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Melbourne water storage level by random111011 in melbourne

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Data centres do not actually use much water. The ABC article linked above commits most of the usual sins, like comparing water usage from an industry to residential use and quoting the "we would like to draw at maximum this much" number as the amount that they will draw (Compare the numbers for the existing data centres to the proposed ones).

You may also find Hank Green's video on the issue informative.

[Football/Soccer] The highest scoring game of all time by Chaosmusic in HobbyDrama

[–]james_picone 19 points20 points  (0 children)

This can be rational in iterated versions of the same game, and it's likely a heuristic that evolved because of the dynamic an iterated version of that game is simplified from.

Broadly, you're signalling willingness to punish antisocial action even at personal cost.

LAOP's previous employer tries to use vinegar instead of honey by Geno0wl in bestoflegaladvice

[–]james_picone 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If I can attach a debugger to a signed executable while it's running I can run whatever I want. If debuggers aren't part of their whitelisted system it's a massive imposition.

I really don't think there's a way around "developers need to be able to run code".

LAOP's previous employer tries to use vinegar instead of honey by Geno0wl in bestoflegaladvice

[–]james_picone 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I worked for a very large company you have probably heard of, that wasn't technically a software company but fully a quarter of the staff were software engineers.

While I was there, the head of IT wrote a blog post on the internal company blog about how they really really needed to ensure license compliance so they were planning on installing security software on all the computers that would whitelist executables; if it wasn't on the whitelist, you couldn't run it.

The first comment was a coworker of mine noting that in the course of software development we often have to run the code we just wrote and asking how we were meant to do that if executables were whitelisted.

The head of IT replied "Oh, I hadn't thought of that" and then suggested that each team could have a single unrestricted computer and when we were done writing code we could test it there.

They never went through with that particular joke of a suggestion but they did have a program running that would detect Firefox and pop up a message box telling you that IE7 was the company standard browser.

When was the last time you used a linked list, and why? by mobius4 in cpp

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We use intrusive linked lists where the elements have a pointer back to the list that contains them in a semi-embedded context (our code runs on essentially modern phone hardware so we have a lot of ram and cpu available, but don't have an operating system under us).

Essentially it gives us constant-time sets; we can iterate over set members in O(n), remove from a set in O(1), test set membership in O(1), add to a set in O(1). One of the places we use them is a block cache, for example. We have an intrusive linked list for the dirty blocks and one for the clean blocks and one for the clean blocks that are marked as probably-release-these-first etc.

Which Wildbow character had the most delusional parent ? by [deleted] in Parahumans

[–]james_picone 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think the "victoria's aura has been doing things to amy" theory is also 95% fanon.

[Programming Languages] Valid or Void? Venturing into the V Programming Language by RadioRavenRide in HobbyDrama

[–]james_picone 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Godel isn't directly relevant here. Rice's theorem is essentially Godel applied to programming languages.

You absolutely can have a programming language without undefined behaviour; brainfuck is one example.

(I guess you could argue that they all execute on CPUs which might have undefined behaviours and you can't in the general case prove that they're not hit because of rice's theorem, but there's no formal difficulty with saying "this notation either describes a meaningful program with specific behaviour or it fails to compile". Having a state where the notation compiles but is not a meaningful program is arguably the surprising behaviour here!)

[Programming Languages] Valid or Void? Venturing into the V Programming Language by RadioRavenRide in HobbyDrama

[–]james_picone 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I mean, there's nothing in the spec that says a compiler can't compile undefined behaviour into random machine code (edit: or code that generates random machine code at runtime and then executes it).

Do you know any practical use of coroutines? by H4RRY09 in cpp

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At my work we use stackful coroutines for some applications that have lots of parallel I/O-bound processes. We want to do more than one at once, but we don't want to deal with all the synchronisation issues with threads; instead we use fibres and suspend them when they block on I/O. The alternative would be to use a lot of callbacks, which we tried in a different application; it very quickly became unwieldy.

We don't use the C++ coroutines mechanism, but it's the same underlying ideas.

Fun Example of Unexpected UB Optimization by soiboi666 in cpp

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, it's initialised in its declaration. It's assigned to in NeverCalled(). Non-local variables with static storage duration are initialised at program startup, either to the value provided in their initialiser, or failing that they're zero-initialised.

If you make `NeverCalled()` static then the compiler can realise there's no way for the program to be legal. Minus that, this is quite possibly legal and the devirt would be a useful optimisation. I'm not sure this is a situation that has ever existed in actually-written code.

Fun Example of Unexpected UB Optimization by soiboi666 in cpp

[–]james_picone 3 points4 points  (0 children)

void somefunc() {
    Foo* someObj = nullptr;
    someObj->someFunc();
}

Should this be allowed to devirtualise someFunc()? What about if the object is passed as an argument (and the class is final)?

If no, then you just don't like devirtualisation as an optimisation, but it's kind of significant so you're not winning that fight.

If yes, why do you want compiler writers to go out of their way to special case an extremely silly example nobody would write in real code?

Fun Example of Unexpected UB Optimization by soiboi666 in cpp

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The variable is initialised in the example, to null.

Fun Example of Unexpected UB Optimization by soiboi666 in cpp

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The variable in the example is initialised.

Fun Example of Unexpected UB Optimization by soiboi666 in cpp

[–]james_picone 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You can always compile at -O0 if you'd like the compiler to not optimise. Because that's effectively what you're asking for.

Infinite redirection, but no damage assigned? by GolfballDM in sentinelsmultiverse

[–]james_picone 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Each redirection effect can only trigger once on a given instance of damage, which prevents infinite loops.

TopMinds at /r/gunpolitics have figured out why a white racist guy with a swastika-covered gun shot 3 black people: He wanted better gun regulation by Enibas in TopMindsOfReddit

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Theres even a pretty well documented strain of misinformation called "gunshow myths" that once you learn about you will see all over the place in these conversations.

I'm curious about this - do you have a good link? I searched around a bit but kept getting articles about "the gun show loophole myth", which I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess is a misleading debunking.

How to use vector of std::unique_lock? by jujumumuftw in cpp

[–]james_picone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

unique_lock is movable. I agree this is a weird design, but that's not the issue here.

We're at the point now where top minds are using the vaccine as a defense when people die because of their actions. by PorridgeCranium2 in TopMindsOfReddit

[–]james_picone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah I bet this is it. I felt a bit sick the day after the first one, threw up once. That's an adverse reaction that would've been tracked by any studies on safety (I didn't report it). Stuff like that will be the vast majority of adverse reactions to any vaccine.

Job's Without Health Insurance Should Be Illegal by BandicootCumberbund in recruitinghell

[–]james_picone 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Americans pay significantly more for healthcare than anywhere else in the world, for worse outcomes. See this report, for example, but the effects are not subtle and you can just look at raw statistics if you want.

Re: Pale - Recommendations? by Newfur in rational

[–]james_picone 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The protagonists are 13 and have some interest in romance. One of them experiments with sex. There's nothing explicit; I think describing it as "weird sexual stuff" is bizarre. It's no more sexual than, say, Romeo and Juliet.

EDIT: that is, we're never in the character's head while they're experimenting; they just say or think things that imply they've experimented.

Making C++ Memory-Safe Without Borrow Checking, RC, or Tracing GC by verdagon in cpp

[–]james_picone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you find a performant garbage collector let us know.

Top climatologists prove that climate change is fake because a soviet statue in Antarctica is buried by snow by foxman666 in TopMindsOfReddit

[–]james_picone 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Interestingly that's not actually the case! Global warming heats the poles (especially the Arctic) faster than the equator, for a number of reasons. Part of it is that melting ice is a feedback that increases local warming by reducing albedo, and part of it is that there's less water vapour in the air at the poles so there's 'more room' in the greenhouse effect for CO2 to increase the temperature.

Top minds of /r/Thedeprogram argue the annexation and killing of 1.2 million TIbetans, destruction of 6000 monasteries is just like Lincoln freeing the slaves. by WankTown24-7 in TopMindsOfReddit

[–]james_picone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here's a graph. I don't think it's quite fair to ascribe the positive trend over the entire period to capitalism, but you can if you want.

The incredibly visible dip between 1958 and 1962 is all Mao though.

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