derf_

1. The divisor is not actually a compile-time constant, but comes from a small set. You can compute a table of corresponding constants and use the same code for every divisor.

2. You want to do many divisions by many different divisors (whether known at compile-time or drawn from a small set, like above, or pre-computable and applied many times... think of something like a quantization matrix for image coding, for example). Here Robison easily SIMDifies, whereas an algorithm that needs different code paths for every divisor is going to be much more difficult.

Regarding the lack of native signed-unsigned multiplies, as someone who does a lot of multimedia processing, I find the set of available multiplication instructions on x86 and ARM to be rather shamefully limited (especially x86). I recall a colleague who used to optimize for VideoCore (the GPU in a Raspberry Pi) saying that when he first started he was astounded that it had 80 different multiply instructions, but within a year or two he had used basically all of them.

That is not the kind of thing that inspires a person to stick around.

      Some operators (the unary operator ~ , and the binary operators << ,
  >> , & , ^ , and | , collectively described as bitwise operators)
  shall have operands that have integral type.  These operators return
  values that depend on the internal representations of integers, and
  thus have implementation-defined aspects for signed types.

No, it was implementation defined, which is very different. Every implementation you were ever likely to encounter defined it reasonably. Making some of it undefined now has created a bunch of code that uses macros to cast back and forth between unsigned to get the expected behavior (or, for cases where it is provable that the result is representable, to replace the left shift with a multiplication and hope the optimizing compiler translates it back, because compilers now warn on any left shift of a negative value, despite the fact that the semantics are supposed to be the same as the corresponding multiplication now).

In other words, it created a mess for basically no reason.

This is all obviously very specific to the locality where you live, but at least where I live, property values were recently reassessed to account for the large post-pandemic increases. Individual homeowners were generally stuck with these reassessments, while commercial properties, especially those managed by large property management groups, were organized and successfully petitioned to reduce those assessments in disproportionate numbers. So the balance of power was not equal to start with.

Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.

That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.

This should not have been a surprise.

[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.

It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.

He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.

There have been over 70 incidents of overt domestic default since 1800. The United States defaulted in 1790, when a portion of the interest it owed was deferred for 10 years, and technically defaulted again in 1933 when it abrogated the gold clause.

I was really happy Thomas Davies added quantization matrices to the spec, because if he hadn't, I would have had to. Fortunately, he did a good job. I am glad someone is finally using them. Don't sleep on per-segment quantizer deltas, either.

Source: I lead Mozilla's technical contributions to AV1.

Unlike a thumbnail, higher-resolution layers can be predicted from the lower-resolution layer, so those bits are not wasted. That is not possible by layering <img> elements.