Richard Barrell

@0xabad1dea @becomethewaifu I think the CPU in my current PC has more L3 cache than some of the machines I learned to program on had RAM. Certainly I've worked with xeons and epycs for which that was true.

@brooke @0xabad1dea @becomethewaifu I immediately dare you to parallelise the main "for each ray..." loop of course ❤️

@becomethewaifu @0xabad1dea I had a 3d graphics class about 20 years ago where the lecturer claimed that the bottleneck in ray tracing renderers is usually cache misses for reflected rays. I think he used the phrase "primary rays cache, secondary rays thrash". The primary rays (the ones that go out of the camera into the scene) mostly get to take advantage of CPU cache because they point in very nearly the same direction as the other primary rays adjacent to them. But then secondary rays that bounce from the surfaces in the scene thrash CPU cache because they fly off in all directions, from different starting points. I liked that lecturer. Dutch gentleman, I think, and a very good teacher. I remember him once explaining something about how things work when there's only one light in a scene, and he started by saying "If I had enough bricks to smash all but one of the lights in this room..." :D

@AmyZenunim reddit algorithm is working well for once then

@SusanPotter the first program I remember writing that I found really useful was a CGI script I wrote in C to turn a text file with all my bookmarks in it into a web page. I ran it on a little second hand (very cheap) Pentium 1 PC. In retrospect I have no idea why C.

@SusanPotter eee ❤️

@edwinb a member of my family recently learned to program in their late 30s. Had interest in computing their whole life and I think had tried some small courses before but it never clicked. Then we tried making a mod for the game Project Zomboid together and pretty soon they were writing lots of Lua. If you ask me to teach a random person to program I will first talk to them to find a project they are interested in making, and then use any programming language which can accomplish their project.

@tommorris "who could have predicted this" yikes that essay about the idea of using prediction markets as a mechanism for plausibly deniably paying out money to assassins is only a few decades old now????

@adrake @mhoye maybe you should offer to sell a licence for your solution to him 😂

@dashdsrdash @mhoye slightly aside from your main point here, I quite like that as a definition of "big data". If it's big data then it doesn't fit on a single computer and you need to do something distributed to get it to fit. Has some nice side benefits like accurately tracking that the definition of "big" changes every year as new components with larger storage capacity become available. Also "medium data" if it fits in SSDs on a single computer, "small data" if it fits in RAM (yes this can be multiple TBs ofc) and "tiny data" if it fits in RAM on a cheap computer.