GeertB

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

The program terminated just a few moves into the game when there were plenty of legal moves left. Also, it is surprisingly hard to play chess as a human when there is no checkered board.

I don't quite understand how multiply doesn't require addition as well to combine the various partial products.

The article makes it sound like the Tesla Semi is physically infeasible. Yet, it is in active use on a sufficient number of long-haul routes that ignoring this proof of existence undercuts some of the central points the post tries to make.

The combination of higher efficiency, regenerative breaking, and some regulatory wiggle-room such as slightly higher allowable gross-weight (2000 lbs in the US, and 2000 kgs in the EU), together with reduced maintenance cost and time significantly affect the economics of trucking.

As regulatory frameworks price in more externalities of internal combustion engines, such as the climate and health effects of their emissions, burning diesel will no longer make economical sense. All road transport will end up being battery-electric. The declining cost of owning and operating electric vehicles compared to internal combustion ones will reach this point even without regulatory changes, just at a slower pace.

monochrome

Can't help myself: whenever I see Windows 3.11, I have to compute the difference between it and Windows 3.1. So, I fire up the calculator from the Accessories folder, and compute 3.11 - 3.1. The result: 0.00. Try it! :-)

How did you handle games where Stockfish would castle or promote?

For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!

To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!

I wonder if this will improve latency and signal strength

The title here says 100M, but the actual presentation says 1M?

That one has a special place for me. I was a consultant then and invited to join the chorus even though I wasn't at the more professional level the other cast members were. We did a performance in London and one in St Louis. Still, it was a lot of fun, and how I got to meet my spouse 25-ish years ago.

This game is so fun! I spent entirely too much time playing it just once last night, and got to the 1024 piece in the first run. I don't know how long it took me, but it was long. With 2048 my runs are far quicker.

A smart compiler would have used the test (x & (x - 1)) == 0 to verify that x (assumed non-zero) is a power of two. Don't know why Clang didn't do that here.

This article really confuses the problems that legacy car manufacturers have with switching to EVs, with EVs in general. EVs work, just look at countries farther ahead in the transition, or ask the 1.8 million people who bought a Tesla last year. The transition is in full swing.

Tesla's excellent supercharger network is already more than sufficient for roadtripping in the USA and Europe, and now is open to non-Tesla EVs. This piece of writing is just a poorly researched bit of trash.

That's quite the bandwidth-delay product at 3.3GB.

Actually, that's mostly false. If you can charge at home, you'll have a fully charged car in your driveway every morning. With the Tesla charging network, you really can charge no matter where you want to go. Typically after 4 hours or so of driving, I'm ready to take a bathroom break, stretch my legs and get a coffee. By the time I'm back the car is charged to 80% or so, good to go for another 250 miles or so.

It seems that the proposed system is an improvement over plants, but not necessarily over the Sabatier reaction driven by energy captured by solar cells. Is that right? How would these compare?

The new satellites will orbit the EU.

You probably work too many hours, and actually can more often say 'no' than you think. Delegate some of your responsibilities. Work smarter, not harder. Be transparent with your manager about your night classes and the need to change some schedules. If your manager is sensible, they'll take 80% of your known performance at our level of experience over uncertainty and a long ramp to reach the equivalent of your 80%. Sure, there is a chance they won't accept, but it might be a risk worth taking. Oh, and by going to school you surely show that you want to grow.

In many cases, software is like a tool. I provided a screwdriver: generally it's used for good, but sometimes it's used for assembling a bomb. By providing the screwdriver, I have no influence on how it's used. For me, it's important that most software I write is free software with few restrictions on its use. That way, I ensure that my screwdriver is available for all good purposed, even though I acknowledge that I cannot prevent it from being able to be used for evil. It's a tricky balance, but I trust that the good uses of new tools outweigh the evil. A war on screwdrivers won't prevent missiles targeting civilians.

In particular, if you're developing Free Software or Open Source Software, and a company wants to hire you, it is _expected_ that they're OK with you continuing to do so. If any contract says otherwise, explain that you need to keep doing what you're doing in order to stay at the level of expertise that you're at. If a future employer would not agree for you to keep doing that, you shouldn't sign.

When I started studying CS in 1990, people told me that "programming" was a dead end: 3rd generation languages wouldn't require programmers and anyone would be able to bend computers to their will without programming. I didn't heed their advice... We're farther from retiring the profession of Software Engineer than we were 30 years ago. But, is that a good thing?

Why not just keep the wire attached to the Yubi-key, but leave it electrically floating (high-impedance state) and have the board ground it whenever it needs to be pressed? No need for mechanical triggers...

Their goal is absolutely to drive down cost. Right now they're battery-constrained, so it would not make sense to sell them to third parties. If Tesla can only sell a given number of cars, it makes financial sense to sell them at a higher price. The extra revenue serves to build more factories and grow faster. As production keeps scaling, average selling prices will keep going down. If they'd attempted to start with a $25K car, they'd producing no cars today.

Having been there, and having bitten often enough, I can confirm that most compilers just try to generate the most conservative code possible for volatile accesses. Their semantics are crazy/inconsistent, so you can't reason about them, and high performance code won't use them. Nobody will ever be interested in making them work/perform well.

C++ atomics in their various memory models are different in that they have well-defined semantics, used in high performance code and people do care. You're right that there have been bugs (and probably still are), but at least you can _argue_ that something is a bug if there is a coherent definition. Optimization of atomics, such as merging barriers, is still in its infancy.

After 3 weeks of waiting, I just got my new iMac. Paid $4399 before tax. Old specs, same price as new one with improved camera, 2 additional cores etc. :-( I can't use Zoom with the camera of the old model, without using a 3rd party tool, as the color balance is way off making everybody purple/red. Sad.

I know of one programmer who went from writing software to building cars, rockets and a solar grid. I hear he's doing quite well.

I really like the super high efficiency at the important multiple-of-4-byte increments. Using 7 base-24 characters to encode 32 bits is 99.7% efficient. However, I'd recommend using 7 base-24 digits followed by a blank as standard output format. This would allow for efficient 8 character <=> 32 bit conversions. Also, I think padding output to a multiple of 7 characters would be good, for similar reasons that it's good for base-64. Now you can concatenate encoded streams like you could byte streams, and recover on decode. As multiples of 32 bits are so common, padding would be used little in practice. On input, it would be fine to accept unpadded base-24 sequences, but valid base-24 output should always pad to a multiple of 7 chars (excluding the blanks that should be just for readability and not significant otherwise).

However, I strongly dislike the arbitrary mapping between character values and base-24 digits. There is a strong reason for using the order 2345679ABCEFGHKRSTWXYZ, which is that now encoded values compare the same as the original binary values. I did appreciate the 0x00000000 == ZZZZZZZ equivalence, but consistent ordering is just way more important IMO. Also 2222222 looks a lot like ZZZZZZZ. Just saying.

Battery management systems deal with this by using some energy to heat the pack. So dealing with cold temperatures is just a measure of insulation and some vampire drain. While driving, or parked in a garage, there are no issues of course. Note that Norway is the European country where Tesla cars are most popular, so the problem seems to be nonconsequential in practice.

This is the right model for insurance: the potential reduction of claims incentivizes the car manufacturer to make cars safer and less expensive to repair.

Flip side: from its telemetry, Tesla can derive how safely you drive your car and adjust premiums accordingly. Is this good or bad?