In the West we have autonomous systems to commit genocide, detecting and murdering "enemy combatants" at scale, where "enemy combatant" is defined as "male between the ages of 15 and 55".
Sometimes I'm not so sure about any so-called moral superiority.
Citation? Not saying you’re wrong but my time in defense left me very much with the opposite opinion (radar target acquisitions had to be approved by a human, always)
> On the build quality side, basically all the PCs are still lagging behind Apple,
This is an oft-repeated meme, but not really true. Thinkpads, high-end lightweight gaming laptops like the Asus G14... There are many x86 laptops with excellent build quality.
There's also corrupted versions in other languages than English! I'm from Portugal and there's also semi-bawdy lyrics that somehow spread across the country organically across hundreds of miles.
I'm actually surprised that gcc doesn't do this! If there's one thing compilers do well is pattern match on code patterns and replace with more efficient ones; just try pasting things from Hacker's Delight and watch it always canonicalise it to the equivalent, fastest machine code.
This particular case isn't really due to pattern matching -- it's a result of a generic optimization that evaluates the exit value of an add recurrence using binomial coefficients (even if the recurrence is non-affine). This means it will work even if the contents of the loop get more exotic (e.g. if you perform the sum over x * x * x * x * x instead of x).
Doing something like that with a pattern is obvious, but also useless, as it will catch very limited cases. The example presented, is known there is a closed form (it’s believed Gauss even discovered it being 6 yo). I’m sure this optimization will catch many other things, so is not trivial at all.
In 2025 it's decidedly old-fashioned to even think of interfering with the march of the orphan-crushing profit-maximising machine. Each quarter demands a fresh way to rip off people.
How quaint even the 90s seem today, and we though that was hyper capitalism!
I'll add that tone matters. Treating tens of thousands of yearly deaths and horrific injuries in automobile crashes as "just a fact of life, as natural and inevitable as being struck by thunder", does matter a lot to the discourse.
In what sense is HN an algorithmic feed? It is neither personalised nor does it have a significant discretionary boost beyond "age" and "upvotes". It's qualitatively a different thing.
Note that there is also "censorship" (!) - `gag_factor` - even in this free thought paradise. The lesson is that no matter your scale, suppressing certain content is necessary to prevent low quality posts and spam from turning your site into a swamp.
Correct, it is not personalized. So we need a different word than 'algorithmic'. People keep saying that word when they want to "ban" a certain kind of math. But they should at least be particular about what they don't like (sort your friends' posts chronologically is also a personalized algorithm, after all..)
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