pacaro

The largest test case was 4kloc.

There are hundreds of billions of lines of cobol in production.

The IRS alone has approx 160 cobol programs, averaging 230kloc each.

Can't help thinking of the classic series of userfriendly comics about Vigor, which at one point was implemented as a plugin for nvi

The EU's "E-Evidence framework" allows authorities in any member state to compel entities doing business in any part of the EU to produce and/or preserve communications data, completely by-passing cross-border barriers.

_e.g._ Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive

I'm getting a mixed reading, the most egregious flags aren't present, but there are a couple.

As you identified there is a lot of parallel sentence structure.

They also have a bunch of lists of 3-5 items which is a classic.

It doesn't have the anodyne rambling never getting to the point style common to LLMs

Reading this, it feels like an application on Conway's law.

Dithering as a mechanism to reduce/remove banding can be very impressive.

The color Next machines only had 12 bit displays, 4 bits per channel, but with careful use of dithering it was often indistinguishable from a 24-bit display (so called "true color")

There are so many ways to produce sierpinski gaskets.

It you specify n points and the pick a new point at random, then iteratively randomly select (uniformly) one of the original n points and move the next point to the mid point of the current point and the selected point. Coloring those points generates a sierpinski triangle or tetrahedron or whatever the n-1 dimensional triangle is called

FWIW, the Next color machines had 12bit (4096) color and in practice it didn't make much of a difference. I was using one fairly extensively in the late 90s (by which time 24bit was the norm -- albeit not yet ubiquitous) and for anything other that photo/video work it was perfectly reasonable. It's amazing how far a good dithering algorithm can get you.

The refresh rate is, of course, a different issue

Yes! that one!. I have a paper copy, so it didn't occur to me that there would be an online version

There's even a book "Adventure in Prolog" by Dennis Merritt (ISBN 1520918917)

It's a lot of fun to work through, other prolog resources can be a little dry

I've also worked with engineers who have raced LMP. It's largely pay-to-play and this is one of those professions where if you're the right person, in the right place, at the right time, you might be able to afford it.

For the title holder, in this case the Earl of Lovelace, they are often referred to ("styled") simply by the place name. So after William King-Noel was created Earl.of Lovelace he was styled "Lovelace". She would have been styled "Lady Lovelace" in society, and "Countess of Lovelace" in formal contexts

From the mid 60s

Hence why it is so easy to get lost in there

The sidebar about pirate radio, while factually correct, seems to heavily imply that pirate radio started in the jungle era, but Radio Caroline was broadcasting in the 60s

Just that thinking about the "floppy drive in 1998" question.

I can think of a couple of things at play

The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this type of contract works

Even in 1998 USB was very new, so thumb drives weren't an option

CDs were ubiquitous, but cd writers were not

Proprietary tech was available, Zip and Jazz drives come to mind, or maybe even minidisc in that timeframe, but any would have been a poor choice in hindsight

Tape would presumably have been considered, but was already notorious for long term compatibility (in 99 I had to restore from a tape backup that was only a couple of years old and we couldn't easily find compatible hardware)

There were other proprietary optical storage media in the market, but they were expensive and aimed at the long term storage market (heaven help you if that's how your archives are stored)

If they needed a cheap, easily written, and distributable media, they didn't have a lot of good choices.

We still don't have a good choice for this if you want your system air gapped. I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone plug a USB device into a safety critical system

As @GistNoesis is being somewhat gnomic, I believe that they are referencing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Treatise_on_Electricity_and_...

Written in 1873 by James Clerk Maxwell

They also reference Genesis 1:3 "Let there be light"

I believe that they started writing it in 2003. It's hard to precisely age code unless you cut it down and count the number of rings

I've always thought of this as being equivalent to "work hardening"

My concern with it is more about legitimately old code (android is 20ish years old, so reasonably falls into this category) which was written using standards and tools of the time (necessarily)

It requires a constant engineering effort to keep such code up to date. And the older code is, typically, less well understood.

In addition older code (particularly in systems programming) is often associated with older requirements, some of which may have become niche over time.

That long tail of old, less frequently exercised, code feels like it may well have a sting in its tail.

The halflife/work-hardening model depends on the code being stressed to find bugs

They are popular cars to steal because they are easy to steal. Stolen cars are used "differently" than other cars

The tech trivia related to this that springs to mind is that the DEC Alpha processor was known internally by the code name EV, which stood for "Electric Vlasic" — although the suits backfit this in to "Extended VAX".

(Vlasic is an American pickle brand.)

I guess that I was taught basic mental arithmetic differently. Multiply by 8 and divide by 5, or (it's inverse) is two single instruction cycle opcodes (or whatever my brains equivalent is).

Regularly needing to translate between sane units and US (and occasional British) idiosyncrasies keeps these mental muscles worked enough that it's mostly subconscious now.

I didn't enjoy rote repetition of times tables and drills as a kid, but it's frustrating seeing my daughter being taught to understand multiplication, and learning "strategies", but struggling with mental arithmetic (I mean she tests above grade level, so I'm not worried, it's just a _get off my lawn_ reflex)

Yeah, this is basically my take too. I had a hardcopy of this sometime between 99 and 02, and read it several times

At the time I was an embedded developer at Microsoft and had been a Windows programmer in the mid 90s. It was pretty clear that there was some dunning Krueger going on here. Neal knew enough about tech to be dangerous, but not really enough to be talking with authority

.M and .P for those that use vim digraphs

And in addition, and TFA alludes to this, each time a person receives a transfusion there is a chance that their immune system will generate antibodies to it. That might not impact the transfusion at the time, but can make the recipient much harder to match for in the future.

My partner has had severe anemia, and because of a prior transfusion went from being an easy match (A+) to a being a 1 in a thousand match. The last time she needed blood it took 12 hours to locate and transport suitable blood.

If you read the literature on survival rates for people with very low hemoglobin level, it's all based on post operative recovery (or otherwise) of Jehovah Witnesses

Thanks for the summary. I kinda low-key love the idea of converting floats into a fixed point representation that covers the entire range represented by the float type. I mean the accumulator is only 32 KB, which is likely to be in L1 the entire time on modern hardware, and any given float is only going to need two 64 bit words, + 13 bits (12 bits for offset, and 1 for sign) to be represented in this scheme.