Spyke

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41 replies

Now I get it!

"I am never gonna financially recover from this."

Joe predicted the AI memory crisis. Mind blown!

7

Ya know, when I first made that comment all I did was a quick check on your profile and saw no data;

But then I realized my instance is only a month or so old so perhaps I’m missing data, and Lo and behold I was correct, I just figured it was a 3yo account with absolutely no activity coming back to life, I retract my previous comment.

4
piefed.zip

Funny, in Finnish a byte is called a syllable. Which would better apply to a nibble I guess.

4

It depends on the architecture. Some chips have weird words, like the Voyager spacecraft computer.

4
piefed.zip

Oh. Shit, first I didn't know what a nibble is, now I didn't know what a word is ... I'll just show myself out and make sure I never try to write any assembler code.

4

Actually that does sound best... but not because of anything to do with you, that advice just applies to all humans for the last basically twenty years. So it's nothing to do with AI slop, but rather compilation got SO FREAKING GREAT that in like 99.9% of cases it does better than a human.

Ironically, one of the reasons for that is that concepts like "word" varies between different architectures (like like "byte" too - e.g. you've likely heard the distinction between 32-bit vs. 64-bit systems). As the other person said it is usually 4 bytes but other times it can be like 2 (in super old systems I suppose) or more than 4 in like super powerful ones (128-bit ones maybe?).

And compilers keep track of ALL of those minutiae, as well as a bunch more stuff too. Like a small(-ish) loop that only runs a couple to few times is far more efficient to just be duplicated in the assembly code, rather than have the GO-TO procedure jump back to its beginning spot. And also it helps immensely to feed things to the chip based on what the various cache sizes are - L1, L2, L3 (though not all chips have all... or even any of those).

So yeah, it's best to leave compilation to the computer to handle, thus freeing up the programmer to handle the overall logical flow and deal with other higher-order effects like code reuse and documentation and stuff.

1
lemmy.zip

Word=4bytes Dword=8bytes=2words Qword=16bytes=4words

*On a 32-bit, x86 arch. The word size on Voyager is like 12-bits or something odd.

7

Memes can't even teach me about programming my voyager properly. Smh my head.

1

Yeah, I've always used the "nybble" spelling for data instead of tooth activity. But, also I think more people just use "hex digit".

3
Zorquereply
lemmy.world

Depends on if its referring to hard drive storage or reality.

1

Wait until you learn what the other seven parts of a byte are called when the first one is called a bit.

7

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