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Messages - McTraveller

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181
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: December 27, 2023, 05:57:18 pm »
Right I mean they are "exactly the same" if you don't include the entire God becoming incarnate as Jesus aspect?

We wouldn't have "Christmas" without that. We'd just have... some other festivals.  Sure modern society would have an overly-commercialized version of whatever they are, but it would not be Christmas.

182
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: December 27, 2023, 04:24:13 pm »
It wouldn’t merely have a different name, it would be a different thing.

183
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: December 27, 2023, 12:41:32 pm »
Without Christ, it would just be Mas.

184
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 26, 2023, 06:57:36 pm »
Why oh why does modern television/cinema have this fetish with narration?  Reveal the plot and backstory, don't narrate it, dangit!

185
General Discussion / Re: Random thoughts - On the Origins of "I Could Eat A Horse"
« on: December 26, 2023, 02:08:58 pm »
I just learned about fractional derivatives today (that is, instead of what's the second derivative of a function, what's the 1 and 1/2 derivative of that function).

There are several general formulae for this which has some interesting properties, such as if you use that formula at integer (not fraction) derivative orders you get the usual derivatives.

But if you use the fractional form, the values are nonlocal - they depend on a limit of integration.

Apparently nobody has a meaningful description of what this means, even though the math works.

Because it oddly changes a local operator (standard differential operator) to a nonlocal operator, I wonder if this has something to do with quantum mechanics, entanglement, and the mysterious collapse of the wavefunction.

186
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 24, 2023, 04:25:44 pm »
Are they guests, or "guests"?

How can we know!?

187
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: December 23, 2023, 12:46:20 pm »
Day 1 of Christmas Break.  My kids are already driving me crazy.

Gonna be a long two weeks...  :'(

188
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 23, 2023, 08:36:25 am »
Sometimes I don't feel I have anything to add to the conversation. So I just read quietly.

189
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 21, 2023, 09:05:36 am »
Quote from: ChairmanPoo on December 20, 2023, 05:53:37 pm
I dont disapprove mind you, but I never took you for a communist

Oh I'm no communist, I fully support private ownership of means of production.  I'm also for strong protection against abusing the stressed, and I'm also for social structures that encourage using profits to benefit all of society, not just a few. I don't actually know the name for this, because it's a combo of capitalism and social protections.

Spoiler: For example (a bit of a soap-box) (click to show/hide)

190
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: December 19, 2023, 07:06:51 pm »
The totally mundane reason was I was looking at assembly in my debug build was I wanted to verify that -ffast-math was indeed emitting opcodes for things like min/max instead of calling functions.

Even the just base -O code seems to have way more steps than I'd do if I was doing it by hand... I haven't looked at -O2 or -O3 code yet.

Basically, the -O code has way more mov instructions than I'd expect... lots of shuffling stuff around and re-loading constants instead of cacheing a re-used value for example.

191
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: December 19, 2023, 03:46:42 pm »
I did that, it's literally just a variable assignment in a structure element, like:

Code: [Select]
void foo(StructType* s, int a)
{
    s->m1 = a;
    s->m2 = function_of(a);
    :
    :
}

If I compile with -O it of course is sensible.

Interestingly enough, if I create a new local variable it "fixes" it even without -O, so is probably related to something with the structure indirection.

Definitely interesting.

(This is important because these functions are called very often, it's some numerical simulation code... dumb stuff like copying variables twice for no reason stood out as a red flag!)

192
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: December 19, 2023, 01:47:07 pm »
Anyone know why clang/llvm would output assembly like this for x86_64?

Code: [Select]
movq %rdi, -8(%rbp)
movq -8(%rbp), %rdi

This just moves contents of rdi into a stack-local variable then... moves the same value back to rdi? Why would it do this!? Even without optimizations (there are no -Ox command lines here), what intermediate code could possibly result in this no-op!?

NOTE: There are no side-effects here, ebp is not indexing some hardware register that might read different from how it's written.

193
General Discussion / Re: Messing around with forum text formatting and stuff.
« on: December 18, 2023, 05:46:45 pm »
None of this is .text, it is all .data.

EDIT: (I do like Strif3's work though. Nice stuff!)

194
General Discussion / Re: Israel-Gaza/Palestine war thread
« on: December 17, 2023, 07:02:11 pm »
Quote from: feelotraveller on December 17, 2023, 05:04:25 am
But, but, but, October 7th was entirely unprovoked.  (Sarcasm fully intended.)

The tally as of 4th October was 248 Palestinians killed by Israelis this year, and 35 Israelis by Palestinians.  Every week there were more killings, the vast majority unjustifiable like this one.  We had an ongoing conversation around my household about how long it would be before it all blew up. It triggered again every week (often daily) when more were murdered. My prediction was 12 months but it came a bit sooner.

It wasn't unprovoked, but if your neighborhood is being attacked by corrupt law enforcement you don't respond by attacking the random people that live in the neighborhoods where that law enforcement is from. You attack the law enforcement itself.

Sure there are basically portions of Israel that are essentially corrupt law enforcement, or gangs that are allowed to operate because of "law enforcement's" blind eye.  But this cannot ever justify attacking anyone other than those directly conducting or supporting violence.  That is, attack should be in proportion to violation. Sure yes the general Israeli population is somewhat culpable, if for no other reason that they don't stand up against violence committed "in the name of Israel", same as some of the residents of Gaza are culpable for not standing up against violence committed "in the name of Palestine."  But is silence or indifference really the same as active participation? If so, then we all deserve ultimate violence, because there is no meaningful distinction of degrees of culpability.

EDIT: is it possible, by definition, for a State to conduct terrorism? Isn't it simply acts of war or (war) crimes? Honest question here, I thought terrorism has a more narrow definition. Otherwise it seems like the term just gets watered down, and absolutely "anything" can be labeled terrorism.

195
Forum Games and Roleplaying / Re: Word association game 2^15.57: exponential wordin'
« on: December 16, 2023, 03:02:01 pm »
Practicality is irrelevant.

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