16 states affected, yet no Canadian provinces, apparently. Good thing smoke can’t cross 5000 miles of open border…

You can always combine integer operations in smaller chunks to simulate something that’s too big to fit in a register. Python even does this transparently for you, so your integers can be as big as you want.

The fundamental problem that led to requiring 64-bit was when we needed to start addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It’s kind of similar to the problem of the Internet, where 4 billion unique IP addresses falls rather short of what we need. IPv6 has a host of improvements, but the massively improved address space is what gets talked about the most since that’s what is desperately needed.

Going back to RAM though, it’s sort of interesting that at the lowest levels of accessing memory, it is done in chunks that are larger than 8 bits, and that’s been the case for a long time now. CPUs have to provide the illusion that an 8-bit byte is the smallest addressible unit of memory since software would break badly were this not the case, but it’s somewhat amusing to me that we still shouldn’t really need more than 32 bits to address RAM at the lowest levels even with the 16 GB I have in my laptop right now. I’ve worked with 32-bit microcontrollers where the byte size is > 8 bits, and yeah, you can have plenty of addressible memory in there if you wanted.

I know a google engineer who was saying they’re having to update their code bases to handle > 16 exabytes of storage, if you can imagine. But yeah, that’s storage, not RAM.

I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.

I guess the MAC address guy is up next. 48 bits may not go so far if every light bulb is going to want its own.

Imagine if you were the guy who made the call on IPv4 addresses…

Falsehoods About Time

Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.

Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.

Falsehoods About Text

I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!

So the next captcha will be a list of AI-generated statements and you have to decide which are bat shit crazy?

Fair, though I guess my interpretation was that void* is kind of like a black hole in that anything can fall into it in an unsettling way that loses information about what it was?

“Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,”

Seems like a lot of extra disk thrashing that would shorten the life expectancy of an SSD? Like it would be considerably more than your usual background chatter of daemons writing to log files and what not. Unless I’m misunderstanding this?

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

I think I could get very nervous coding for the military, depending on what sort of application I was working on. If it were some sort of administrative database, that doesn’t sound so bad. If it were a missile guidance system, on man! A single bug and there goes a village full of civilians. Even something without direct human casualties could be nerve-wracking. Like if it were your code which bricked a billion-dollar military satellite.

Speaking of missile guidance systems, I once met someone who worked a stint for a military contractor. He told me a story about a junior dev who discovered an egregious memory leak in a cruise missile’s software. The senior dev then told him “Yeah, I know about that one. But the memory leak would take an hour before it brings the system down and the missile’s maximum flight time is less than that, so no problem!” I think coding like that would just drive me into some OCD hell.

I have only written potentially life-threatening code once in my life. It had to do with voltage/current regulation in the firmware of a high-powered instrument used by field workers at the company where I work. It was a white-knuckled week I spent on just a single page of code, checking and re-checking it countless times and unit testing it in every conceivable way I could imagine.

Fair enough. I’m just looking for some independent confirmation as this is pretty big news.

Is this official though, or wishful thinking on the part of Cameron?

One thing most text editors can do is print. I was shocked the other day when I couldn’t print a readme from vscode when someone asked for hard copy.

This is why I fear activating any AI features in the IDE.

Compiler/interpreter: Can’t find variable farfignewton.

Earlier:

Me: Declare variables near, far

IDE: Oh! You mean farfignewton right? I found that in some completely unrelated library you didn’t write. Allow me complete that for you while you’re not paying attention.

Right, so your choice of facial expression would, in effect, act like a passcode. Good luck breaking into Jim Carrey’s phone!

I got the idea initially when I noticed I couldn’t unlock the phone while laughing. Then I got annoyed and I guess angry face didn’t work either.

I wonder now what would be the minimum facial contortion you would need to make a distinct ID? It could be something as subtle as curling your lip or raising a cheek muscle slightly? I might have to experiment with this a bit…

I was thinking about face ID the other day. What if you trained it while making a funny face? So then you would have to make that face to unlock the phone and how could someone compel you to do so? It’s sort of a 2-factor authentication in a way.