DavidVoid
Joined 8 years ago
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362
Member since
Apr 14
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
I wish more books would come in the same format as the Macmillan Collector's Library series of books. They're tiny hardback books with thin pages.
I just checked my copy of Moby Dick, it's about 770 pages, but the book has a very pocket-able size of just 15.6×10×3.5 cm (6.2×4×1.4").
Comment · 3 months ago
Seems to be run by a married couple of (maybe) burnt out account managers. That, in combination with some AI help, explains the empty "LinkedIn slop" writing style I think.
It's not often I comment on blog posts, but this is honestly one of the most meaningless blogs I've ever read (not counting those fully AI-generated SEO ones). I don't get why it ended up so high on Hacker News; it has an interesting title I guess, but pretty much no substance.
Comment · 4 months ago
The game Overwatch is a pretty great contemporary example of this [1]. It has some excellent fluid animations, which look really weird if you freeze frame them.
Comment · 5 months ago
I don't think GPUs ever had branch prediction in the first place. You can however run into poor performance due to thread divergence, which is a similar kind of issue (with much less black magic).
Comment · 5 months ago
Yes. I'm sure it would feel nice to pay off my apartment loan, but the interest rate on that is 2.75%, which is way lower than what I can (reasonably) expect to make on the stock market.
Comment · 5 months ago
> Product owners and engineers could initially collaborate on this spec and on test cases to enforce business rules. Those should be checked into the project repositories along with the implementing code. There would need to be automated pull-request checks verifying not only that tests pass but that code conforms to the spec. This specification, and not the code that materializes it, is what the team would need to understand, review, and be held accountable for.
This just sounds like typical requirements management software (IBM DOORS for example, which has been around since the 90s).
It's kind of funny how AI evangelists keep re-discovering the need for work methods and systems that have existed for decades.
When I worked as a software developer at a big telecom company and I had no say in what the software was supposed to do, that was up to the software design people--they were the ones responsible for designing the software and defining all the requirements--I was just responsible for implementing that behavior in code.
Comment · 6 months ago
A couple of quotes from one of the employed baristas (translated from a Swedish local news article) [1].
"I'm worried every time there's a delivery, I never know what she's ordered."
"I like it. At the interview, Mona didn't care that I have dialect or I don't have a doctorate. For her, the most important thing was that I was nice and could make coffee."
If he has learned something from the experiment, it is that it is the middle managers and all CEOs who are at risk of being replaced by AI – not the baristas.
"Without me here, it would have been difficult for Mona."
[1] https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/ai-driver-eget-kafe-i-vasastan-...
Comment · 6 months ago
I don't think so. The cafe is a real place and it's owned by the company mentioned in the article. It was in the local news the other week [1].
If you're going to do an experiment like this, then Stockholm is a good place to do it, since the bureaucracy here is very digitalized.
[1]: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/ai-driver-eget-kafe-i-vasastan-...
Comment · 6 months ago
Considering the size (and significance) of the VSCode user base, it feels like someone should be in charge of ensuring that default behavior doesn't change without good reason.
Does anyone (or any team) have ownership of the extensions/git/package.json file?
Comment · 6 months ago
See also: the distinct shape of the flap and landing gear levers (which are often located next to each other).
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/22680/why-is-th...
Comment · 7 months ago
How do you read a number like 17? "seventeen", small endian.
Language is messy, some more than others [1].
Comment · 8 months ago
There's an old German short film called Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)[1] that I'm fond of. It was a protest film against Napalm and how some companies wouldn't really let their employees know what they were actually working on.
"I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cleaner. But however I try, it always becomes a sub-machine gun.
...
This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This sub-machine gun can become a useful household appliance.
What we produce it depends on the workers, students, and engineers."
That last line is still very relevant today.
Comment · 8 months ago
I like em dashes—and sometimes overuse them—but 37 times is absurd in that amount of text.
Comment · 9 months ago
I would go even further and state that "you should never assume that floating point functions will evaluate the same on two different computers, or even on two different versions of the same application", as the results of floating point evaluations can differ depending on platform, compiler optimizations, compilation-flags, run-time FPU environment (rounding mode, &c.), and even memory alignment of run-time data.
There's a C++26 paper about compile time math optimizations with a good overview and discussion about some of these issues [P1383]. The paper explicitly states:
1. It is acceptable for evaluation of mathematical functions to differ between translation time and runtime.
2. It is acceptable for constant evaluation of mathematical functions to differ between platforms.
So C++ has very much accepted the fact that floating point functions should not be presumed to give identical results in all circumstances.
Now, it is of course possible to ensure that floating point-related functions give identical results on all your target machines, but it's usually not worth the hassle.
[P1383]: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p13...
Comment · 9 months ago
Unless you compile with fast-math ofc, because then the compiler will assume that NaN never occurs in the program.
What is good for the group is not necessarily good for the individual.