i was reminded of this blog post on “the myth of RAM” from 2014 which argues that the asymptotic complexity of random access addressing is sqrt(n), both empirically on actual hardware, and theoretically from simple physics

https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html

it took me AGES to remember the magic keywords to dredge up the dratted url, tho!

in the course of which i found this rather more academic article on modelling asymptotic complexity of virtual address translation https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0703

What makes software engineering so challenging - more often than not - is people.

I've worked with a bunch of technically very capable devs who routinely failed because they couldn't do the people part.

You can't learn to do it on your own.

A token mirror (I am not a tall person)

#dysfunctional #designfailure

Many platforms use your data to train AI. Here’s how to opt out. https://www.eff.org/pages/i-want-opt-out-ai-tools-or-training-made-big-tech

“It’s a poor worksman who blames his tools” has always been complete nonsense. No-one complains about imperfect tools faster and louder than a master. A master will yank a cheap or damaged tool out of your hand and yell at you for not blaming it yet

Cheap, lousy tools come from middle managers who don’t know how to do your job. Blame the hell out of poor tools and those who demand you use them

We computer nerds need to face up to the fact that our industry sucks. It is basically terrible at what it does with fundamental flaws in *everything* involved with how we do it. Decisions initially made decades ago just to get things working are still with us. Von Neumann hardware allows buffer overrun exploits and countless other bugs, unsafe languages underly everything, crappy “engineering” methodologies and just plain terrible lazy programming.
#programming #software #computers
1/2

In Dublin on Tuesday? Come to the Dublin C++ User Group!
https://www.meetup.com/cppdug/events/317078174/

Sorry #nintendo but this is not right.

I imagine its a localisation bug somewhere its internally represented as Great Britain, hence its placement. Yet gb != uk.

#programming

Any libc++ maintainer want to review my PR for nth_element?

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/234656

#cplusplus

"Wealth Inequality in America Drawn to scale": https://dreamagainusa.org/

Sometimes the sheer scale of things is hard to comprehend.

#money

[blog] JezCon One

https://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2026/10/jezcon-one.html

A write-up of a recent weekend away with a small bunch of fellow programmers to rekindle the joy of programming.

#my9games

Modern C++ tip of the day:

Prefer std::span over raw pointers + size when you can.
It makes interfaces safer and clearer without sacrificing performance.

#cpp #cplusplus #ModernCpp

Great way to chill on a weekend.

#ps2 #ffx #retrogaming

I am genuinely interested in all reasoned viewpoints, please comments and share your views. I'm current chair of ACCU and trying to understand how software engineering is evolving or staying the same.

Please no Ad hominem or other fallacies.

📣 ACCU York x Slurp n' Learn 📣
Wed Nov 11, 6pm: two talks, one evening, running order TBC.

🗣️ Oana May: how product leaders decide what's worth building.

🗣️ Second talk to be announced

What's your product sense like?

🔗 Q&A, networking, and 🍻
📍 Patch, The Bonding Warehouse, Terry Ave, York YO1 6FA
👉 https://www.meetup.com/accu-york/events/316908920

Free & open to all
An in-person #TechMeetup in #York
#productthinking #engineeringleadership #ai

I had a thought, its stuck with me for a while, regarding #aicoding.

I don't understand the viewpoint of treating it like a black box. I have a mindset of an engineer where details matter. My mind goes to Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, a simple detail which caused a fatal failure.

I get that abstraction is about trust. I trust (for the most part) the hardware and OS. But with new code, trust has not been built yet and so the details DO matter.

#programming

@bjn
https://codeberg.org/bruno_nicoletti/typelist/pulls/4

I've introduced a selection and gather mechanism and used it for unique. Problem with existing filter is that it accumulates, which means it makes a lot of intermediate types which are not reused by anything. I can change unique because using filter is an internal implementation detail, hence we change to selection+gather. Fixing filter is a interface break.

The video for my talk "Using Types to Save Your Code's Future" from @cppunderthesea 2025 is now out on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljmIwA1Fm_I

"Google freezes open-source bug bounty program amid flood of invalid AI slop submissions"

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/google-suspends-part-of-the-oss-vrp-bug-bounty-program-due-to-an-influx-of-invalid-ai-submissions-product-vulnerability-submissions-ended-october-1