superjan

It tells you that human attention can be gamed.

You do pay taxes.

In order of priority, I’d say:

1. If you write CRUD apps, make sure that the database does the heavy lifting.

2. Take note of algorithm complexities, use hashtables as appropriate, and write good hash functions when you start using hashtables/dictionaries.

3. Avoid pointer-heavy datastructures. In high level languages like Java, an object reference is a pointer dereference that can stall the CPU waiting for memory. This is sometimes optimized, but you can’t depend on it. The true zealots call this “data oriented design”.

4. If you write C/C++,rust, or the like, you might want to learn to read assembly. Godbolt.com is a fun way to learn. Note that not all instructions are equally fast: Long division and trigonomic functions are slower than integer adds, even when they are both a single instruction.

5. The next level is probably going for vectorized instructions: SIMD (ARM Neon, AVX). The most original applications can be found at lemire.me: a professor exploring optimizing things like JSON parsing using the latest processor features.

I can imagine it is not the same everywhere. I guess I have an active local chapter of editors. Given that I have 2 comments disagreeing and none concurring I guess this is an exception.

They can’t do so automatically. Osm Editors must approve. Apparantly OSM fears legislation when people copy info from google maps. They like to see evidence, like street sign photos. In my limited experience anyway.

You can’t make smaller chips features with photonics. Visible light photons have a wavelength between 400 and 800 nm, much larger than current chip features. When you go to higher frequencies they get smaller, but they are really difficult to produce and control.

Do we known what ink is used?

Is the camera roll excluded? I bet I am not the only one who has a passport picture in there. I don’t know about other people’s camera rolls, but I bet it is occasionally more saucy than mine.

(Sorry for not testing. Chrome-hater)

I’m not sure we are talking about the same virus, but for the version prevalent in northern europe, there’s a vaccine.

That is effectively what Uber did. Internet and GPS make taxi companies and “Knowledge” unneeded for taxi drivers. This destroyed local (badly run) monopolies, but also job security for taxi drivers.

What I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two.

For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.

It did not work that way for me. My music interest has been rekindled since Spotify.

You can also hunt via Spotify. Songs and artists can help you find curated playlists (by other artists or fans) where you discover new artists.

Everynoise.com is also a great start, but these playlists are no longer maintained.

There is also a huge audience of people who want to hear “elevator music” tuned to their activity at hand and do not care about who or what made it. Spotify obviously wants those customers. I don’t mind these people subsidising my hobby, but I hope Spotify will continue to cater to my interest too.

Not neccesarily: https://www.ifixit.com/News/113171/iphone-air-teardown

When telling a story through film, changing what depth is in focus is a great way to move the viewer’s attention, without the need for cutting to a different angle or camera movement.

A nice (short!) video on this topic is this one from Chalk Talk: https://youtu.be/QDdOoYdb748?is=vCFGroHUPwZP7Dqm

Off topic: The very first assignment in this game is called “oil tank holiday”: fly the chopper to unguarded oil tanks, shoot and watch them burn, and then fly home. No enemies. Just learn to fly and shoot.

I apply this in testing code. After you write some code, try to think of the absolute minimal test to prove that your code does anything at all without crashing. These are my “oil tank holiday” tests. It is always humbling to see those fail.

How about the infamous iOS hack with a VM implemented in a JBIG2 PDF? https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero...

You know, if can change code without overhead to ends of the pipeline, using the language & library of my choice, I’d do this too. For many of us this isn’t always the case.

It’s faster for 3 digits and more. 3 digits is not galactic scale. Otoh, if over half of your numbers are single digits, it will lose to other implementations. I think that is more often the case that we’d like it to be.

What you can do in C# today is convert any unsafe pointer to Span whenever you get your hands on it, and pass around slices. You can still drop down to ‘fixed’ when it turns out you need it for performance.

The way I understood the 80% is that is the margin on the actual product. 36% is what remains after the “investments” in moonshot projects nobody asked for.

I’ve learned this lesson over the years. It is quite common that users make a screenshot of the error with their phone, and send it on to support with hardly any details. The fact that errors become recognizably different is also an improvement: the user and support staffer can recognize recurring errors, and notice patterns.

It reminds me of facebook. Staff was locked out of the office due to the outage they were supposed to fix.

Phish? It turns out to be a band: https://phish.com/

In a perfect world, there would be a stable version of chrome, that would get fixes, but would crucially not get the new features that introduce new vulnerabilities. Not a fun job, I know, but with today’s coding agents it wouldn’t even be an unreasonable ask.

My favorite USB ethernet adapter is a lowly 100 MBit one that works everywhere without requiring driver downloads.

The nuclear option is to disallow it to store your watch history. You get only a search bar and your subscriptions.

I switched to this. It is less fun, but also less of a timewaste.

For Anthropic, it is valuable that they control the scheduling, so they can move jobs around to use the infa when it is relatively quiet. If you let customers choose the time, a lot of work will start at whole hours.

Might as well plug this recent Criminal Podcast episode: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-358-the-formula-3-27-2026

TLDL: During prohibition, US government required adding 5% methanol to industrial alcohol, hoping that this would stop bootleggers from selling it as liquor. It was sold anyway, resulting in many deaths.

Both of you are right. There is one more edge case: if you commit to buying electricity in advance it might cost you extra to not consume it. It would still be in your interest to use the power at a net marginal loss rather than not using it and paying a fine for failing the contract.