Post #4050336
2026-06-11 08:44 UTC
@tykling@mastodon.social mental arithmetic is another. Coming from a precalculator generation it was once second nature. Now I still remember (with a slight delay) the times table, but ask me to do division in my head and I almost have to start from first principles. But I guess later generations never had this ability? #vibecoding
Replies (2)
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@patterfloof@meow.social 2026-06-11 09:50
@marinheiro@ciberlandia.pt @tykling@mastodon.social so many times I've reached for the phone calculator then thought half way through "why am I putting in something this simple, should be able to at least rough it in my head"
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@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-06-11 17:34
@marinheiro@ciberlandia.pt People were doing division in their heads? Wow. That's hard. It's hard for computers too, by the way. Division takes much longer than most other instructions, and when a program says to do division, optimizing compilers will substitute a different operation when possible. A division by 2, for example, can be done faster by just shifting the bits, much like division by 10 in decimal is faster. @tykling@mastodon.social