This is so true tho

  • SalamiDommie@lemmus.org
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    2 hours ago

    The amount of businesses with things you just can’t touch for whatever reason is surprising.

    The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.uk
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      1 hour ago

      Social collapse isn’t an exciting day in your life, it’s a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.

      • Sabata@ani.social
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        2 minutes ago

        Some dude in the year 2345 will be shitposting about how we didn’t see it coming because we are dumb.

  • Corbin@programming.dev
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    2 hours ago

    Discussed previously (here, there).

    I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?)

  • FedX@quokk.au
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    6 hours ago

    Ronald is indescribably more important than any tech billionaire could ever hope to be. So let’s raise a glass and give out a hardy thank you to all the Ronalds of the world!

  • dracc@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 hours ago

    Not sure if it’s part of the joke but that word means “jerk” (as in “jerk off”) in Swedish.

      • pelya@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Written in hand-optimized assembly with individual implementation for every CPU on the planet, with integer division function in 10000 lines of code impelented with XOR and bit-shifting which is somehow 0.3% faster than CPU built-in division operation.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          He had to de-optimize the init sequence because the little trick he added that caused the init sequence to return a little power to the grid instead of taking it was causing grid stability issues because the returned power from offices starting up was a bit higher than the extra power required for factory startup weekday mornings.

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
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          4 hours ago

          The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.

          It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.

          • vrek@programming.dev
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            56 minutes ago

            There is a video where a real game dev was showing how bad a specific benchmark was. It was basically read arguments, get a random number, do a for loop 10,000 times, inside there do another for loop 10,000 times, do some equation with a modulo, put result in array, pick a number from array and print to screen.

            The biggest time cost was the modulo as that’s the hot path. He basically went through and typecast all the ints to double. He got 4x the speed. It went from almost 2 seconds to less than 0.5 second just on that change. This is mostly due to cpu and compiler now using simd instructions.

            Small changes can have big impacts.

  • vrek@programming.dev
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    5 hours ago

    For a long time all systems which deal with timezone data (like ability to convert utc to est for example) was reliant on 1 server in 1 random guy’s basement which he paid for himself. I heard they were working to correct this situation but haven’t been following it.

    • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
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      5 hours ago

      You sent me down the exact kind of weird rabbit hole I love. Genuinely thank you.

      It’s maintained by the IANA now (the same people who basically run the modern Internet, saying what domains are allowed and such for those who don’t know). Though Arthur David Olson (the man you mentioned) still contributes his expertise and data.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    The myth of Steve Jobs needed the actual genius of others to exist. Steve’s gift to the world was recognizing and pointing out actual gifts tonthe world that would have otherwise gone unoticed or not brought to their full potential.

    If Steve was still around, he would have taken Ronald’s idea and had it rebuilt with a little polish and an exorbitant price tag.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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        48 minutes ago

        One hundred percent, but don’t forget Jony Ive. The mythology of Steve Jobs is built on the genius of Woz and the designs of Ive.

  • agentTeiko@piefed.social
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    4 hours ago

    Its almost like his name was Dennis Richie and its a shame a blow hard like Jobs died around the same time as him and overshadowed his passing and his legendary legacy.

    • unmagical@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      Those were both exploitative business men more than engineers or developers. Jobs wasn’t special and there’re reasons why Microsoft boosted Gates to be the richest person in the world at one point.