5 ms·
Just make everything 128 bits and never worry about overflowing a counter until we colonize the galaxy.
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Just make everything 128 bits and never worry about overflowing a counter until we colonize the galaxy.
- TrainedMonkey 6y agoThis message is sponsored by your friendly neighborhood big memory/storage consortium /s On a serious note, using fewer datatypes is super helpful for any kind of serialization.
- BearOso 6y agoFewer datatypes. “Less” should be used when you’re talking about a qualitative measure, “fewer” when talking quantitatively. This message is sponsored by your friendly neighborhood grammar nazi.
- TrainedMonkey 6y agoFixed, thanks for the heads up.
- gumby 6y agoIndeed; I misread that sentence the first time through and was briefly puzzled.
- hinkley 6y agoThanks, Stannis.
- linuxftw 6y agoThis is not a thing. There are no rigid rules for using less or fewer.
- zimpenfish 6y agoAnd the rigid rule that daft old prescriptivits insist on seems to have come from some random writer in 1770 going "I think this sounds better in this instance". http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...
- samatman 6y agoThanks a bunch, Der Fewer...
- Asraelite 6y agoThey're both quantitative. "quantitative" doesn't necessarily mean "discrete". The usual way to refer to this distinction is uncountable vs. countable nouns.
- Asooka 6y agoNope, it's less. You can use "less few" if a naked less bothers you. "Fewer" is not a real word - if it were, then we would also use "manyer" as its antonym. And before you go off saying I'm wrong, let me remind you that language evolves as its speakers will it to. You are speaking English, you can decide to change it however you want and nobody can claim you're wrong. Whether your change sticks or not is a different matter...
- llampx 6y agoLess applies to uncountable things, fewer applies to countable things.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoThis article explains there is significantly more nuance to it than that: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/fewer-vs-less https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/fewer-vs-less
- zimpenfish 6y agoMay I direct you to Language Log, a blog of professional linguists and grammarians whose archives will be only too happy to disabuse you of this daft old prescriptivist nonsense? https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=less+fewer https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=less+fewer
- sowbug 6y agoI still can't get over people saying "I need to drink fewer milk."
- ecopoesis 6y agoUntil someone decides one data type is good enough and everything is a string.
- sowbug 6y agoBut note that larger datatypes are viral in the same way C++ const is.
- amelius 6y agoYes, after coming back from a roundtrip to the Andromeda Galaxy, the Linux kernel will be at version > 2^128.
- a1369209993 6y agoNah, even if we go at a pokey 9km/s, and release a new kernel version every second, that wouldn't be enough to overflow even a 64bit number.
- lilott8 6y agoEspecially after "2^32 is all the space we'll ever need for ip addresses."
- astrobe_ 6y ago... And "640K is enough for everyone". I believe they are all instances of induced demand [1]: If you allocate a large pool of a given resource, you tend to use it more liberally, and in the end the consumption rate is about the same regardless of the size of your pool. It's interesting to note that apparently people prefer to reconsider some wasteful uses of the IP address pool rather than switching to IPv6. That's the story of our societies. Waste the cheap stuff until it becomes too expensive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand