hcs

if ... then ... neht ... fi

There are numbers between 0.1% and 20%

I recently picked up this recently, it uses The Library as a way of discussing a few different mathematical topics. I can't strongly recommend it but it's interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unimaginable_Mathematics_o...

I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.

Events of Back to the Future II (2015-10-21)

Same, seeing the title and having not read Bradbury for a long time I was thinking either The Veldt or that one (The Long Rain). I did remember it on reading, though, and it's an unsettling feeling.

Maybe I'm not communicating the point clearly. In order to use a table to do the whole multiplication it has to be much larger than the largest number you would want to multiply with it. A lot of the analysis of algorithms, especially multiplication as discussed here, is about astronomically large numbers, so you don't want the existence of an even more astronomically large table as a prerequisite.

Well, yes, which is why they don't measure it your way, as it doesn't lead to discovering anything interesting about computation to have a shortcut like that. Or if they do it's part of a larger analysis, called an oracle machine.

An algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, and so can't include an infinite table. More generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_method

> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust.

Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.

Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.

Pitch is the offset between the start of consecutive rows of pixels in the image, used to convert y coordinates into the start of any given row, so you access a pixel as buffer[y*pitch+x]. Often this is the image width, but can be greater depending on required alignment.

If we're collecting anecdotes, it happened for me in more of my office jobs than not. Might have been relevant that these were smaller offices.

I liked it, still find good answers, and it was gratifying to provide answers when I could.

    enum Bool
    { 
        True, 
        False, 
        FileNotFound 
    };

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

Some of my earliest programming exposure was a dBASE IV book my dad had for work, though it was some time before I put any of it into action. At that time I was reading manuals like fiction, only slowly realizing that I could actually use some of it with our computer.

> millenials got the birth of social media

..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.

It's a honeypot for pedants

> Or you do not consider MUL/DIV "arithmetic", or something.

Multiplier and divider are usually not considered part of the ALU, yes. Not uncommon for those to be shared between execution threads while there's an ALU for each.

I phrased that badly, Dragon's Lair was the example of low process intensity.

Even on NES a lot of games use CHR-RAM so arbitrary bitmaps are at least possible, though only a small part of the screen is unique without some rarely used mapper hardware. Zelda and Metroid mostly just use this to compress the graphics in ROM, Qix is a simple example with line drawing, Elite is an extreme one.

I made a demo of the Mystify screensaver using the typical 8KB CHR-RAM. Even with a lot of compromises it has pretty large borders to avoid running out of unique tiles. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1_MymcLeew8

Chris Crawford called this "process intensity", he noted it at least back to 1983 with Dragon's Lair, discussed in this 1987 article https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

Or you can just hit the Random button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

There's a restrictions on games with even simulated gambling

You are more quickly being carried by the ground further from where you would otherwise be. Hope that clears it up.

Not the same thing but I was reminded of a joke about the puzzle game Stephen's Sausage Roll:

> I have calculated the value of Pi on Sausage Island and found it to be 2.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240405034314/https://twitter.c...

As they say in a somewhat different context: worse is better

> But what if you could push?

There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.

Or grade accounts by the logarithm of how many accounts were registered before them, like Slashdot. (This is tongue in cheek as I assume yours was.)

> The "inability to act" which, as Forrester points out, "provided the incentive" to augment or replace the low-internal-speed human organizations with computers, might in some other historical situation have been an incentive for modifying the task to be accomplished, perhaps doing away with it altogether, or for restructuring the human organizations whose inherent limitations were, after all, seen as the root of the trouble. [...]

> Yes, the computer did arrive "just in time." But in time for what? In time to save--and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize--social and political structures that might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.

- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) pp 29-30