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z500

205 karma · joined June 11, 2018

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z500··on Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?
Octal just maps onto 3 bits instead of hex's 4. I always imagined it had something to do with the size of the byte not being standardized yet.
z500··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
> Also, somebody contributed reduce() to Python way back in the 90's, as well as other functional idioms. He wouldn't have added that himself -- it was never his preferred style.

> He preferred a more imperative style. But he allowed those contributions, and then slightly regretted it later.

That would explain why they're so inconvenient to chain.

z500··on “Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain
It's an X from the blackboard bold range in Unicode.
z500··on Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux
Call me crazy, but for me the next stop after nitter is knitter, not the other thing.
z500··on PageRank explained
I've always wondered what would happen if you named a kid Nominative Determinism. Some kind of paradox?
z500··on Read the novels and forget everything else
> Maybe I should look into training an AI in the audio style of Patrick O’Brian and have it read Shakespeare for me.

That's what you took away from that?!

z500··on Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
I went down a rabbit hole a few summers ago and I ended up writing a calculator from scratch in assembly for RISC OS. Interesting experience having GUI routines at the syscall level
z500··on Programming language file extensions that match ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes
On the flip side, .hpp always makes me chuckle. What is that, Header++?
z500··on Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?
I've never really been a math person, either, which is why I thought I was going to hate discrete math in college. I mean, it wasn't always the easiest thing ever, but it was a lot more intuitive to me than continuous math. And that's all programming is, materialized discrete math.
z500··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
And the SD card logo was originally intended for Super Density Disc
z500··on Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
I was one of these hapless Comic Chat users. Luckily someone gently nudged me toward a real IRC client lol. I was an absolute IRC fiend for years after that.
z500··on Almost all coders at Id Software have been fired, following Xbox reset
That's odd, it always worked fine for me. I have had that issue with archive.today, though.
z500··on US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos
I'm confused. Aren't these supposed to be photos, or are we expected to be agog with 3D renderings?
z500··on Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down
Loads for me, but not particularly quickly
z500··on I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
That makes sense. The part where my program really benefits is in a bottleneck area that you always have to go through and where you visit every code path in it.
z500··on I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
It's .NET 10 lol. It's not so slow you can't write stuff for it, I have implementations of Conway's game of life, Huffman compression, and a minimal TUI. The main problem is doing almost anything in it involves a method lookup. And there are almost certainly places I could have done things more smartly.

One thing I do want to try out is publishing it with native AOT. I had a lot of luck with that on one of my other F# projects, I got like a 75% speedup out of it. I understand the JIT is supposed to outperform native AOT in the long term but I haven't seen it reach that speed.

z500··on I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
That's so cool! I love F#, but I wrote a little Smalltalk interpreter in it and I can confirm it isn't exactly a speed demon for that kind of thing if you use it as intended lol
z500··on nowhere: an entire website encoded in a URL
Actually they do have one, but it's an older beta format that isn't supported anymore.
z500··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
z500··on XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
That was what I guessed too, but according to the article Intel detected both.
z500··on I’m spending months coding the old way
Thank you for injecting some perspective into the thread of AI hysteria. I feel like everyone is imagining a bug in a CRUD app.
z500··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
This is pre-virtualization, so it's not the cloud either
z500··on We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History
At least we hardly ever have to hear anyone say "cyberspace" anymore
z500··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
This might be controversial, but smelling either in public makes me happy! Now the stale smell of tobacco-infused clothing, that is awful.
z500··on Programming Used to Be Free
If I remember correctly, it even came with a utility to remove line numbers for you
z500··on Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings
It doesn't take an AI to demand graph go up
z500··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
Oh I've actually been meaning to get around to reading that first one. I'll have to crack that open.
z500··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
Egyptian had it, and although it's Afroasiatic it's not Semitic, so it must have gone back further than that.
z500··on Am I German or Autistic?
Doch.
z500··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
I've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do you have a source?
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