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Exception-safety, the invisible bug.

The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 6 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row.

My post from yesterday on permutation roots ends with a Mathematica code for finding the probability that a permutation of n elements has a kth root. This is done by finding the coefficient of xn in the generating function I wanted to say more about this, and look at implementing the same code in SymPy. […]

The post Counting permutations with roots first appeared on John D. Cook.

Jason Grigsby has a great article where he surfaces an opinion from the Safari team about how AI agents shouldn’t get special treatment: An agent acting on a user’s behalf is, in effect, assistive technology: it should operate a site as the user would, and the site should n...

It’s well known that you can convert the base 16 (hex) representation of an integer to the base 2 (binary) representation by simply converting each digit from hex to binary. For example, CAFEhex = 1100 1010 1111 1110two I imagine it’s less well known that you can do the same thing with floating point numbers. […]

The post Printing floating point numbers in binary first appeared on John D. Cook.

Nvidia is falling. The mood has changed.

I’ve talked a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of old milestone operating systems. But what were the advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1, first released July 27, 1993? That’s a fair question, and there are valid reasons it

The post Advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump): Grant me the courage to change the things I can. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chilling Effects; Billy Bragg v Myspace; Glenn Beck calls murdered Norwegian children "Hitler Youth"; Photo...

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. In the previous two instal...

ARCNET was the first commercially available local area network standard, beating both Ethernet and Token Ring to market. Conceptually, it had similarities with both, and because it was inexpensive and efficient, it was popular for a good 15 years or

The post What happened to ARCNET appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Let σ be a permutation on n elements. If there is a permutation τ such that applying τ twice has the same effect on the list of elements as applying σ once, we say σ = τ² and τ is a square root of σ. If we let our n elements be the integers 0 […]

The post Permutation roots first appeared on John D. Cook.

An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources. This looks to be mostly a thing in China. Res...

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of Snap was all over the news in the US because he and his wife made a large donation. The weird part about it was that every news outlet that covered it had an acrobatic title where they didn't specifically say how much they donated, yet insisted on that $550 Million amount.

When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of that amount. So I wondered, why did they inflate the amount in the first place? It looked like a PR stunt.

This past couple weeks, I worked on a video to explain what really happened and how we should take this news.

Enjoy

The function expq(x) is defined by taking the power series for exp(x) and keeping only the terms whose index is a multiple of q. For example, exp2(x) keeps only the even-numbered terms in the exponential power series and so equals cosh(x). In general, The first sum uses Iverson’s bracket notation: a Boolean expression in brackets […]

The post exp_q first appeared on John D. Cook.

To call this derivative is an understatement. But that's what this genre demands; rehash all your favourite media properties into something new. It's the literary equivalent of having your Transformers™ fight your He-Man© toys. The plot, such as it is, features the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroying Earth due to a late beurecratic appeal, forcing people to play The Hunger Games, while a Twitch …

The Origin Energy breach down here in Aus is all over the news this week, and as with many breaches, it's multi-faceted. You've got them leading with "don't worry, your credit card is fine", the hacker leading with "they didn&

Release: sqlite-utils 3.39.1

I back-ported a fix for table.delete_where() that shipped in version 4.

Tags: sqlite-utils

Ruff v0.16.0 Astral shipped a significant new version of their Ruff Python linting tool a few days ago on July 23rd. I noticed today because my various CI jobs all started failing thanks to new default Ruff checks and my unpinned "ruff" dev dependency. From Brent Westbrook's...

Opus 5: Richard III