 0, top_k = 0 gist.github.com/moyix/267d122f…
I also just added results and easier-to-parse data files for both the original and expanded (1000 questions) results. Don't have time to do lots of analysis right now sadly gist.github.com/moyix/ca4091f1…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 9
Definitely was a mistake not to strongly isolate the build directories from one another. I wonder which package (or part of my own infra) wiped out all the package metadata :P
One interesting thing might be to put some canary files one level above the build dir and then yell loudly if those files are gone after the build finishes. Might shake out some fun "oops, building this package deleted my home directory" bugs
Right now all the official build infra (as well as the reproducible build projects) run builds in an isolated chroot, so I can easily imagine issues like this going undetected for a long while.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 29, 2021
It's under-appreciated how simple and elegant the OS X UI experience is. In just a single glance here I can learn absolutely nothing about where all my disk space went
It calls to mind the classic design principles of ed(1): "generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity" Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
Another elegant touch is the way the UI gently keeps users on the path of righteousness. Open source weirdos may complain about their "freedoms", but I sleep more soundly knowing that Big Mac is watching out for me–there will be no rogue disk inventorying in this house! UI screenshot: "Disk Inventory X" cannot be opened
Read 4 tweets

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