flanagan.ffs

Recent Actions

• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  There is not actually any real incentive to going 128-bit for general purpose computing. On the memory level, the important metrics these days are 1) the cache line size, which is already 512 bits (64 bytes) on Intel and 1024...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  A compiler smart enough to convert English (or any other natural language) descriptions to optimized code would not be a compiler, it would be an AI. And since "Bootstrap yourself into the Singularity" would be a valid natural language description...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  I am up to my elbows in compiler optimization issues at the moment, so I have my doubts regarding the all-seeing power of The Mighty Compiler. Look at the shipwreck of the Itanium if you want an example of "The...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Inappropriate contact with sacrificial livestock caused the failure of a mission-critical occult procedure....
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Made unauthorized use of Hands of Glory to jump queues and avoid paying for entry at theaters and nightclubs....
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  Okay, time for a little thought experiment. A little over half of all possible BTC have been mined so far. Imagine those who currently hold those BTC just hold onto them until all BTC have been mined, and don't do...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  Actually, if it's a dystopia you're living in, once local smart devices analyzing our every thought and deed are possible, then all the proles are already dead, having been replaced by local smart devices....
• Commented on A man walks into a bar
  An article on knights versus snails made me think about how historical equoid outbreaks may have been recorded: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html...
• Commented on Commercial interlude
  Emo kids are generally the same kids as would have been goth kids back in the day, except that they can't be "goth" anymore, because that's something older people do. In another 10-15 years it'll still be the same general...
• Commented on Parasites
  Least favorite: Guinea worms. But at least they are on the way out, on track to be the first human parasite species ever to be eradicated by humankind. From the Carter Center website: ...in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5...
• Commented on The latest news
  Regarding trusting compilers, the seminal work is the "Reflections on Trusting Trust", written by Ken Thompson in (ironically) 1984: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html The answer is "no, you can't necessarily trust a compiler, even if you compiled it yourself from source code"....
• Commented on Off the Map: Women in Science and Science Fiction
  I wonder if that Motorola anecdote was correlated with the dot-com boom at all. There was a period of time in the mid-90s at Motorola where new-hire engineers (such as myself at the time) were coming in at starting salaries...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  The horror story mode of failure, to my mind, would be one of the two people dying part way through the trip. How would that affect the mental state of the survivor? A loss of spouse is already the canonical...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  An interesting corollary of such life extension is that it brings the End of Growth to within one's suddenly-extended lifetime. By "End of Growth", I mean that if humanity's energy consumption (and energy is the underpinning of ALL consumption) were...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  This sounds like the premise of a horror story to me. A future world in which the current 1% get to entrench themselves in that position forever, without even the small amount of turnover that happens due to senescence or...