cremer

careful what you wish for, x87's extended precision is what wrote the original bug: 80 bits in registers,64 on a spill, so the value depended on register pressure

ARM and WASM dropped it for a reason, and more bits would not help anyway, a sign is one bit, any rounding step that disagrees at the last bit flips it

his predicates paper opens with "Computational geometers despise floating-point arithmetic" same trick as the CG title: write the sentence a frustrated reader would write, then aren it.. if you like those the Triangle paper is the third one in the same key

Redis sorted sets are probably the most widely deployed example. Redis uses a skiplist for range queries and ordered iteration paired with a hash table for O(1) lookups. Together they cover the full API at the right complexity for each operation

Skiplists also win over balanced BSTs when it comes to concurrent access. Lock-free implementations are much simplier to reason about and get right. ConcurrentSkipListMap has been in the standard library since Java 6 for exactly this reason and it holds up well under high contention

Barely anyone mentioned the "AI agent angle", I mean the situation when an AI agent runs "cat readme.txt" a file with embedded instructions becomes a prompt injection attack. It is the same vulnerability class out-of-band data smuggled through an in-band channel, just targeting the different parser. Terminal security guys have been fighting this for decades and the AI guys are about to rediscover it

The real risk is not that "LLM SQL" is wrong, it is in fact that a man who asked for it can't recognize when it is wrong. Writing a query and knowing when JSON silently doubled your rows are different skills and LLMs are able to give you only one of them (I'm not sure if they really can)

The numbered forms are most useful as a teaching device, not an engineering specification. Once you have internalized 2NF and 3NF violations through a few painful bugs, you start spotting partial and transitive dependencies by feel rather than by running through definitions. The forms gave you the vocabulary. The bugs gave you the instinct..