koala_man

I would never have imagined a phone web browser capable of this in 1996 between playing Quake and testing out the hot new JavaScript powered mouse rollover image effects in Netscape Navigator 2.0

Unsurprisingly it was buggy without the obligatory "Make no mistakes."

> Swap files have had the same performance characteristics as swap partitions for more than 20 years

I thought so too, then I benchmarked it on a (spinning rust) HDD and found it was significantly slower:

https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/blog/?p=1110

tl;dr: "In this test, using a swap file was surprisingly 50%+ slower than simply allocating a swap partition at the start of the drive, in spite of the low fragmentation and Linux’s bypass of the FS layer."

> The costs just get bigger.

By a constant factor no less (until we get into theoretical physics)

I spent years not upgrading because when I'm in my car asking my phone to navigate somewhere, Gemini likes to say "As a large language model I can't navigate anywhere. Try using a map application on your mobile device."

It still does it, but these days you can reply: "yes you %@#$ing can, use a tool call!!" and it will

Matching decomp would require the same compiler and flags as the original game, right? How is that determined?

> OpenBSD devs making huge progress unlocking the kernel for SMP

Isn't this anachronistic for 2026? Am I misunderstand what this means?

I will try to remember him for his far too relatable Dilbert comics about corporate office life, and not his, uhm, later work.

One of my favorite strips was Dilbert in the 90s only being given a 286 PC for 3D rendering work, with the boss saying "besides, how often will you do 3D rendering in your career?"

Dilbert replies "Once, if I hurry"

I once saw a high resolution CPU graph of a video playing in Safari. It was completely dead except for a blip every 1/30th of a second.

Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.

> The intention was to prevent tooth decay by regulating candy intake.

Yes, but crucially not by reducing candy intake.

The result of the study was that the amount of sugar didn't particularly matter, but frequency of intake and stickiness did.

I'm Norwegian and concluded that she meant when ordering, such as for a choice of potatoes or pasta.

This makes sense since the context is translation for tourism.

Otherwise, the normal, casual way would be "kan du sende potetene?" i.e. "could you pass the potatoes?", lit. "can you send the potatoes?"

(This assumes it wasn't physically possible to simply reach across people to grab it yourself with what's known as "the Norwegian arm")

> Meta went from 2K to 10K+ from 2018 to 2025

Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021

Good call. O(N^2) is the worst time complexity because it's fast enough to be instantaneous in all your testing, but slow enough to explode in prod.

I've seen it several times before, and it's exactly what happened here.

My bad. I had been reading about how there's a frustration in the community that allistic people refuse to explain why such statements are wrong, and instead just repeat "you know what you did!" to people who genuinely don't.

I tried to be the one who didn't do that, but missed the mark. I'd delete it if I could.

This question is logically sensible but considered emotionally abhorrent. If you haven't been tested for autism you should consider taking a quiz.

The article starts off saying that if you want people with real full stack experience, from kernel to UX, you need to grow it.

It goes on to say that it's hard to find and develop expertise for low level software like hypervisors.

What's the connection between the topics? It feels like two different rants.

If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX?

It feels like we're back in 1900 when anyone's clever idea (and implementation) can give huge performance improvements, such as Ford's assembly line and Taylor's scientific management of optimizing shovel sizes for coal.

I'm surprised there are no UTF-8 specific decode instructions yet, the way ARM has "FJCVTZS - Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero"

I worked on this project for a week during the FB team matching process.

I had previous Haskell experience, but what struck me was how irrelevant that was.

To their immense credit, they had managed to use Haskell to write an entirely entreprise focused, "boring" business rule backend serving millions of QPS, and people who were not Haskell fans could easily use its sensible DSL to accomplish their goals.

Way too many Haskell projects are about Haskell itself, so this was really fascinating to see.

> doesn't use enough anesthetic

My school dentist always botched the anesthesia, and afterwards I had to grind my teeth for three days to make them fit together again.

I never told anyone because adults kept saying dentistry hurts so I assumed it was normal. I didn't realize how fucked up this was until I went to college and experienced a competent dentist for the first time.

> extremely large functions > quadratic behavior

*High five*

I fixed several of these during my time as a compiler engineer too.

It's true what they say, quadratic is the worst possible time complexity. Fast enough to work on all your test cases, slow enough to explode in prod.

> one website

I'm guessing gov.uk is hoping that this will become some kind of standard, at least for British resources.

Tbh if you've never done either, I can absolutely see why getting on and riding a machine 1000x your size is a bigger deal than seeing various animals from a distance.

I remember the address one. It was fantastic and I loved it. I wish they were all that helpful.

I find this "falsehoods programmers believe" format of making pointed claims that you intentionally don't clarify to be unhelpful and obnoxious

Maybe it works better on cold blooded animals

Back in the day I ran Bochs in all its 4 Bogomips glory on a university IP address and went to IRC channels where script kiddies were "trading root".

I let them go first, and watched through an instrumented terminal how they clumsily installed a rootkit, then inevitably refused to give anything in return and laughed calling me a noob.

Their laughter was short lived.

I had even spent quite a bit of effort kludging the kernel to report much higher specs than Bochs could deliver, but all that effort was wasted because no one knew how to check.

A coworker similarly said "WAIT--reindeer are REAL??"

I'm thankful I had maturity to simply say "yes, they're in the deer family, native to Canada and Northern Europe".

She was from China where they probably rarely mention reindeer, and only in the context of Santa Claus.

It's no different from a Westerner rarely hearing about tanukis, and only in the context of trickster spirits in anime and Super Mario Bros 3. How are you supposed to know they're real?