Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the…
There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion…
I'd have no idea how to find him. But I think it'd be a fruitless task anyway. I'm sure they'd have no memory of what, to them, was a moment as mundane as any other that day. I've definitely had people recount a shared…
For a few years I worked in the team that wrote software for an embedded audio DSP. The power draw to do something was normally more important than the speed. Eg when decoding MP3 or SBC you probably had enough MIPS to…
> seems like x86 and the major 8bit cpu's had the same speed, pondering in this might be a remnant from the 4-bit ALU times. I think that era of CPUs used a single circuit capable of doing add, sub, xor etc. They'd have…
Those aren't the only resources. I could imagine XOR takes less energy because using it might activate less circuitry than SUB.
> Code is formal, and going from C to assembly is deterministic. OK, this is the main thing. Going from C to assembly is not deterministic in a sense because different compilers can produce different output. But the…
> A spec is an envelope that contains all programs that comply. Creating this spec is often going to be harder than writing a single compliant program. This perfectly explains the feeling I had when, 20 years into my…
I wasn't comparing the two studies. I was just asking what the first sentence of the abstract of study 1 meant when it appears to be a false statement given study 2's result. Usually this is because I don't understand…
The abstract begins, "Growing evidence supports early eating to control appetite and energy balance". What does that mean? My unskilled reading of it is that there is recent evidence that eating breakfast helps with…
In the UK the wholesale price was about £80/MWh in 2025. The retail price was about £270/MWh + a standing charge. If you factor in the standing charge, an average user paid about £344/MWh. So the cost of generation was…
Doh. Thanks.
We're seeing this galaxy as it was 280 million years after the Big Bang. But the universe didn't become transparent to photons until 100 million years after that…
Yep, I think it is. The point is there's almost no history of oral peptides, other than stomachs destroying them. FTA: "So to summarize the state of the art in oral peptide delivery: there are exactly two FDA-approved…
The British government continued to negotiate with Hitler after Kristallnacht (November 1938). They only stopped once he invaded Prague in March 1939.
Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct... I think this…
That wouldn't make me happy. If the sharpie on the tape said it was bad, I'd still look at it, sniff it and probably eat it. Certain foods scare me though. eg there's a common claim that boiled rice shouldn't be kept…
> The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit. I know. I mainly just wanted to link that video because it is awesome. The article does explain how the Inca did it - only the front edges are tight…
Pounding stone seems reasonable to me. Obviously I don't have any proof or even strong evidence but I saw a video that changed my perception of what is possible. It showed two old men making a millstone with hand tools:…
Good point. I guess there are more cases than just this one where I'd like to be able to tell the compiler I don't care about rounding behaviour and would prefer the fastest code. Like -ffast-math but for integer…
Fair point. It doesn't do the optimization if you ask to optimize for size '/Os' either.
Ooo, I'd never thought of using & like that. Interesting. > (also note you got the endianness wrong in your hand-optimized version) Doh :-)
Ah, yes, good point. I think this is a nice example of "I didn't notice I needed to tell the compiler a thing I know so it can optimize".
eg 4: int foo(char const *s) { if (s[0] == 'h' && s[1] == 'e' && s[2] == 'l' && s[3] == 'l') return 1; return 0; } The outputs 4 cmp instructions here, even though I'd have thought 1 was sufficient.…
Nice. Is the best way to think of optimizing compilers, "I wonder if someone hand wrote a rule for the optimizer that fits this case"?
Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the…
There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion…
I'd have no idea how to find him. But I think it'd be a fruitless task anyway. I'm sure they'd have no memory of what, to them, was a moment as mundane as any other that day. I've definitely had people recount a shared…
For a few years I worked in the team that wrote software for an embedded audio DSP. The power draw to do something was normally more important than the speed. Eg when decoding MP3 or SBC you probably had enough MIPS to…
> seems like x86 and the major 8bit cpu's had the same speed, pondering in this might be a remnant from the 4-bit ALU times. I think that era of CPUs used a single circuit capable of doing add, sub, xor etc. They'd have…
Those aren't the only resources. I could imagine XOR takes less energy because using it might activate less circuitry than SUB.
> Code is formal, and going from C to assembly is deterministic. OK, this is the main thing. Going from C to assembly is not deterministic in a sense because different compilers can produce different output. But the…
> A spec is an envelope that contains all programs that comply. Creating this spec is often going to be harder than writing a single compliant program. This perfectly explains the feeling I had when, 20 years into my…
I wasn't comparing the two studies. I was just asking what the first sentence of the abstract of study 1 meant when it appears to be a false statement given study 2's result. Usually this is because I don't understand…
The abstract begins, "Growing evidence supports early eating to control appetite and energy balance". What does that mean? My unskilled reading of it is that there is recent evidence that eating breakfast helps with…
In the UK the wholesale price was about £80/MWh in 2025. The retail price was about £270/MWh + a standing charge. If you factor in the standing charge, an average user paid about £344/MWh. So the cost of generation was…
Doh. Thanks.
We're seeing this galaxy as it was 280 million years after the Big Bang. But the universe didn't become transparent to photons until 100 million years after that…
Yep, I think it is. The point is there's almost no history of oral peptides, other than stomachs destroying them. FTA: "So to summarize the state of the art in oral peptide delivery: there are exactly two FDA-approved…
The British government continued to negotiate with Hitler after Kristallnacht (November 1938). They only stopped once he invaded Prague in March 1939.
Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct... I think this…
That wouldn't make me happy. If the sharpie on the tape said it was bad, I'd still look at it, sniff it and probably eat it. Certain foods scare me though. eg there's a common claim that boiled rice shouldn't be kept…
> The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit. I know. I mainly just wanted to link that video because it is awesome. The article does explain how the Inca did it - only the front edges are tight…
Pounding stone seems reasonable to me. Obviously I don't have any proof or even strong evidence but I saw a video that changed my perception of what is possible. It showed two old men making a millstone with hand tools:…
Good point. I guess there are more cases than just this one where I'd like to be able to tell the compiler I don't care about rounding behaviour and would prefer the fastest code. Like -ffast-math but for integer…
Fair point. It doesn't do the optimization if you ask to optimize for size '/Os' either.
Ooo, I'd never thought of using & like that. Interesting. > (also note you got the endianness wrong in your hand-optimized version) Doh :-)
Ah, yes, good point. I think this is a nice example of "I didn't notice I needed to tell the compiler a thing I know so it can optimize".
eg 4: int foo(char const *s) { if (s[0] == 'h' && s[1] == 'e' && s[2] == 'l' && s[3] == 'l') return 1; return 0; } The outputs 4 cmp instructions here, even though I'd have thought 1 was sufficient.…
Nice. Is the best way to think of optimizing compilers, "I wonder if someone hand wrote a rule for the optimizer that fits this case"?