Aging impacts cancer risk in a unique way – while the risk increases in our 60s and 70s due to genetic mutations building up, it decreases after 80. A study on lung cancer in mice reveals that older mice have higher levels of the protein NUPR1, leading to a functional iron deficiency that limits cell […]
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In the Fastmail Advent 2024 series, the focus is on why Fastmail prefers using its own hardware rather than relying on the cloud. With over two decades of experience, they have optimized their systems to efficiently use bare metal servers for cost optimization. Fastmail has transitioned to NVMe SSDs, enabling better performance and higher density. […]
Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ was a thrilling puzzle that led me to uncover the intricate telephone network signalling used in the 1982 film. Analyzing the audio clip from when Pink calls London revealed a blend of speech, dial tones, rapid tone combinations, ring tones, and more, ultimately encoding the phone […]
The author recently became fascinated with Blender 3D after discovering Tellusim and its impressive rendering quality. Through examining Blender’s slow USD scene import speed, the author delves into the profiling process, uncovering inefficiencies in id_sort_by_name that lead to performance issues with shared object names. Their solution involves modifying the naming methods to avoid O(N^2) processes, […]
Improve startup time by preloading and linking the classes of an application using the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. This involves monitoring the application during one run and storing the loaded and linked forms of all classes in a cache for subsequent runs. No changes are needed to the code or how applications are started. The […]
Leonardo de Moura is excited to welcome Cameron Zwarich to Lean FRO, praising his expertise from Apple. The focus is on enhancing Lean’s code generator. A CEO shares insights on timeless software, while a software architect emphasizes clean, scalable solutions. An ex-intern highlights the importance of building a legacy with quality code. A consultant discusses […]
Daksh Gupta, co-founder of Greptile, discusses the challenges faced with their AI code review bot leaving too many comments on PRs. Attempting to reduce the noise, they experimented with prompting the LLM to generate fewer nits, but failed. The LLM’s judgment of severity was unreliable, leading to a new clustering method – filtering out comments […]
The author discusses the benefits of using an Array of Enums (AoE) and a Struct of Arrays (SoA) data layout in programming. The SoA layout reduces memory usage and improves memory bandwidth utilization and SIMD optimization, by restructuring data fields in separate arrays. The author also introduces the concept of using enums with arrays and […]
I recently finished reading “A Philosophy of Software Design” by John Ousterhout, a book filled with insights for junior-mid level software engineers. One key idea is adopting a zero-tolerance approach towards complexity, as it can accumulate and lead to project inefficiency. Another idea challenges the belief that smaller components equate to better modularity, emphasizing that […]
In this text, the author explores different strategies for achieving SIMD-ized division of 8-bit unsigned numbers through floating-point division and the long division algorithm. Compilers struggle to vectorize the simple scalar division procedure provided in C++, leading to manual optimizations. The long division algorithm is detailed in both general and SSE implementation, taking advantage of […]