prattmic

I wonder how accurate the locations are in this LiDAR dataset and/or the Queens Giant Wikipedia article. The Alley Pond Park candidate looks suspiciously close to the the Queens Giant, so I wonder if it's actually picking the same tree?

I wonder if they are actually going to start enforcing this. I’ve been receiving emails that my account is at ~200% capacity for a little over 13 years (just went through my email to double check). I’ve logged into my account a handful of times over the years, but certainly not every 12 months.

I’m not sure if you were getting at this by mentioning the ABI specifically, but for Go the “faster size class computation” isn’t purely about the computation itself.

There are lots of cases in the allocator that are conditional on size class (tiny allocations have a bunch of special cases, as do large allocations). Pointer/no-pointer allocations also have lots of special cases.

In the specialized functions, these conditionals become constant and lots of code falls away. We don’t pay the cost for those comparisons anymore, plus since code size is smaller it is now more reasonable to inline callees a bit more aggressively.

Michael also put a lot of time into finding the right balance of code size. At first you want to specialize everything, but that is going to increase code size a lot and thus hurt icache performance. If I recall correctly, our initial version had a code size increase ~4x higher than what we ended up with in 1.27. The final version specializes far fewer size classes yet actually had better performance than the original version.

Regarding the ABI, we definitely see an improvement with static calls vs computing the size class in the runtime. If I recall correctly, it’s the indirect call to the specialized function through a lookup table that stalls the dynamic case.

“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

How does this work when using a US credit card in the EU? I assume the merchant still pays the lower interchange fee, so are the banks just betting that customers won’t do a large proportion of spending abroad?

I do get through lots of books this way!

> 2. Cell service has, at the same time, become ubiquitous in subway tunnels.

Not in New York, unfortunately. All of the stations have cell service, and one tunnel (14th Street L train tunnel under the East River), but everywhere else has no service between stations. It’s an annoying limitation that most cities seem to have fixed by now.