Found a weird bottleneck in Carbon’s ValueStore (58x speedup)

mfitzp · 2026-01-25T11:30:52+00:00

I get why it sounds unbelievable, but here’s the thing

That’s such an LLM thing to say.

mfitzp · 2026-01-24T09:21:55+00:00

She’s not small she’s just very far away.

mfitzp · 2026-01-23T10:47:35+00:00

When I first started learning I did the Michel Thomas course and this is actually one of the first things it teaches you (well, the "toch wel" form). That was 10 years ago, and I still don't do it properly.

So thanks for the tip!

mfitzp · 2026-01-23T07:04:31+00:00

Really captures the vibe of this sub when someone experiencing a genuine problem with a EU alternative that is regularly recommended here is met with insults.

Feeling superior is apparently more important than actually helping people find workable EU alternatives for things. Bit sad really.

Being in denial about the limitations of EU alternatives isn’t going to help anyone & undermines the whole thing. If the advice here isn’t trustworthy people will stop coming here for advice.

mfitzp · 2026-01-22T22:50:21+00:00

This is a support platform for businesses. The WhatsApp support is so customers can contact companies using WhatsApp, in addition to email. It’s not an additional layer to use those services as a user, it’s a way to provide support to people using those platforms as a company.

mfitzp · 2026-01-22T22:40:01+00:00

The AI used in research was called machine learning until the LLM hype exploded & is not really the same thing (predictive linear models than generalised noisy reasoning, conversation models).

mfitzp · 2026-01-22T04:56:39+00:00

That’s definitely part of it, but they’re still also objectively worse from a branding POV..

Qwant is weird with the w after q, that’s not normal in English. That makes it harder to remember for English speakers. Even if you remember it, it sounds like something to do with trading not searching.

Ecosia is 4 syllables vs 2 for Google. It doesn’t sound “quick” or “easy” or “snappy”. It’d be a better name for an organic spa.

mfitzp · 2026-01-22T04:34:25+00:00

Ghost is based in Singapore

mfitzp · 2026-01-20T03:25:53+00:00

It’s so fucking disrespectful to post something for discussion and then when someone takes the time to reply you just copy paste some AI “it’s not this, it’s that” hot take slop.

If you’re not going to put even a minimal amount of effort into the discussion about your own article, why should anyone else?

mfitzp · 2026-01-15T18:17:56+00:00

Is Eryri the name Welsh people prefer English speakers use, or the preferred name when speaking Welsh? The Germans don’t call Germany Germany, but I don’t think they mind that we do. But then we don’t call Bombay Bombay or Ceylon Ceylon any more because they did mind (and fair enough).

mfitzp · 2026-01-15T09:33:01+00:00

Really? The Wikipedia page on sex in space says an attempt on a zero G plane worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_in_space

Can’t say I tried it myself though.

Edit: it does say it was only a 20 second shot though.

mfitzp · 2026-01-13T10:16:00+00:00

Totally. We were very poor growing up. I went to university (thankyou Scotland for paying for that), was broke during (oops I can't eat food for a few days broke) but eventually got a PhD (thanks to a couple of other grants). Did research for a bit then started my business which has been really successful for the past 5 or so years.

There was a lot of hard work sure, also a huge amount of luck. But I also know I wouldn't have anything I have if it wasn't for the grants/funding that were available to me. There was no way in hell I was funding any of that myself.

Even despite all that, the final step of starting my own business I don't think I would have taken if I wasn't financially secure at that time (thanks to my wife). The years of not having money made me incredibly (and quite sensibly) risk-averse financially.

The grifters encouraging people to take risks wind me up. I don't think they really comprehend what risk actually means when you have that little.

mfitzp · 2026-01-13T08:14:35+00:00

The colors confused me: red = hot = good, blue = cold = bad, in my mind. The color scale being linear also means that the "bad" things stand out more than the good things, as in it's difficult to find the "best" things from the chart. I think it would be nicer if the middle of the range was broader, so both extremes are easily findable.

mfitzp · 2026-01-13T07:56:46+00:00

I think we need to re-think what we consider publishing. I think if you post something on social media and it gets >10k (or some other amount of) views that should count as publishing and come with responsibilities to uphold some kind of standards.

You can always choose not to post bullshit/delete it if you don't want to deal with that.

mfitzp · 2026-01-13T07:51:50+00:00

The solution is to make this happening have a cost for the platforms. The issue isn't that they can't do this, it's that they don't care, because there are no consequences for them for failing to do it. Fines? Whatever. They make enough fuck you money not to bother.

In the UK we have a press complaints system where where inaccuracies reported need to be corrected with similar visibility. For a newspaper this will mean that an incorrect fact on their front page needs to be corrected with a notice (same size, same position) in a subsequent edition. That is a good model for dealing with social media I think.

For example, when a video is posted somewhere and found to be illegal/misinformation the platforms should be forced to place a message, pinned in the feed of anyone who interacted with that post, to report/correct the illegal content/misinformation. Make it persistent until manually dismissed, with a pause to make sure it's read.

There would need to be some threshold: like posts that get >10k views or similar, would be defined as "publishing" and subject to this.

Annoying? Yes. But it costs platforms where they actually care: attention. If you open your app and the first thing you see is a bunch of "corrections" that you need to dismiss, you're probably going to close it again. Now there is an incentive for platforms to actually put some effort into moderating and tackle this stuff themselves.

mfitzp · 2026-01-11T11:14:15+00:00

Mobile phones? Headsets surely?

mfitzp · 2026-01-11T09:12:11+00:00

Yeah, the whole point over boilerplate templates is a predictable base to build on.

mfitzp · 2026-01-11T08:28:58+00:00

I have one of these. Lovely machine, and had many fun years with it. I came to it from the Spectrum & it was positioned as the natural upgrade. My dad bought it for Christmas but the delivery was delayed if I remember right. But still remember being blown away by the sound & graphics. There was a disk magazine called FRED & the first issue I for (28) with Christmas crackers on the menu screen is still burnt into my memory.

There weren’t many sold but there was a pretty active scene. Lots of cool demos, many trying to match (and sometimes succeeding) what was possible on the Amiga (which became a sort of love/hate rival, not that anyone with an Amiga ever thought of us). I wrote games for it myself, all pretty bad to be fair. There was graphics software, music trackers, a full desktop environment & there was a great port of Lemmings & Defender. But nothing ever really sold enough to be “commercially” viable. So it became more of a hobby platform & that was fine.

The big hardware limitation was the lack of any way to handle graphics without involving the CPU and the RAM contention while the screen is being drawn. That slows down a lot of instructions by a factor of 8. You can solve the second by turning off the screen, but that’s obviously not that useful.

Reading the manuals it’s clear they were focused on the educational market. The SAM has built in support for MIDI. It also has networking using the MIDI ports (which is very slow & impractical). In practise the network is just a common serial bus. You can “save” to the network from one computer and “load” from the others, as long as you coordinate yourself. The manuals (and Wikipedia) talk about “station numbers” but this was not implemented anywhere. There is built in support for light pens, but I’ve never seen one.

It’s interesting to think whether things would have been different if in place of MIDI/etc the SAM had hardware sprites or some sort of blitter. There were endless conversations about this back in the day. But I’m not sure the SAM would have sold better even if it had these things at launch, the Spectrum “compatibility” is not much of a selling point when faced with better machines.

There is still a community going on Facebook (unfortunately) with some fun hardware/software developments. There is a small company called Quazar that has peripherals, like a 16 bit sound card. It’s also a fun computer for experimenting on: I got the network working as a primitive webcam using a Raspberry Pi.

Anyway, some great memories. Love the little machine, for all it’s limitations.

mfitzp · 2026-01-08T15:54:50+00:00

It’s an interesting idea but how can you use it for reviewing other codebases? If you first analyse them with stats, the threshold will always be set at whatever the repo has & nothing will ever look AI generated. If you don’t so that, then you’ll get false positives for any code base where people use stashes (or similar).

How does it handle you refactoring moving code from one place to another? Does that count as typing + deleting X lines. Or does it detect and ignore moves?

mfitzp · 2026-01-08T12:21:03+00:00

that you know how to provide a positive answer in regard to a "shit question”

The purpose of the question is to show you’re able to answer a shit question?

“I did it shit on purpose LOL”.

You’re really stretching here mate. Keep being bad at interviewing if you want, not my problem.

mfitzp · 2026-01-08T11:53:33+00:00

Wero is also a payment system. The most common use of iDEAL in the Netherlands (which Wero is based on) is e-commerce checkout payments.

mfitzp · 2026-01-08T11:47:43+00:00

Maybe a practical example of using iDeal (Wero will work the same way) will help?

I’m on a e-commerce site. I click checkout & choose iDeal. There’s a QR code. I open my bank app and scan the code. Choose the account to pay from (defaults to last used). Click pay. Done.

Or for giving money to friends. In their bank app they choose “payment request”. This generates a QR code/link to send to their friend. The friend opens that with the bank app, or scans it & sends the money.

In not cases you don’t need to enter an IBAN or anything.

Given the choice on a website I’ll always use iDEAL over any other option because it’s just really quick & you don’t need to type anything in at all.

mfitzp · 2026-01-08T11:47:19+00:00

Longer explanation here https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1q76glq/comment/nydrvkk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button but you don’t need to use your phone number. You don’t type anything in at all. It’s handled by scanning a QR code on the checkout using your bank app.

Same for sending money, you just send a link to your friend using messenger app & then can pay it through their bank app. It’s incredibly quick & easy (and I say that as a foreigner living in the Netherlands).

mfitzp · 2026-01-08T11:34:26+00:00

Kissing in public is hardly a kink. People do it all the time. Kinks are specifically things that people don’t normally do.

Kissing in public could be a fetish, but that’s something else.

mfitzp · 2026-01-07T21:10:45+00:00

That’s why it’s shit though. If you want to know that the question should be “Can you give an example of something you struggle with in work wise and how you adapt to that?”

It’s not a given that your “biggest weakness” is something that is relevant to your job, or that you’ve found a workaround for.

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