abainbridge

5 ms·

1.
by abainbridge 17d ago
Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the book anymore.
2.
by abainbridge 1mo ago
There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turned black, the P
3.
by abainbridge 4mo ago
I'd have no idea how to find him. But I think it'd be a fruitless task anyway. I'm sure they'd have no memory of what, to them, was a moment as mundane as any other that day. I've definitely had people recount a sha
4.
by abainbridge 4mo ago
I think I have an observation that defies the info on that page. That page was written around the time that STEVE (an aurora related phenomenon) was first named. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEVE I mention this becau
5.
by abainbridge 5mo ago
For a few years I worked in the team that wrote software for an embedded audio DSP. The power draw to do something was normally more important than the speed. Eg when decoding MP3 or SBC you probably had enough MIPS to keep up with the stre
6.
by abainbridge 5mo ago
> seems like x86 and the major 8bit cpu's had the same speed, pondering in this might be a remnant from the 4-bit ALU times. I think that era of CPUs used a single circuit capable of doing add, sub, xor etc. They'd have 8 of th
7.
by abainbridge 5mo ago
Those aren't the only resources. I could imagine XOR takes less energy because using it might activate less circuitry than SUB.
8.
by abainbridge 6mo ago
> Code is formal, and going from C to assembly is deterministic. OK, this is the main thing. Going from C to assembly is not deterministic in a sense because different compilers can produce different output. But the behaviour of the ge
9.
by abainbridge 6mo ago
> A spec is an envelope that contains all programs that comply. Creating this spec is often going to be harder than writing a single compliant program. This perfectly explains the feeling I had when, 20 years into my career, I had to sta
10.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
I wasn't comparing the two studies. I was just asking what the first sentence of the abstract of study 1 meant when it appears to be a false statement given study 2's result. Usually this is because I don't understand somethi
11.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
The abstract begins, "Growing evidence supports early eating to control appetite and energy balance". What does that mean? My unskilled reading of it is that there is recent evidence that eating breakfast helps with weight loss. B
12.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
> try using obscure CPUs I tried asking Gemini and ChatGPT, "What opcode has the value 0x3c on the Intel 8048?" They were both wrong. The datasheet with the correct encodings is easily found online. And there are several correc
13.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
In the UK the wholesale price was about £80/MWh in 2025. The retail price was about £270/MWh + a standing charge. If you factor in the standing charge, an average user paid about £344/MWh. So the cost of generation was only a
14.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
Doh. Thanks.
15.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
We're seeing this galaxy as it was 280 million years after the Big Bang. But the universe didn't become transparent to photons until 100 million years after that ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(c
16.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
Yep, I think it is. The point is there's almost no history of oral peptides, other than stomachs destroying them. FTA: "So to summarize the state of the art in oral peptide delivery: there are exactly two FDA-approved products tha
17.
by abainbridge 7mo ago
The British government continued to negotiate with Hitler after Kristallnacht (November 1938). They only stopped once he invaded Prague in March 1939.
18.
by abainbridge 8mo ago
Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct... I thin
19.
by abainbridge 9mo ago
That wouldn't make me happy. If the sharpie on the tape said it was bad, I'd still look at it, sniff it and probably eat it. Certain foods scare me though. eg there's a common claim that boiled rice shouldn't be kept for
20.
by abainbridge 9mo ago
Edit: I think that was too strong. I don't have any real knowledge of this subject. The explanation in the article seemed reasonable to me. That is all.
21.
by abainbridge 9mo ago
> The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit. I know. I mainly just wanted to link that video because it is awesome. The article does explain how the Inca did it - only the front edges are tight fitting. The gaps
22.
by abainbridge 9mo ago
Pounding stone seems reasonable to me. Obviously I don't have any proof or even strong evidence but I saw a video that changed my perception of what is possible. It showed two old men making a millstone with hand tools: https:/&#
23.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
Good point. I guess there are more cases than just this one where I'd like to be able to tell the compiler I don't care about rounding behaviour and would prefer the fastest code. Like -ffast-math but for integer operations. I don
24.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
Fair point. It doesn't do the optimization if you ask to optimize for size '/Os' either.
25.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
Ooo, I'd never thought of using & like that. Interesting. > (also note you got the endianness wrong in your hand-optimized version) Doh :-)
26.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
Ah, yes, good point. I think this is a nice example of "I didn't notice I needed to tell the compiler a thing I know so it can optimize".
27.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
eg 4: int foo(char const *s) { if (s[0] == 'h' && s[1] == 'e' && s[2] == 'l' && s[3] == 'l') return 1; return 0; } The outputs 4 cmp instructions h
28.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
Nice. Is the best way to think of optimizing compilers, "I wonder if someone hand wrote a rule for the optimizer that fits this case"?
29.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
Hmmm, really? Switching compiler seems sufficient: https://godbolt.org/z/xnevov5d7 BTW, the case of it not optimizing was MSVC targetting Windows (which doesn't support LD_PRELOAD, but maybe has something similar?
30.
by abainbridge 10mo ago
The examples are fun, but rather than yet another article saying how amazing optimizing compilers are (they are, I already know), I'd probably benefit more from an article explaining when obvious optimizations are missed and what to do

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