Someone (u/Someone) - Readit News

Someone commented on IBM's Power11 Processor Architecture servethehome.com/ibms-pow... · Posted by u/ksec

vb-8448 · 11 hours ago

There are still plenty of IBM-I (formerly as400) and AIX installations around Europe.

Someone · 8 hours ago

The statistic to look at is not how many there are, but how many get sold nowadays.

Also, how does “plenty” compare to the millions (50 million or so, it seems from a quick search) x64s that Intel sells per year? Do they even sell 1% of that?

Someone commented on I made a floppy disk from scratch kottke.org/25/08/i-made-a... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

qingcharles · 2 days ago

Right. He's making a disk in this video, though. In the movie they have the disks and no drive :)

Someone · 8 hours ago

Haven’t seen the movie, but if the goal is to read a single 8" disk once, it wouldn’t surprise me that, with modern tech, were easier than creating a disk. A McGyver construction would leave out the spindle motor and the stepper motor for the read head. You can manually rotate the floppy at about the right speed, manually move the disk head to find the positions of the tracks, record the signal and then do signal processing on you multi-GHz laptop to recover the signal.

Someone commented on Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017) theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/surement

vessenes · 14 hours ago

Thank you for this expansion. I was about to rabbit hole on how it could be that ratio-based trig (and what is that?) is more accurate than modern calculations.

Re: rationals, I mean there's an infinite number of rationals available arbitrarily near any other rational, that has to mean they are good enough for all practical purposes, right?

Someone · 9 hours ago

> that has to mean they are good enough for all practical purposes, right?

For practical purposes, they’re bad. Denominators tend to explode when you do a few operations (for example 11/123 + 3/17 = 556/2091), and it’s not easy to spot whether you can simplify results. 12/123 + 3/17 = 191/697, for example.

You can counteract things by ‘rounding’ to fractions with denominators below a given limit (say 1000) but then, you likely are better of with reckoning with a fixed denominator that you then do not have to store with each number, allowing you to increase the maximal denominator.

For example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farey_sequence), there are 965 rational fractions in [0,1] with denominator at most 10 (https://oeis.org/A005728/list), so storing one requires just under 10 bits. If you use the fractions n/964 for 0 ≤ n ≤ 964 as your representable numbers, arithmetic becomes easier.

Someone commented on Hundreds lose water source in Colorado's poorest county with no notice coloradosun.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/mooreds

giantg2 · 13 hours ago

"but it's hard to empathize with them when the municipality they're not paying into makes a decision on behalf of their own voters/taxpayers."

They're paying for the water. It's not like they're getting it for free. Sure, the municipality could just not sell outside the municipality, but most utilities are forbidden from suddenly cutting off service due to health and safety concerns.

Someone · 13 hours ago

Indeed. IMO, the municipality should have raised water prices for everyone to make supply match demand.

And that doesn’t mean water bought ‘on demand’ would have to be equally costly as what people who ‘subscribed’ to water pay.

Someone commented on I made a floppy disk from scratch kottke.org/25/08/i-made-a... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

qingcharles · 3 days ago

In the new Mission: Impossible film they're tasked with making an 8" disk drive from scratch. That should be his next video :)

Someone · 2 days ago

8" drives having lower density, I would think that is easier.

Someone commented on Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching (2022) hillelwayne.com/post/pyth... · Posted by u/agluszak

cauthon · 4 days ago

You _can_ write pathological code like the Everything example, but I can see this feature being helpful if used responsibly.

It essentially allows the user to check if a class implements an interface, without explicitly inheriting ABC or Protocol. It’s up to the user to ensure the body of the case doesn’t reference any methods or attributes not guaranteed by the subclass hook, but that’s not necessarily bad, just less safe.

All things have a place and time.

Someone · 4 days ago

But the moment you use a third party library, you cannot use it “responsibly” because that library, too, might use it “responsibly”, and then, you can easily get spooky interaction at a distance, with bugs that are hard or even impossible to fix.

Someone commented on D4D4 nmichaels.org/musings/d4d... · Posted by u/csense

ajross · 5 days ago

I think you're misunderstanding. 32 bit ARM has TWO instruction encodings. OpenBSD apparently only knows about one. In thumb encoding, the instruction is a branch, not a trap.

Someone · 4 days ago

It can’t be a trap in regular ARM assembly, either, can it?

There, all instructions are 32 bits and D4D4 is only 16 bits.

Someone commented on Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover imperialcollegelondon.git... · Posted by u/ljlolel

umanwizard · 5 days ago

The former.

We can't be 100% certain that Fermat didn't have a proof, but it's very unlikely (someone else would almost surely have found it by now).

Someone · 5 days ago

Unlikely, but not unheard of. Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares is from 1640. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_theorem_on_sums_of_... says:

“Fermat usually did not write down proofs of his claims, and he did not provide a proof of this statement. The first proof was found by Euler after much effort and is based on infinite descent. He announced it in two letters to Goldbach, on May 6, 1747 and on April 12, 1749; he published the detailed proof in two articles (between 1752 and 1755)

[…]

Zagier presented a non-constructive one-sentence proof in 1990“

(https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-closest-thing-to-magic-that... shows that proof was a bit dense, but experts in the field will be able to fill in the details in that proof)

Someone commented on Prime Number Grid susam.net/primegrid.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

knome · 7 days ago

>There are more prime numbers than there are squares of integers.

all integers have a square, while not all integers are prime.

in any given span, you'll see more primes than squares, however.

more dense?

Someone · 5 days ago

> all integers have a square, while not all integers are prime.

That’s true, but I don’t see how that’s an argument. “All integers have a prime ‘the nth prime’, while not all integers are squares” similarly is true, but not an argument as to which set is denser.

Someone commented on Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? zed.dev/blog/windows-prog... · Posted by u/janjones

Analemma_ · 5 days ago

Think about the customer base: the sorts of users who want a high-performance text editor are exactly the kind of people who will run Windows 7 until it's pried from their cold, dead fingers, and who will flood the support forums with complaints if you limit support to operating systems released in the last 15 years. Because of their target market, Zed probably has implicit support requirements which wouldn't apply to e.g. the last first-person shooter.

Someone · 5 days ago

Similarly, the Mac version is for MacOS 10.15 (from 2019) or later, and has an x64 version.