

It’s “squeereœuille”, not squirl. /s


It’s “squeereœuille”, not squirl. /s


I wish there was a “deliver ONLY during the weekend” option so you don’t have to have things delivered to your workplace because no-one’s home.
There were 200? I understand that is exactly the lowest genetic pool limit for avoiding unsustainable inbreeding. They are likely dying off, if not already gone.


“Who’s signal is this?”
“Oh, it’s that guy with the metal strips. His address is on a post-it note somewhere around here.”


Thanks for the tip regarding Fossify, they do seem to have a nice clean set of apps!
Meh. He only had $23.50 in his account.
I’m all for the “SLEEP 8 HOURS” bit though. I need more of that in my life.


You had one job.


I get the impression this is a video-only thing because you need multiple vantage points of the scene. You can still extract a single frame in the end of course (like the article itself does), but you’ll need to shift around meaningful distances, like attack submarines do with Target Motion Analysis.
That’s 25 attoseconds, no?.. If so, that’s impressive.
The power record holder right now is the Măgurele laser in Romania, at 10 PW, but it lasts a thousand times longer, at 25 femtoseconds I believe. I can’t find clear info on pulse duration anywhere. They do intend to decrease pulse durations it seems.
Porque no los dos?
I think “blitzkrieg” matches somewhat: don’t stop to engage every stronghold, just drive around them, isolate them, and cut off their support networks.


That’s the longest time I’ve ever heard someone take to build up a comeback. Be on your guard!


This doesn’t make sense to me. The ultimate value of shares is in the dividends they represent, no? If there are no dividends ever, what are they sharing in? Is it just a postponement until future dividends? A share in control of activities?
I get that there’ll be speculation that will keep values increasing, and selling can net a profit, but what does the last share-holder get?


Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.


The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram
TL;DR
If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:
McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.
For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.
When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.
They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.
McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.
Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.
Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.



There was something wrong here, but the… right kind of wrong.
Looking back, those times were an incredible desert of of titillation compared to the desserts of today.


No, never did find it… But I’m pretty sure now that pen really was his. It was just a mildly unlikely coincidence that he had one just like mine.
I felt at the time that I’d been conned out of some things in the past, and that had me set a bit too hard on “not being fooled again”, so I overdid it.
One particular case I remember is exchanging toy cars with someone, and them claiming later that day that they lost the car i just gave them. So I spent a good few minutes looking for it with them. I even insisted “no, let’s look again” when they suggested we give up. I felt bad that they’d lost out on our exchange, so I gave them back the car they’d given me, just to ease their misfortune. Only to hear the next day how they’d been bragging about fooling me. Gah.
You’re good people, don’t regret it. Incidentally, I’d probably grab a handful of the cash and just hand it to whoever returned the wallet to me like that. It was lost anyway.