jcranmer

23 ms·

391.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
That entire conversation on comments is just wildly insane. Uncle Bob outright admits that he couldn't understand the code he had written when he looked back on it for the discussion, which should be an automatic failure. But he tries
392.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
It took me quite a bit to figure out what you're trying to say here. The importance of e is that it's the natural base of exponents and logarithms, the one that makes an otherwise constant factor disappear. If you're using a
393.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
> Is it really too late for the C committee to not develop a modern string library that ships with base C26 or C27? I get that they really hate adding features, but C strings have been a problem for over 50 years now, and I'm not ad
394.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
IIRC, current estimates are that OpenAI is losing as much money a year as Uber or Amazon lost in their entire lifetime of unprofitability. Also, both Uber and Amazon spent their unprofitable years having a clear roadmap to profitability. Op
395.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
Dereferencing an arbitrary integer cast to a pointer means you are dereferencing an arbitrary memory location, which includes memory that is outside the purview of the C abstract machine model, say the return address of the function. That m
396.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
The concept of poison here is not the same as C's definition of UB. LLVM has at least 3 different concepts that all vaguely count as UB (and probably closer to a half dozen when it gets fully formalized). In C, UB is instant-UB--the mo
397.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
There's like one or two use cases where encrypting email could work. The best case I've come across--Bugzilla has the ability to let the user upload a public key to encrypt emails for updates to non-public bugs. It's not a b
398.
by jcranmer 10mo ago
Don't you think it's time to update it, given you start by saying that "If someone, while trying to sell you some high security mechanical system, told you that the system had remained unbreached for the last 20 years you wou
399.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> My intuition is that LLMs will for many use cases lead us away from things like formal verification and even comprehensive test suites. The cost of those activities is justified by the larger cost of fixing things in production; I susp
400.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
You can charitably read it as "MBA from Stanford, with a focus on computer science-related stuff," or maybe "MBA and a bachelor's in CS from Stanford." Or you could assume that it's an MS in CS that was 'a
401.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if your waste is incinerated, rather than sent to a landfill directly). Glass, pl
402.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
No, they couldn't. What they could do--and what they did do--was push for the move of TLS connections for the MX-MX hop of email; I don't have the stats off the top of my head for how prevalent that is, but I think it's in
403.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
I'm far from an expert in this field--indeed, I can but barely grasp the gentle introductions to these topics--but my understanding is that calling string theory a "theory of everything" really flatters it. String theory isn&
404.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
No, you'd go overland in Suez and then go down the Red Sea. Although there was a Suez canal at various times in antiquity, albeit one between the Red Sea and the Nile, not the Mediterranean directly.
405.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
I believe more trade between China and the Mediterranean was transited via Indian Ocean trade routes than via the traditional Silk Road, though I'm hard-pressed to find actual statistics.
406.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
It's worth reflecting on the fact that for most of human history, sea travel is easier and faster than land travel. That's one of the main reasons why major towns and cities are centered on river access.
407.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
There is a cost to having multiple language-level types that represent the exact same set of values, as C has (and is really noticeable in C++). Rust made an early, fairly explicit decision that a) usize is a distinct fundamental type fro
408.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
CHERI has 64-bit object size but 128-bit pointers (because the pointer values also carry pointer provenance metadata in addition to an address). I know some of the pointer types on GPUs (e.g., texture pointers) also have wildly different si
409.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
There is a set of languages which are essentially required to be available on any viable system. At present, these are probably C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and Bash (with a degree of asterisks on the last two). Rust I don't think has m
410.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
C currently remains the language of system ABIs, and there remains functionality that C can express that Rust cannot (principally bitfields). Furthermore, in terms of extensions to the language to support more obtuse architecture, Rust has
411.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
To expand on this a little bit more: x86 has a general pattern of encoding operands, the ModR/M byte(s), which gives you either two register operands, or a register and a memory operand. Intel also did this trick that uses one of the r
412.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> - Forth people defined the IEEE754 standard on floating point, because they knew how to do that well in software. IEEE 754 was principally developed by Kahan (in collaboration with his grad student, Coonen, and a visiting professor, St
413.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
As Randall Munroe pointed out in https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ , almost nobody knows how to spell "fuchsia" correctly. I only remember it by the mnemonic of it's fu
414.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Some guesses here: First off, Itanium was definitely meant to be the 64-bit successor to x86 (that's why it's called IA-64 after all), and moving from 32-bit to 64-bit would absolutely have been a killer feature. It's basical
415.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
An erupting volcano can spew ash over a large distance. When Eya.... that Icelandic volcano (that's hard to spell because I don't know Icelandic) erupted several years ago, the ash cloud traveled far enough to disrupt travel over
416.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
That photo is pretty clearly fake. * The steam from lava should be arising from where the lava hits the lava, boiling it--there's not going to be any steam from the interior of a lava tube, because all of the water will have boiled out
417.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
USGS has a page on the history of Kilauea here: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/geology-and-h... , which also has some links on some of the eruptions in recorded history. Probably the closest th
418.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Kilauea is more or less constantly erupting. This is the 38th eruptive episode since in the past year: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/eruption-info... (note that the 38th episode started a few
419.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Actually, I think all of the jet engine manufacturers these days are using 3d printers for some of their parts? Although you usually find the press releases talking about this using the term "additive manufacturing" instead. See,
420.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
From the videos I've seen, Biden reminds me of my grandmother in her later years of life, while Trump reminds me of my other grandmother... the one with dementia. There's just too many videos where Trump doesn't seem to entir

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