The physics prof who gave me my start would always get this kind of fond, nostalgic look in his eye whenever anyone mentioned "the days of punch card programming". So, naturally, I took an old slide rule and mounted it in a shadowbox with lettering that said "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS" when I got ready to graduate. He got a tremendous kick out of it.
Readit NewsRayhem commented on Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules? · Posted by u/blenderob
That’s interesting. So from this viewpoint what happens in childhood or afterwards for the kid to end up a narcissist?
Disclaimer: I'm just an...interested layman, but as far as I know we don't really know. It looks like there's both genetic and environmental components to it; your genes have a big impact on your "temperament" and more volatile temperaments correlate more strongly with cluster B disorders. But it seems like neglect, a failure to recognize a child as their own independent person (basically "my needs are your needs"), from parents/caregivers who are often themselves narcissists contributes pretty strongly, too.
The Little Shaman[1] has been one of the most comprehensive-yet-approachable resources I've found for understanding these kinds of high-conflict personalities. In particular [2-4] are pretty relevant to your question.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@thelittleshamanhealing/videos [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZeXxU7QTg [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TokWBgMQIZ4 [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Hq_xNxrOg
I recently encountered someone who spoke like this and I researched what might be the issue.
I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance. But the truth is most people are smarter than you in some ways and less smart in others, but you’re unable to see it because you’re in this black and white mode where preserving your ego relies on you being the smart guy amongst the idiots.
It’s very common in tech to see this. Maybe because we were all exceptional at maths when we were young and got the idea that meant we were super smart and this compensated for our nerdiness.
I worked with a bunch of physicists and every single one of them was smarter than me at maths and physics, I wasn’t even close. But they sometimes talked about politics and current affairs, which I’m very well read in. I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked at how little they knew and how overconfident they were.
None of those folks were narcissists, thankfully they were lovely people, but for sure it highlighted how poor people were at judging their own expertise in an area.
It’s so easy to dismiss people, criticising is easy, and so hard to see just how stupid you can be yourself.
> I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance.
This may be the colloquial description of how narcissism manifests, but it isn't even close to (and possibly completely opposite) clinical narcissism. The grandiosity isn't so much a belief as it is a "false self" put on to garner caretaking from others. It's not "I got all the toys as a kid, so I deserve more stuff!" but a failure to individuate from caregivers. "Mom (as a tool, not a wholly independent person) came when I cried as a kid, so I need you to lavish attention on me and make me feel better now as an adult. I can't see myself without external input; I only see myself as a reflection through you."
Rayhem commented on Writing memory efficient C structs tomscheers.github.io/2025... · Posted by u/aragonite
So, in option two, you'd be using SoA with a
double health[];
Yes, exactly. If you have to update everyone's health (you do) and the updates are pretty much the same (they are), then things don't get any more cache friendly than this.
Rayhem commented on Writing memory efficient C structs tomscheers.github.io/2025... · Posted by u/aragonite
Could you give some intuition on why this is likely to be the case more frequently than accessing different values from a single entity?
I'm not a games developer, so I don't have a good feel for why you'd need to iterate over every monster's health property in a tightly loop vs accessing each monster and calculating their position, what properties they have and updating one or more of their values in an iteration.
Sure. If your monsters have health, then their health is going to need updating pretty much by definition. Option 1 would be to make each entity responsible for updating itself with an overloaded `update` function in sort of a "classical OOP" fashion:
for(auto &entity: entities) {
entity.update();
}
Option 2 with something like an Entity-Component-System design would have a "Health" system that handles health updates across the board.
for(auto &damageEntity: entitiesThatDoDamage) {
damageEntity.registerDamage();
}
for(auto &healthEntity: entitiesWithHealth) {
healthEntity.updateHealth();
}
Rayhem commented on Writing memory efficient C structs tomscheers.github.io/2025... · Posted by u/aragonite
This is a good article, but it bugs me that it sort of only tells half the story.
Why are you making your structs smaller. Probably for "performance". If your goal is literally just reducing memory usage, then this is all fine. Maybe you're running on a small microcontroller and you just straight up don't have much RAM.
But these days, in most areas, memory is cheap and plentiful. What's expensive is CPU cache. If you're optimizing memory use for that, it's really about runtime speed and less about total memory usage. You're trying to make things small so you have fewer cache misses and the CPU doesn't get stuck waiting as much.
In that case, the advice here is only part of the story. Using bitfields and smaller integers saves memory. But in order to access those fields and do anything with them, they need to get loaded into registers. I'm not an expert here, but my understanding is that loading a bitfield or small int into a word-sized register can sometimes have some bit of overhead, so you have to pay attention to the trade-off.
If I was optimizing for overall runtime speed and considering packing structs to do that, I'd really want to have good profiling and benchmarks in place first. Otherwise it's easy to think you're making progress when you're actually going backwards.
If you're really accessing those fields it's overwhelmingly likely that you're accessing the same field for all of your instances. Your access pattern is going to be
monsters[0].health = //calculation
monsters[1].health = //calculation
monsters[2].health = //calculation
monsters[0].health = //calculation
monsters[1].name = //update
monsters[2].is_poisoned = //check
Rayhem commented on Writing memory efficient C structs tomscheers.github.io/2025... · Posted by u/aragonite
> The health of a monster is currently represented by a 4 byte signed integer, meaning that the health can range from -2^31 to 2^31-1 (2^31 ~= 2 million). We can already see that half of the integers potential is unused because the health of a monster should never be negative, so an unsigned int would fit way better.
If you're strictly optimizing for memory size out of necessity, then yes. It's dangerous to use an unsigned type in any context where you might even consider subtraction, though, and it's pretty effortless to see that new_health = health - damage is going to be used somewhere. Congrats! Your 100hp lvl3 monster just got resurrected with sixteen thousand hp.
Rayhem commented on Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists holovaty.com/writing/chat... · Posted by u/adrianh
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer.
I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.
Rayhem commented on How to win an argument with a toddler seths.blog/2025/04/how-to... · Posted by u/herbertl
"What would it take to convince you otherwise" is a question I've asked in the past, but I'm less and less convinced of its utility.
If the counterparty knew the answer to that, they would sit down with Google, not engage in an argument. Debate is mainly information sharing, but also to some degree about exploring the answer to that question.
In the same vein, I've been keen to try out "What would the world look like if..." and then show that we do or do not observe related phenomena. It seems like the best way to meet someone on their terms (because they get to write the "rules" of the world) and then you just apply them towards one conclusion or another. But I haven't had enough exposure to really test this out.