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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzIEEE 754
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    13 days ago

    Well, rules like “all integers can be represented up to 2^24” and “10^-38 is where denormalisation happens” are helpful, but I often have to figure out why I got a dodgy value from first principles, floating point is too complicated to solve every problem with 3 general rules.

    I wrote a float from string function once which obviously requires the details (intentionally low quality and limited but faster variant since the standard version was way too slow).


  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzIEEE 754
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    13 days ago

    In game dev it’s pretty common. Lots of stuff is built on floating point and balancing quality and performance, so we can’t just switch to double when things start getting janky as we can’t afford the cost, so instead we actually have to think and work out the limits of 32 bit floats.


  • Disagree, XUL was a dead end that either needed shooting behind the bike shed or it’d have taken Mozilla down with it inevitably. It froze their internal architecture to a design that didn’t care about multicore or modern security. Switching to a proper extension api (it didn’t matter if it was chromes or their own, only that they are willing to make their own decisions, like in manifest v3).

    That said, I suspect the real death blow was when they killed servo, that project was their distant salvation, a chance to genuinely outcompete technologically and direct where browsers need to go next. I too hope I’m wrong and they can figure out a path forward, but they’ve shown little ambition from the top, so I’m not holding my breath.

    Edit: you could argue that the solution to XUL should have been an upgrade to modern design rather than death, but that would have just been an expensive temporary reprieve, the world doesn’t stop changing, it was always going to be slow to correct to whatever direction they needed to go next (and meanwhile every extension dev would be screaming murder every time they killed some braindead api designed 20 years ago).







  • The restrictions are pretty reasonable. The obvious “risk” of abuse is that this is a slippery slope and both the rules get relaxed and the safeguards lose their funding and attention over time, but the chance of that happening increases over time, there’s no way in hell they’ll be making a dent in the benefits bill for the next few years.

    So I don’t think your suggested link between this and the current governments goal of reducing benefits is the truth, or even particularly credible.

    Maybe there will be problems in 20 years, it’s certainly a reasonable fear and I don’t blame anyone who argued against it to avoid that risk, but I can’t seriously believe that anyone thinks the government is going to use this to start killing off benefit claimants in job lots.

    Tldr: your ”truth” is a pretty dumb take






  • scratchee@feddit.uktocats@lemmy.worldBlack Cats
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    3 months ago

    As the owner of 2 black cats… as far as I’m concerned all black cats are a superposition of each other until you get with a foot or so, spot the one tiny clue that gives them away, and they finally collapse into a specific cat.