mtklein

I don't think it's too clever at all. Notably it works with both signed and unsigned i. Frankly if I see anyone doing anything other than this, they're wrong.

My first skim had me thinking he sent the package in the 90s; sadly it was just three weeks ago.

That's kind of exactly what floats are. You store the log2 of the number, a bit for its sign, and in what remaining bits you have left some fixed-point scaling between adjacent powers.

That's how we felt answering performance questions of our own... we needed to know if our work was important, and the tools help keep that focus locked in. I'm no longer on the Skia team, but like, welcome to the Skia team; if you use nanobench, you're legit. :)

I'm the same user name @gmail.com if you ever have any questions. It's been a while but I'd be happy to try to page things back in for a good cause.

As a former Skia contrib, this is cool as heck to read. It's exactly the sort of optimization work we had in mind when we wrote that SkRecord system, and I'm pleased that you were able to make use of nanobench. Back in those days we had just a few small optimizations that we could apply, mostly trying to eliminate unnecessary saveLayer() calls. Very cool to see it done in a modern way with Lean.

Decades ago they used to pull completely off the can (think Jimmy Buffet "stepped on a pop-top").

I should barely be listed as a co-author on what Claude does for me. Hiding Claude's contribution feels about as true as a combover to me.

That's kind of what reddit used to feel like when it was brand new. Can you believe it?

I have found qwen 3.8's coding quality using opencode to be similar to claude or gpt from 6-9 months ago, except much slower.

My rule of thumb is that integer ops cost 1 cycle except divides, floats 3 but maybe divide is a bit more, then integer divides are like infinity at 20+ cycles that cannot be amortized by vectorization.

When you code simd it's best to assume the integer divide instruction does not exist. Just an impossibility, if you need to divide ints, rethink your whole program.

They're typically like a 3-cycle op, right? Obviously that's not zero, but as far as floating point ops get it's a cheap as it gets, like an add, mul, fma, that sorta thing.

Don't forget SubEthaEdit! That was the first multiplayer editor I recall.

Never found a use for this sort of thing once novelty wore off. :/

I don't think there is necessarily one ideal middle ground here. It still feels to me like what's best is a function that depends on who and when.

I see it as something like a personal gradient descent. You're working on a problem, there are solutions down there somewhere, and you can kind of feel the gradient of the tools-and-techniques ground around you. Any way you walk means you're investing time improving some skill or another. So you should go the way that personally feels to you will best get you moving in the direction that you want to go.

For some people it's obvious LLMs are competent coders, getting better, sticking around... and those people should lean into that gradient. For some people what's obvious is nearly the exact opposites of all that, and I'd encourage those people to also follow their gradient/heart/nose down the path of sharpening their personal traditional coding skills. Some people are in a relatively flat area where nothing is obvious, and need to explore and maybe just keep doing their best to hedge with a bit of both.

Yeah it makes me sad too. It's a one-way veil, no going back once I experienced the new magic.

Sometimes I pop back into a terminal, mkdir, git init, crack my knuckles to do some all-natural hacking and the sadness sets in before the hour is up... "why am I insisting on doing this the long way? I know this project would be better with me in a different role now."

Coding for me has always been a balance of process and ends. Getting done what I wanted done mattered most, but I can't pretend that I didn't also enjoy being the moving parts of that process. And I am most grateful for what I learned by throwing myself over and over against problems I didn't quite know how to solve. There's a satisfaction to doing a thing well that I always love being a part of, still do, anything, even doing the dishes or laundry.

And just recently with Opus I found myself having some really joyously manic days and weeks, making calls, picking tech, designing APIs, insisting on quality, keeping agents spinning. But Fable just kind of came in with "oh, I can do that all for you too. You can relax," and that was both exactly what I wanted and what started making me realize this had all finally caught up to me.

I never wanted to be management, but I can't unsee that I am more effective now playing Fable's boss than I was the last few months as TLM of a squad of Opuses, and that was more effective than just coding myself the way I love.