Tootfinder

from my link log —
Eliminate branches by melding IR instructions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22390
saved 2026-01-01 https://dotat.at/:/J3PP5.html

Eliminate Branches by Melding IR Instructions
Branch mispredictions cause catastrophic performance penalties in modern processors, leading to performance loss. While hardware predictors and profile-guided techniques exist, data-dependent branches with irregular patterns remain challenging. Traditional if-conversion eliminates branches via software predication but faces limitations on architectures like x86. It often fails on paths containing memory instructions or incurs excessive instruction overhead by fully speculating large branch bodi…

from my link log —
Saving Skylab.
https://www.airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/saving-skylab
saved 2025-11-30 https://

Saving Skylab
During launch, the micrometeoroid shield surrounding the Skylab Workshop ripped loose. Designed to protect the workshop from tiny space particles and the sun's scorching heat, its loss caused sunlight to raise internal temperatures to over 130° F, making the station uninhabitable and threatening foods, medicines, films, and experiments that were onboard. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart was responsible for testing a parasol on Earth and developing procedures for deploying it in space in an effort …

from my link log —
Evaluating TCP BBRv2 on the Dropbox edge network.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07699
saved 2020-08-19 https://dotat.at/:/FHLM3.html

Evaluating BBRv2 on the Dropbox Edge Network
Nowadays, loss-based TCP congestion controls in general and CUBIC specifically became the de facto standard for the Internet. BBR congestion control challenges the loss-based approach by modeling the network based on estimated bandwidth and round-trip time. At Dropbox, we've been using BBRv1 since 2017 and are accustomed to its pros and cons. BBRv2 introduces a set of improvements to network modeling (explicit loss targets and inflight limits) and fairness (differential probing and headroom for…