https://www.jakef.science/ Recent content on Jake's Blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 28 Apr 2024 17:53:43 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/posts/microcorruption-mania/ Sun, 28 Apr 2024 17:53:43 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/posts/microcorruption-mania/ At first, Microcorruption was just a diversion. Whenever I was bored with my main project, I could spend a few hours on a fun puzzle, learn about buffer overflows, and get a nice hit of endorphins when I solved it. But as the levels became more involved I got sucked in deeper. I would start first thing in the morning, racing against the clock because I wouldn’t be able to fall sleep until I solved it. https://www.jakef.science/posts/return-statement/ Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:22:32 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/posts/return-statement/ I recent completed 18 weeks at the Recurse Center, “the retreat where curious programmers recharge and grow”. It’s customary to write a Return Statement1 reflecting on your experience. Here’s mine. My vague goal when I started RC was to learn “how computers work” at a basic level. I wanted to explore topics in security and low-level systems, and I wanted to stretch my abilities in thinking adversarially, being creative, and designing software. https://www.jakef.science/posts/simd-parallelism/ Fri, 29 Mar 2024 13:24:38 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/posts/simd-parallelism/ Ok, so I sort of buried the lede in the last post: after removing recursion the ray tracer renders the image in 37 seconds, a long ways from the 3+ hours we started with. By the end of this post it will get down to 24.7 seconds, a ~500x overall speedup. The main changes that led to this are: Improvement Speedup Compiler optimization flag 15x Multithreading 6.2x SIMD 2.4x Recursion 1. https://www.jakef.science/posts/recursion-riddle/ Mon, 25 Mar 2024 17:20:08 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/posts/recursion-riddle/ Since I learned about compiler optimization levels, I’ve gone down a deep rabbit hole of CPU performance optimization to make this ray tracer faster. I’ve implemented multi-threading and SIMD. I’ve learned about instruction-level-parallelism and CPU pipelines and memory hierarchy. I’ve read instruction timing tables and disassembled and reassembled. I’ve made a lot of changes that I thought were really clever but instead made my program slower. I’ve also made some changes that I didn’t think would make a difference but led to significant gains. https://www.jakef.science/posts/gcc-wtf/ Fri, 22 Mar 2024 21:47:16 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/posts/gcc-wtf/ Inspired by others at the Recurse Center, I recently built a ray tracer by working through the excellent book Ray Tracing in a Weekend. I’ve been learning C and was attracted to this project because it was complex enough to be interesting but small enough to be time-constrained (my implementation is ~1,000 lines of code); there’s minimal dependencies so I can focus on learning C instead of learning APIs; and the end result is a pretty picture: https://www.jakef.science/about/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 22:30:02 -0400 https://www.jakef.science/about/ Hi, I’m Jake. I’m an aspiring security professional, an experienced data scientist, and a former physicist. I like backpacking and bikes and I have two funny cats. https://www.jakef.science/posts/starting-up/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 19:00:00 -0500 https://www.jakef.science/posts/starting-up/ I’ve never written anything on the internet before. Sure I’ve sent emails, but I’ve never had a website or blog and I don’t post on forums or social media (I’m perhaps the only former Twitter employee who has never sent a tweet). I’ve just never had much to say that hadn’t already been said. And 2024 feels like a weird time to start a blog, given how the internet works these days.