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Programming Leftovers
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Juan J Martínez ☛ Back to streaming
The way I like it, and that is one of the reasons why I started doing it, is like I was doing pair programming: I explain what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, so the person you are pairing with knows what is going on and has a chance to contribute.
That translates into a lot of talking, and mostly doing two things at the same time, which is a skill. Not everybody can think, talk and write code; and like any other skill, practice makes perfect (or better at very least!).
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Daniel Lemire ☛ Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers
In software programming, the product between two integers is often computed to a fixed number of bits with overflow. Consider 8-bit integers. If you multiply 127 by 127, you get back the number 1 as an 8-bit unsigned integer, with an overflow.
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Haskell ☛ Haskell Foundation 2026 Update
The Haskell Foundation has been at the center of a flurry of changes, all of which I’d like to share with the community today.
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The Cyber Show ☛ Why I code (Part 2)
I said it before; coding is like physical exercise. Code is dancing. You don't need a reason to do it. You can feel parts of your mind getting a healthy work-out as you switch between tasks like writing an awk regular expression, installing a new program, debugging a network issue, reading the documentation on a new operating system. With fitness in readiness it does not matter that the calling may never come. You hope it won't. The point is, "I like the sound of it". It makes me feel good.
Some people can't imagine how any of these tasks aren't tedious "work". Why would you do anything so masochistic as to practice code and basic systems administration for any other reason than being paid a ton of money?
Why do you clean your house?
In truth, a lot of what we do in life is preparation for weakness and death; Saving money. Building a secure, comfortable home. Exercising. Learning and self-improvement continue to the very end. They become part of "maintenance" rather than preparation for an extrinsic purpose. They're the self discipline of an ordinary life.
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We want a technological society, but at someone else's cost. "AI" is not just slop, it's technical sloth. It's the protest of an intelligent adult population that has grown jaded, cynical and tired of the technology it so performatively pretends to love.
I think this way of slovenliness is not to "embrace" modernity but to retreat from it. Convenience is not the path of the technophile and gadget geek. "Convenience" is a rejection of technology in place of "magic". It is throwing oneself into wilful superstitious ignorance and primitivism.
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Rust
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Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 652
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!
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R / R-Script
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.15 on CRAN: Coping
This release adjusts the package for the maybe overly hasty switch R 4.6.0 has undertaken with respect to using C++20 as a default C++ compilation standard. I am of course largely in favour of such a switch to more modern C++. But I am also cognizant of the fact that not all compilers and machines are ready. And just as I have already seen one other package fail to compile on a particular CRAN system (!!) under C++20, this package all of a sudden, and only on that same system, started to throw two (harmless) compiler warnings. We could call these erroneous as newer versions of the same compiler do not throw them but it does not matter. The decision to default to C++20 has been made, and now we live with it. But maybe some hardware platforms should be moved behind the barn. Either way, this release both adds an explicit cast to two lines that may not really need it (but this will not hurt) and also dials the compilation standard down to C++17 on one particular platform. So once again there are no user-facing changes, or behavioural changes or enhancements, in this release.
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