If they reversed the order of the fields, you could sort them by just pretending they are int64’s.

No you couldn’t, given “Normalization is not required”, so we have

    10³ × 9 < 10¹ × 100000

That’s because it’s called “the news”, not “the olds”.

When I teach people how to talk to reporters I always emphasize this. If it’s the 10th time something happened, you need to explain it in terms of what’s -new- or your info won’t go beyond the pitch meeting.

Thats why your town’s street fair makes a big deal that it’s the 10th anniversary event. It’s “news” that you’ve hit a round number. That’s why Trump breaks the law in a little way before doing it in a big way… the second time isn’t interesting.

I'm pretty sure his point was that security labels are a dead end.

(Have you ever attended an academic security conference like Usenix Security?)

Exactly.

I find that people try to use interfaces like they’re using an OO language. Go is not OO.

This is a good reminder that optimization without measurement is stupidity.

It’s also a reminder that compilers aren’t magic and optimizers aren’t all-knowing.

People have a tendency to ascribe magical properties to anything they don’t understand. Compilers and optimizers more so.

Measure before and after any optimization. You’d be surprised at what does and doesn’t improve efficiency.

Today’s CPUs are more complex than a human can understand.

Measure twice, cut once.

Worse is the cargo cult of "write this way because it is faster", without any measurements.

Only because it used to be true in the past, someone told it was so during a coffee break, or it appeared in some computer related article.

Agreed. As an embedded software engineer new to the field I’ve seen senior engineers with over ten years of experience complain when division by a compile time constant (even by a power of two) is used in code instead of multiplication or bit shifting on our cortex-m7 mcu running at 600MHz

I (and I’m being serious) assumed AGI would break into the world’s financial institutions and steal the 45 trillion.

It is purely academic... or is it?

G. H. Hardy's autobiography was titled "A Mathematician's Apology" because he, somewhat jokingly, wanted to apologize for a life of pure math... totally academic and completely useless.

Then a few years after he passed away, his math was key for The Manhattan Project to build the first successful nuclear bomb. His math lead to the device that changed the world and affected every aspect of human life for a century.

It's only "useless" until someone finds a "use".

P.S. The book documents his time with Ramanujan. If you liked the film "The Man Who Knew Infinity", you should read Apology

Look, if you tell me that this is just an interesting problem, I'm happy to hear that. If it helps prove some exotic theorem, I'm happy to hear that. I'm also happy to hear that this has a direct application somewhere.

I just want to know.

I'm sorry if it sounded like I was scolding you. My intent was to confirm your assumption but give you an appreciation for the fact that it's hard to know.

Nobody knows.

That's the reason why you were pointed to Hardy's Mathematician's Apology. He was talking about how his works would never have a practical use.

It turns out he was wrong, because Computers are mathematics made flesh. All these abstract notions suddenly had a practical use.

There is something fundamental about the limits of computing so there might well be something that can be made of the BB function but at the moment it's just pure maths.

Imagine if we had strong consumer protection laws. Companies would fear claiming HDMI 2.0 that was really HDMI 1.2. Instead they just figure “meh! If anyone complains we’ll let them return it.”

I’ve always assumed this was the diner. I wonder if someone can confirm:

https://prestigediner.com/

You need to appreciate how little RAM and CPU power those cameras have.

As far as cost:

Applying the right tag: 0

Anything else: not 0

Why not include a faster CPU or more RAM? In an industry where people pick one product over the other because of a $10 price difference, you’re never going to convince management to approve the better CPU when a tag solves the problem.

These are hardware companies. They look at software as a nuisance. “fix it in software” is for the downstream.