Why do you believe that the same mathematical properties hold everywhere in the universe?
Not the person you're replying too, but ... because it would be weird if they didn't.
Readit Newsbillforsternz commented on Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024) infinitelymore.xyz/p/comp... · Posted by u/FillMaths
billforsternz commented on Let's compile Quake like it's 1997 fabiensanglard.net/compil... · Posted by u/birdculture
Could also just edit the old binary directly in a pinch?
One of my best rescue jobs involved doing this in 1999, yes that 1999. The client had shuttered their development department years before but was expecting to continue happily supporting and selling their simple enough alarm system products indefinitely. Testing revealed that come 2000 the alarms would just fire continually. Whoops. Fortunately there was one dev PC they'd decided to keep and not touch. Found the offending .c code and the corresponding offending machine code after some disassembly. A little bit of creative assembly language was required to squeeze an extra check in but really no big deal and the day was saved. I remember the client manager being ridiculously happy and grateful.
billforsternz commented on 221 Cannon is Not For Sale fredbenenson.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mecredis
> On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.
I’ve had one fraudulent charge in my entire lifetime. Once a quarter seems insane. Are you putting your card info into random websites or something?
He meant once every 4 years not once every quarter.
billforsternz commented on Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown securelist.com/notepad-su... · Posted by u/natebc
The article starts out by saying that Notepad++ "is a text editor popular among developers". Really?
I enjoy coding something new up in Notepad++, without any annoying autocomplete and jank. I call it unplugged (acoustic?) mode. Jeepers Visual Studio these days starts autocompleting if and while for example and sometimes doesn't respect normal keystrokes because it expects me to complete these kind of interactions instead.
billforsternz commented on Not all Chess960 positions are equally complex arxiv.org/abs/2512.14319... · Posted by u/MaysonL
Probably many asymmetrical combinations are unfair to black. Maybe running through combinations and simulated games with a chess engine could identify ones that are fair, asymmetric and fun? Then a database could be built up of these combinations and it could be randomly selected to start your game.
Maybe there are asymmetrical combinations that actually give Black the advantage? Because Black's setup is nicely harmonious and White's is clumsy. Or maybe not I'm entirely unsure.
billforsternz commented on Some C habits I employ for the modern day unix.dog/~yosh/blog/c-hab... · Posted by u/signa11
> the fatal error was not combining the array dimension with the array pointer; all it needs is a little new syntax a[...]; this won’t fix any existing code. Over time, the syntax a[] can be deprecated by convention and by compilers.
You're thinking in decades. C standard committee is slower than that. This could have worked in practice, but probably never will happen in practice. Maybe people should start considering a language like D[1] as an alternative, which seems to have the spirit of both C and Go, but with much more pragmatism than either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)#Criti...
There is some irony in someone replying to the author of the D language suggesting that maybe the D language is the real solution he's looking for.
billforsternz commented on Your app subscription is now my weekend project rselbach.com/your-sub-is-... · Posted by u/robteix
One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.
Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...).
Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?
billforsternz commented on The world of Japanese snack bars bbc.com/travel/article/20... · Posted by u/rmason
> French culture is a rare culture where shop owners won't be afraid to tell off/talk back at customers that don't show a basic level of politeness.
My favorite French shop anecdote (I'm American): Went to a bakery in Paris. Tried to order "Un croissant, s'il vous plaît". Shopkeeper responded (in very lightly accented English) with "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying". I wasn't mad or offended, in fact it's one of my favorite memories from the trip.
Bonjour monsieur, je voudrais une eclair chocolate s'il vous plait is my number one French phrase. I can usually sell it. Maybe you needed the prefixes?
billforsternz commented on The Z80 Membership Card (2015) sunrise-ev.com/z80.htm... · Posted by u/exvi
I love the Z80, I started my career writing Z80 assembly for various embedded projects on a Z80 host system 45 years ago.
But you don't need a physical Z80 to enjoy that classic instruction set. For example see this source file from one of my projects; https://github.com/billforsternz/zargon/blob/main/src/zargon...
The good ole' Z80 assembly code is right there unaltered on the right, but it executes using C macros. In my humble consumer laptop I get a 40,000 times performance boost compared relative to a colleague's physical Z80 running the same code. I love the combination of nostalgia AND modern hardware performance.
billforsternz commented on Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024) bellard.org/ts_zip/... · Posted by u/everlier
I back of the enveloped it wrong is what :(.
It's -log2(0.75) for getting a 75% chance right and -log2(0.25) for getting it wrong. I should have stated .4 bits and 2bits respectively not 0.5 and 2.4. Sorry! Good catch.
It's 3.2 vs 4bits. Now that may not seem huge but the probabilities tend to be at the more extreme ends if the predictor is any good. Once you start going towards the 99% range you get extreme efficiency.
Thanks for the clarification.