In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.

The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.

Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.

Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.

Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.

Apple has done pretty well, but they aren’t immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.

The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.

Are you working with 20 bit integers? You’ll never get it down to a million lines like that…

There’s a million lines of If >4096, subtract 4096

Then a quick lookup case statement for whether the remaining number is even.

I selected the probability “95%”. It’s conscious, full AGI confirmed.

I got 17/28… I do not use javascript. This is not the first time I have taken this quiz (but it has been a while).

If small numbers are much more frequent, it’s better to return early. Really, you should gather statistics about the numbers the function is called with, and put the most frequent ones at the top.

You’re right, I want thinking of the manager thermals as counting as another person for the purposes of “alone with”, but provided they can move back and forth simultaneously with their employee (or they’re always counted as part of the new team) then the puzzle is possible.

It’s not, the way it’s written, the asshole cannot coexist with either the bore or the idiot, which is pretty accurate.

They only came out 10 years ago. If we optimize now, how will we integrate an AI chat agent feature next year?

Delete Ass Master volume 7 to make room - that one wasn’t any good anyways.

Companies try to maximize green per red. By paying less, and getting the same, they maximize that, year after year until (in a temporary and unforeseeable setback) you leave for… Bluer pastures, apparently.

There are different sorts of companies, and the more they think of employees as a number of years of experience plus a stack of skills, the more susceptible they are to believing that replacing humans with other equally skilled humans is a productive way to spend their time.

You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.

I think you’re reading more into the statement than is there. Their studio was founded the same year this game released, with only one of the two founders described as a programmer. I’m pretty sure they mean “we” as in “the two guys that founded the studio”.

In my mind, the line is that an engineer is someone that can commit a crime by doing their job incompetently. If the only things at risk are your job and your pride, that’s a different thing.

“I program all day, so there’s a lot of trial and error. My friend is a negligent civil engineer, so there’s a lot of error and trial.”

I’m a Senior Computer Software Developer Programming Engineer, or SCSDPE (which is pronounced Skuzz-Deep), and I will be irreparably miffed if you get it wrong.

For your convenience, I also accept “that guy that sits weirdly close to the water fountain”, “hey”, and “paid keyboard user”.

I’ve known a lot of math people, and /on average/ I think they’re more capable of programming useful code than the other college graduate groups I’ve spent a lot of time working with (psychology, economics, physics) /on average/.

That said, the best mathematicians I’ve known were mostly rubbish at real programming, and the best programmers I’ve known have come out of computer engineering or computer science.

If you need a correct, but otherwise useless implementation, a mathematician is a pretty good bet. If you need performance, readability, documentation, I’d look elsewhere most of the time.