I did not realize that the AMD64 ABI specifies a silly calling convention rule that forces structs with 3 or more word-sized (i.e. 8-byte) fields to be passed by pointer, even if you write your code expecting to have it be passed by value. I learned this from: Speed up your code: don’t pass …
Nobody has seasonal affective disorder describes that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is one of those medical-ish conditions that cannot be tested for, has no specific or clear symptoms, nor treatment. It could be generously called an umbrella term: The more I read about it, the more I get the …
Sometimes you’ll encounter situations where a variable is still in scope, but cannot legally be accessed anymore. A typical example is if the variable has been moved from and we want to make sure we don’t accidentally reference it again, but there are other examples as well, for example …
A really interesting video with some details about how the Stockfish chess engine works and what makes it so good at chess: .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, …
I feel like that as much hype as AI has gotten, rightfully so, the people advocating for caution and restraint, such as the Effective Altruism movement, have not been very popular. Part of that is just being in the unenviable and intrinsically unpopular position of a naysayer, but I think a large …
In The value of your work I have talked about how in a job, work is useful for your individual career only if your manager deems it so, even though that is not always the same thing as what is valuable for your team or your organization. In fact, it is rather difficult to come up with a good, …
As usual, XKCD is dead right and manages to entertain at the same time: DateTime. I have had the misfortune of trying to implement sane date and time primitives at my last job, as well as dealing with measuring elapsed time with less overhead than clock_gettime(), and it is a nightmare. For a …
This will be huge, if true: A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes bacteria causing tooth decay (Hacker News discussion): Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the …
Interesting: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default, following Fedora which made the same change in version 38. In short: GCC will by default start emitting frame pointers again as if using -fno-omit-frame-pointer, which helps debugging and profiling tools a bit, at the cost of what …
2023-12-14 Work is valued if and only if it is something that management (or whoever evaluates your performance) cares about, which does not necessarily have to be in any way related to how much real value it provides. Have you fixed a bug or introduced a feature that helps every software developer …
All-you-can-eat buffets are so not so widespread in Europe (as best as I can tell), but apparently they’re a thing in the USA. I’ve been in this kind of restaurant exactly once in my life, and I can’t say that I didn’t find the idea appealing: it instinctively seems like a …
As much hype and attention that the machine learning / artificial intelligence field gets, and in spite of some impressive results that have come out of it in the form of e.g. ChatGPT, overall we have very little understanding in exactly how do these models work. We can train them, and we can use …
This is brilliant: Cleanly recovering from Segfaults under Windows and Linux (32-bit, x86). I do not think I’d want to actually use this in production, for the same reason that the article itself points out: segmentation faults often indicate that something has gone horribly wrong inside the …
I was reading Why I think C++ is still a desirable coding platform compared to Rust on Low Latency Trading Insights, and wanted to share my thoughts. Overall, I really appreciate this article: it raises a very important subject and makes lots of good points. I do disagree with some of it, though I …
C++ is one of the oldest mainstream programming languages in use today, and also easily one of the most controversial ones: some people love it (including myself), but if you read any online forums, you’d easily be under the impression that most people despise it. The criticisms are, more …
I’ve encountered a statement today in a random blog post about the IBM PowerPC 600 series that broke my brain for a minute while I was trying to figure out what it could possibly have meant, so now I’m going to subject you to it as well. Here goes: Moving a register to itself is …
For my investments I normally use Degiro as a broker, because their app and website is quite decently usable, and their fees are low. However, it’s come to my attention that Interactive Brokers pays quite good interest on your cash balance with them: up to 4.83% currently. This is much better …
I was reading California suspends Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment, which is about a self-driving car company’s (Cruise) failures, and how regulators banned them because they were deemed unsafe. The triggering incident: In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the …
Did you know that Nike has smart sneakers, since like 2019? I certainly have not, and I am having difficulty figuring out what to do with this piece of information, so I am posting about it here. The Verge has an article on the topic, which sometimes reads like a parody of itself: Hands-on with …
Economically and financially speaking, the USA is much more attractive than pretty much anywhere in Europe. US companies dominate the world in many fields, especially technology: just think of Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. Top earners in the USA earn multiples of what top earners in Europe do: in …
I’ve come across The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and, well, I have thoughts. (I know, it was bound to happen eventually.) I agree with a lot of the points, perhaps even with most of them, but the rest strikes me as plainly naive: As techno-optimists, we believe that we must, and we will, create …
I’m continuing to read Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which, by the way, is everything but brief at 496 pages. I’m currently at page 180 though, so making steady progress. Yuval Noah Harari, the author, continues to present interesting ideas and narratives. One interesting thing …
Beauty is the promise of happiness. (Stendhal) I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others and I have to say that I can really recommend it. I’m rarely in the mood for short stories, but every single story here presents a unique and …
My Presidential Platform by Scott Alexander gave me a good series of chuckles. It’s a truly inspiring combination of absolutely stupid and unusually clever, and should serve as a textbook example of “thinking outside the box”. It was all worth it just for this: The American rich …
And so it… begins? Continues? Let’s say continues to begin: Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI (seen on Hacker News). Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold on Amazon that appear to have been written …