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 watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.

I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?

Most recently? My wife was wfh and out of the kindness of my heart I brought her a coke. She was on a zoom call with her entire team. I was pantsless.

literally good for you

I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it’s good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.

I suppose it is a kind of survival training? One of my bandmates who’s served came up after. “So here’s the deal. You watch what everyone else is eating. If they’re meticulously avoiding the peach cobbler or whatever it is, you F’ing stay away from that S if you know what’s good for you!”

I’m in a band that performs on occasion at CFBs (Canadian Forces Bases). We typically eat there and spend the night either in barracks or guest housing.

I have noticed that when we play for officers, dinner is like steak and lobster. When we play for enlisted, it’s more like high school cafeteria. The one and only time I had to excuse myself towards the end of a concert and miss the closing number was after eating at the enlisted mess and getting explosive diarrhea.

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?

“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.

Several years ago, I went under the knife and the whole day from the point they put me under is a total blank. It’s unsettling because I am told I carried on conversations with the doctor, family members, etc. after initially coming to from anaesthesia, but it’s only starting the following morning when I woke up in a regular hospital bed that I could start remembering again.

I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.

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?