But if GLP-1 makes you more active, who am I to complain. There's the reason they approve stomach stapling surgeries on morbidly obese people. They are so compromised that anything that gives them a chance to be more active offsets some of the risks of surgery, and the risks of inaction.

In HP's case, they tried running their JIT to translate from architecture B to architecture B and ended up with better performance than running it directly.

But I think it’s sometimes by management design. Scrum makes it pretty easy to keep devs permanently off balance so they can’t think about how wrong what we are building is. Maybe that person really is a piece of work, but maybe they just have never had time to think about how dumb that decision was and go fix it. Similar to you, I’m glad I don’t know where Ken Schwaber lives or when he’s presenting because I’d probably call him a traitor to his stupid face.

What people forget too is that new and destroy in C++ aren’t exactly cheap either. As far back as Java 5 the hotspot people were bragging on how new in Java was cheaper than new in C++, closer to stack allocation speed.

Of course if you look at any Java library other than ones intended for embedded or HFT systems, you will see Jevons’ Paradox at play. Made allocation cheap, and everyone allocates the hell out of everything, eating up the gains and then some.

But at the same time, the architectural simplicity of not having to worry about object lifetimes makes APIs simpler, which allows people to invest that brain power into making them more sophisticated in other dimensions. Watching Rust try to get itself doubly linked lists was strange to watch from the bleachers.

I wonder sometimes how the team doing the website feels about being treated as second class. Or if it’s the same team and they have to hold their noses to work on it.

The third dumbest smart person I had to work with obviously hated HTML and kept trying to get us to use a DSL instead. At least it wasn’t an in house one, but he had a couple other devs interested in his madness as well. But the two of us who were doing the bulk of the performance work and tricky bug fixes would have been absolutely sunk if we’d allowed that to happen. One of the worst things about React is trying to track back an HTML bug in someone else’s complex React project to the templates that are misbehaving together. The Grafana UI code is madness to debug.We would have been there very quickly and without the dev toolbox to help.

Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.

As an engineer, if you can't even start a process with sobriety, rigor, and safety in mind, that cavalier attitude only amplifies as you go down the road from experimentation to design to unleashing your ideas onto the public.

It's a harbinger of what is to come if you're being a suicidal idiot during the prototyping phase. If you don't even have respect for your own safety...

We won't have to go to 128 bit processors for address space reasons. So I wonder what the justifications will be for doing so? And what features people will actually use it for when they have it? I suppose in some ways SIMD has skipped mostly over 128 to go to 256 and 512 bits though, hasn't it?

But I also know of 2 top-tier JITed languages that can use pointer packing to use 32 bit pointers for heap sizes under 32GB to save tons of memory. So 128 bit words would make pointers obnoxiously expensive.

I've learned to lower my expectations a bit. Not enough to be pleasantly happy, but enough to not be incandescently furious on a periodic basis anymore.

There is no bigger fool than a smart person who confuses intelligence with wisdom. Intelligence is polarizing. Either you notice immediately you're being dumb, or you find a way to rationalize your dum-dum behavior for ages past when everyone else would have figured it out. We literally outwit ourselves.

I would love to be a fly on a wall for a shop-talking conversation between Silicon Valley psychotherapists. Those stories must be amazing.

Part of the settlement was that Intel had to fab for Digital for a long time and pay for a bunch of their patents. The Digital folks made it sound like it was a victory for them but it felt like the beginning of the end, and sure enough it was.

I think Alpha's big problem was people were still migrating to 32 bit code and here was a bunch of smartasses trying to push 64 bit processors 10 years before x86-64 became the flagship for Intel-compatible processors. During the time when 'Internet time' was a thing people said regularly and unironically. 10 years was forever.

Having the free hardware mostly worked, but there was a long time before all of the data alignment bugs got sorted out. It got to the point where my CS classes had progressed enough that I started looking for them myself. Literally the first development tasks I got paid to do was code reviewing for word alignment bugs on 64 bit code. It was a long goddamned time ago so it's pretty fuzzy but IIRC not all 3 processors had exactly the same restrictions for all data types. So if it worked on Alpha it usually worked on the other 2 but not 100%.

I didn't have to deal with 64 bit software at work again for another 10 years, at which point people looked at me like I was trying to be edgy when I just shrugged. No, really, I was looking at 64 bit code errors 10 years ago.