jcranmer

23 ms·

421.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement So the thing about antitrust is that it's not t
422.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
x % 3 == 0 is an expression without side effects (the only cases that trap on a % operator are x % 0 and INT_MIN % -1), and thus the compiler is free to speculate the expression, allowing the comparison to be converted to (x % 2 == 0) &
423.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> If compiler folks can chime in, I'm curious why incrementing in a loop can be unrolled and inspected to optimize to an addition, but doubling the number when both operands are equal can't? Compilers are essentially massive to
424.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> Is the compiler smart enough to only compute them whenever it is necessary? This is known as "code sinking," and most optimizers are capable of doing this. Except keep in mind that a) the profitability of doing so is not alwa
425.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
OpenRCT2 and OpenTTD are, at best, derivative works, if not outright infringement (the line between infringement and derivative in computer code is quite muddy, and there is very little in the way of precedence to illuminate the difference)
426.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> If calling the same function with a different argument would be considered 'function coloring', than every function in a program is 'colored' and the word loses its meaning ;) I mean, the concept of "function c
427.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
When you encode an x86 instruction, your operands amount to either a register name, a memory operand, or an immediate (of several slightly different flavors). I'm no great connoisseur of ISAs, but I believe this basic trichotomy is fai
428.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
One of my biggest bugbears in CS instruction is the overdue emphasis on RISC v CISC, especially as there aren't any really good models to show you what the differences are, given the winnowing of ISAs. In John Mashey's infamous po
429.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Strictly speaking, the thermosphere is actually much warmer than the atmosphere we experience--on the order of 100's or even a 1000 degrees Celsius, if you're measuring by temperature (the average kinetic energy of molecules). How
430.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> Having admitted to never having read a SCOTUS ruling, how can you then proclaim there are better ways for you to understand? How could you possibly make that assertion if you've never read a SCOTUS ruling? A SCOTUS ruling is a pri
431.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Pretty much. > How would that have worked anyway, did they have more days per month? The way I've heard, they just simply didn't track the date during the winter.
432.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
The calendar was regularized to include a leap day during the reign of Julius Caesar (hence the name "Julian calendar"), which would have been 45 BC. The Roman calendar moved to January as the first month of the year in 153 BC, ov
433.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Just because a feature is standardized does not mean it gets implemented. This is actually even more true for cryptography than it is for programming language specifications.
434.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
So there's a controversial feature added in C2y, named loops, that has spawned many a vociferous argument. Now, I'm a passionate supporter of this feature, for various reasons, that I can (and have, in the committee) brought up. A
435.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
There was a recent discussion within the C committee over what exactly constituted consensus owing to a borderline vote that was surprisingly ruled "no consensus" (and the gravitas of the discussion was over the difference between
436.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
> Standards organisations are very easily corruptable when its members are allowed to have conflicts of interest and politick and rules-lawyer the organisation into adopting their pet standards. FWIW, in my experience on standardization
437.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
The standard used in the C and C++ committees is essentially a 2-to-1 majority in favor. I'm not aware of any committee where a 3-to-1 majority is insufficient to get an item to pass. DJB's argument that this isn't good enoug
438.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
AIUI, the AI-based translation models are based on the same transformer-oriented neural nets that LLMs are based on, just not quite writ as large. In other words, it's not entirely inaccurate to call these models LLMs. While there&#x27
439.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
IQ isn't some intrinsic property that we can measure that has a probability distribution. It's something we construct to have a specific probability distribution. Essentially, you have >145 IQ not because 0.1% people happen to
440.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Python 2.7 was EOL'd at the start of 2020, and serious effort to move from 2 to 3 didn't start until around 2018, by which time Go was a very major player.
441.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
"Hi, would you like to sleep with me? If you say no, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you're unable to get a job in the field you want to pursue." And to be clear here, for most of these sex pests, tha
442.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
You're presupposing that the only possible way to provide enrichment is by tracking people into advanced classes.
443.
by jcranmer 11mo ago
Honestly, nothing has done a better job of solidifying my understanding of a material than trying to explain it to other people. We should be giving students more opportunities to do this, not less.
444.
by jcranmer 1y ago
If illegal aliens are not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," it's not possible to arrest them for a crime--that's what the phrase means. The language excludes diplomats, foreign soldiers on US soil while they're
445.
by jcranmer 1y ago
> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are a
446.
by jcranmer 1y ago
When my taillight burned out, I went to the local autoparts store to get a replacement. The first light I picked up had printed on the packaging, in not-terribly-visible writing, "For Off-Road Use Only." I had to go back and hunt
447.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The most important resource you'll need is a hex editor that can let you drop at a cursor and see what the value is at the cursor for all the basic datatypes (u8/u16/u32/u64, float, double, at minimum). Something like 01
448.
by jcranmer 1y ago
> It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is qu
449.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Devereaux wrote that series in large part in response to all the people going "gosh, modern life is just so much worse than medieval peasants!" But honestly, even if you're comparing to the richest kings of the time, your med
450.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Emojis are complicated from a font rendering perspective. But from a string processing perspective, they're generally going to be among the simplest characters: they don't have a lot of complex properties with a lot of variation b

More ›