rwallace

Could it be that ASP (native to x86) was using x87 floating point in its default 80-bit mode, whereas Java (trying to get results more consistent cross-platform), had switched it to 64-bit mode?

Aha! That is one of those things that never crossed my mind, but makes perfect sense once explained.

Now I'm curious: why? Not that I don't believe you, but I'm wondering what is the reason? It's not intuitively clear why gloves would make it more dangerous, even knowing that it is.

> I suggested that perhaps this is because the famous people are the only ones who are fast enough to actually do everything you're "supposed to do" and still be productive.

Conjecture: it is instead or also because famous people are the only ones who are given enough slack to be able to take the time to actually do everything you're supposed to do.

Proposed test to distinguish between the conjectures: do famous mathematicians become famous by finding gaps, or find gaps after becoming famous?

Traditionally, part of what made it worth paying IBM prices was reliably top-notch service, but perhaps that changed over time. What were your experiences? And which decade?

Are the cold viruses impossible to vaccinate against? I always assumed they were the same as flu – possible, but you need new vaccines every year because the strains keep shifting – it's just that the severity of colds is low enough that we don't bother. Is that not the case?

A lot of people blame Banach-Tarski on the axiom of choice. I disagree. I think it's in essence just a variant of the Hilbert hotel, with the axiom of choice merely serving as part of the machinery for this manifestation. In other words, it's just a counterintuitive but true consequence of the nature of infinity. As such, I think any mathematical system that acknowledges infinity, is going to have such counterintuitive results.

There is a sense in which it was: out of all the games that have ever been designed, or that it would be logically possible to design, humans selected Go as one of the relatively few to receive sustained attention, in part because it is particularly well suited to the deep neural network that is the visual cortex. So it is not a coincidence that it is also well suited to artificial deep neural networks.

By way of verification, not only did I double check the path in regedit, but I also tried copy pasting the command line from the Microsoft page, and that gave path not found.

That's clear then, have added the relevant path. Thanks!

No. Should I? Is it the case that my machine is exposed without them, and creating them is necessary to solve the problem? Or that it's fine the way it is now, and creating them would cause the very problem I would be hoping to solve?

So when I try the registry key workaround, it doesn't work, because my registry doesn't have a Printers section. Which is logical, because the last time I owned a printer was long before I bought this machine. Does that mean I don't have to worry, or that I'm wide open to attack? All the discussion so far seems silent on what happens if you don't have a printer. (This seems common to a lot of discussion about 'security vulnerability in Foo' - are you exposed if you don't have and have never used Foo? It doesn't say.)

Okay, fair enough, maybe 'very minor inconvenience' is understating it. And granted that the safeguards are not perfect, and some financial crime does get through. I still think the current state of affairs is a big improvement on what we would have if we just threw out the regulations.

Yep. It's burdening 99% of legitimate users with a very minor inconvenience, to stop the 1% of bad actors who would otherwise end up doing a lot of really bad things that would harm the 99% in ways that go far outside the scope we think of as covered by the financial system.

So yes, I understand where you're coming from, but my libertarian instincts to reflexively think of KYC/AML as excessive and annoying regulation and untrammeled exchange as a good thing, turn out on closer examination to be simply wrong.

The point being missed here is that no algorithm can tell you whether a string is a valid email address, because that's not a property of the string in the first place, it's a property of the world.

Having a fairly low entropy Gmail address, I get an intermittent drizzle of messages of the form of 'thank you for signing up to Acme!' whose content is such as to make it clear that an actual Acme customer typo'd their email address, and Acme thought you could validate it by checking the form of the string.

The only way to validate an email address is to send email to that address, asking the person behind it, are you the one who just signed up for Acme. And once you are doing that, there is no point checking the string for anything other than containing an @.

> I know petty much nothing, but I cannot help but feel that knowing the result, any answer is equally explainable. If Greenland ruled the world we would all be discussing some nonsense about how easily sleds glide over ice.

It is true that, no matter what state of the world we observed, we would try to come up with the best explanations we could, but if we use that as a reason to dismiss explanations of the actual state of affairs, we would dismiss any explanation of anything.

> Nevermind that this supposes a geographic explaination--I imagine the author is a geographer. But an economist examines it through economic policy, an anthropologist through culture.. etc. who I am sure all have their own 'obvious and inevitable' justifications.

Sure. Reality is complex. It should be no surprise that many disciplines have relevant contributions to explaining it. The fact that economic and cultural considerations are also relevant to history, is no reason to dismiss geographical considerations.

I would conjecture that it has two components:

1. Ancestral memory of programming in languages like assembly or early Fortran where your code was going to be spaghetti because the language was capable of little else, so it had to be drenched in comments that would be unnecessary in a better language.

2. Overreaction to personal memory of overzealous professors who demanded assignments be drenched in excessive comments.

Excellent article! One thing I'm curious about: LLVM uses phi, as was considered best practice at the time. Of late, some people have started using block parameters instead; they are fundamentally equivalent, but make some operations more convenient at the cost of making other operations less convenient. Do the LLVM developers still consider phi the best choice, or would block parameters look better if you had it to do over?

There is a lot of low hanging fruit in this area being ignored. Here in Ireland, the pandemic is still raging and they are reopening stores – okay, that's a tradeoff on which reasonable people can disagree. But then there's no air circulating in the stores. Ventilation could be significantly improved by such a trivial measure as keeping the front door propped open, but they don't bother. Why not?

It's a purely arbitrary number, arising from the choice of an 80/20 division of CPU cycles between exploring and exploiting. You have to choose some number; pretty much any choice would work more or less equally well here, though there is a sense in which 2 would be the simplest/most natural choice.

Now I'm curious; who exactly told them to back off, and why?

> When I've been micro-optimizing performance-critical code, integer division shows up as a hot spot regularly.

Now I'm really curious. In my experience, integer division practically never happens (except by powers of 2 that are easily optimized down to a shift), to the point where I was frowning in puzzlement about why Apple spent resources optimizing it.

How is the code you are looking at, bottlenecking on integer division? What on earth is it doing, to make that a frequent operation?

Thanks for the perspective! It's always good to get a look at what the situation looked like to the people who were there at the time. And yes, I can certainly understand that you had to get a product to market within the applicable constraints.

A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.

> IBM has discontinued many mainframe platforms in the past, and there's no guarantee that next year they won't approach you with a 10x markup on your renting costs, that will become 50x in a couple of years and will keep going up until you decide to stop paying.

Which ones has it discontinued? I thought once the 360 platform got going, it was basically forever (unbroken chain of compatibility). What am I missing?

> C or C++, where memory layout is inverted relative to something like Fortran (which seemed to get this right from the 1960s) when you consider most cache lines on most processors.

How do you mean? As I understand it, the only difference in these languages in this regard is in 2D arrays, where in C, the current row is in the current cache line and in FORTRAN the current column is in the current cache line. It seems to me you are if anything slightly more likely to want to do several operations on the current row, so the C way is better. What am I missing?

The second statement is unfortunately true.

But be careful of taking the first one at face value. The outsider might be optimizing for being right. He might also be optimizing for looking good in his social circle, confirming some self-image in his own mind, establishing himself as a prudent person who holds sensible beliefs, or establishing himself as a daring person who holds antiestablishment beliefs. The process that brought him to your attention, might also have selected him for noteworthiness by all sorts of criteria, only one of which is being right; that counts as an optimization process in and of itself.

Which doesn't mean the outsider isn't right. Maybe he is. But be careful of just assuming it.

They solved the problem of unpredictable load times at compile time? Using just LLVM? How?

I'm curious, what was the reason for the difference? While the C language standard doesn't guarantee anything about alignment, I'm used to the behavior of compilers in practice being consistently 'align everything on its own size'; what changed between debug and release builds in that case?

I have seen it claimed that, roughly speaking,

- The sale price of the Xbox itself pays for the per-unit cost of the machine

- The percentage Microsoft gets of the sale price of games, adds just about enough to pay for the development and marketing costs, so at that point, the business doesn't do much better than breaking even

- But when you add in the ongoing revenue from online gaming, that's where the profit comes from

Can anyone confirm or refute this?