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seventhsonon A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

Switch to a Dvorak layout (with blank keycaps!) and you will have all the bases covered.

seventhsonon B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations

We already have an emergency messaging system called Amber Alert. Just generalize that infrastructure a bit and you're halfway there.

seventhsonon {n} times faster than C

Linus' post is 15+ years old. Much has changed in Intel hardware since then. He was probably right on the money re the hardware available at the time.

seventhsonon Flattening ASTs and other compiler data structures

I once worked on a very large commercial application that was based on a home-grown I/O framework which operated on similar principles.

It was a complete pain in the ass. You were constantly future-proofing your data structures because you knew you were going to be stuck with them for all eternity because the I/O framework was going to serialize them verbatim whether you liked it or not. Those were dark days...

seventhsonon Goodreads has no incentive to be good

Require reviews to show a substantial understanding of what the book was about? That means moderation which is always dangerous but probably better than the alternative.

seventhsonon Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

The wavelengths are too large for LIGO. The wave measurements were correlated with data collected from many pulsars.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nanograv-picks-up-si...

seventhsonon Drugmakers are abandoning cheap generics

"Ooo, the drugs for this cancer are cheap and plentiful. I'll choose this cancer for my terminal disease."

seventhsonon Exposing Floating Point (2019)

> floats really really want to be "near 1", to keep precision.

The number of significant digits is identical for (nearly) the entire range of FP values. There's no value to keeping it "near 1" for IEEE 754 floats - the precision is exactly the same regardless whether near 1 or near 1 trillion. This makes them ideal for general computation and modeling physical properties.

In contrast, posits, the unum alternative to IEEE 754, are highly sensitive to absolute scale. Posits lose precision as the magnitudes increase. Otoh, for small values, you get much higher precision which is why they getting some attention from the AI world where normalized weights are everywhere.

seventhsonon How VSCode made bracket pair colorization faster (2021)

It might be stupid, or it also might just be naive, or a shift in priorities.

100x throughput improvement might just come from caching results from earlier computations (less naive) - at the cost of 10x memory footprint possibly (different priorities).