I wish! That number is kinda-sorta-related-to inches, but it's not, at least not anymore. I wear a 31 or 32 jean, but my waist is about 34.5 inches. And any jeans which fit my thighs properly (turns out to be about size 34) will fall off my waist.
Measure your own waist and pants, see what you find!
I think it depends on your experience. I have a lot of experience from the Old Days™ and from developing for microcontrollers, so I find reading assembly very natural and straightforward. When coding for the really small MCUs I've often had the disassembly generated and shown on another window every time I incrementally build, and can check and make sure it's what I was expecting to see.
I do agree that knowledge of compiler optimizations is really important to working this way, though you'll eventually pick them up anyway. I don't see much value in looking at -O0 or -Og disassembly. You want the strongest stuff the compiler can generate if you're going to do this, which is usually either -O3 or -Oz (both of which are strong in their own ways). -O0 disassembly is... just so much pain for so little gain. Besides, -O3 breaks more stuff anyway!
For someone without this level of experience (and who isn't interested in learning)... yeah, I can see why you'd want to do this another way. But if you've got the experience already, it's plenty fast enough.
The thing is, you're gaining a bunch of knowledge about compiler internals and optimisations, but those aren't necessarily specified or preserved, so it's questionable how valuable that experience actually is. The next release of the compiler might rewrite the optimiser, or introduce a new pass, and so your knowledge goes out of date. And even if you have perfect knowledge of the optimiser and can write code that's UB according to the standard but will be optimised correctly by this specific compiler... would that actually be a good idea?
All of that is less true in the microcontroller world where compilers change more slowly and your product will likely be locked to a specific compiler version for its entire lifecycle anyway (and certainly you don't have to worry about end users compiling with a different compiler). In that case maybe getting deeply involved in your compiler's internals makes more sense.
Learning about how compilers optimize code isn't really knowledge that goes out of date. Yes, things get reshuffled or new ideas appear, but everything builds on what's already there.
You'd never want (except in extreme desperation) to use this knowledge to to justify undefined behavior in your code. You use it to make sure you don't have any UB around! Strategies like "I wrote a null pointer check, why isn't it showing up anywhere in the assembly?" can be really helpful to resolve problems.
> 3M does not provide product information on which filters are best for government repression
Just get the one that everyone else does: NIOSH TC-84A-0510 with protection against "Solid Particles, Organic Vapors, Acid Gases, Ammonia, Formaldehyde, Methylamine". Every lab buys this filter, or its manufacturer equivalent, for dealing with god-knows-what, because this one will handle just about anything.
> Also NIOSH-approved with
3MTM Canister CP3N for use
against CS, CN and as a P100
filter (TC-14G-0251) in riot
conditions, including those
with teargas (non-CBRN).
TC-84A-0510 is not a product. It is a certification for half-face masks + filter combos. The relevant certification for fullface masks+filters is TC-84A-070. (TC-84A-0701 or TC-84A-0704 more specifically)
I would definitely do a full-face mask. You can buy them at Lowes for painting. The half masks do nothing to protect your eyes. Also try to get Pxx filters as they withstand oils. Some chemicals are oil-soluble and normal Nxx cartridges can’t handle more than one exposure.
You need to provide a 3M part number. I had to clean up silicone oil and was looking up which solvent works best while being safe as possible and it turns out to be Ethyl Acetate. It works well but is quite potent. A few whiffs had me dizzy to the point where I almost lost balance so I immediately stopped and ordered PPE. I bought a 3M 6900 full face mask and 3M 60928 NIOSH filters for organics and acids. I could not smell anything, breathing was very smooth and natural, and no fogging. When I was finished I walk about 20 feet from the project, took the mask off and immediately was smacked in the face with the solvent fumes.
In the long run, it's going to become about specifications.
Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot.
Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.
> Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications
Which is why I think there's very little threat to the various tech career paths from AI.
Humans suck at writing specifications or defining requirements for software. It's always been the most difficult and frustrating part of the process, and always will be. And that's just actually articulating the requirements, to say nothing of the process of even agreeing on the requirements in the first place to even start writing the spec.
If a business already cannot clearly define what they need to an internal dev team, with experts that can somewhat translate the messy business logic, then they have a total of zero hope to ever do the same but to an unthinking machine and expect any kind of reliable output.
> Humans suck at writing specifications or defining requirements for software
There’s nearly 10k rfcs and the whole ISO corpus that disagree with you. It’s not that people can’t write requirements. It’s just that they change so much over the lifetime of the business that no one really bothers. Or the actual writings are not properly organized and archived.
One of the unexpected benefits of everyone scrambling to show that they used AI to do their job is that the value of specs and design documents are dawning on people who previously scoffed at them as busywork. Previously, if I wanted to spend a day writing a detailed document containing a spec and discussion of tradeoffs and motivations, I'd have to hide it from my management. Now, I'm writing it for the AI so it's fine.
Give short story anthologies (like the "Best of Year" type) a look. The late great Garder Dozois was always my favorite, but I personally also get good hit rates from Neil Clarke and Jonathan Strahan, among others. There's a lot of good stuff in there... and bad stuff... and forgettable stuff. But that's part of the draw of short fiction.
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
My issue with running most monitors this dim is that colors look so much worse and contrast is lost. It’s not as much of a problem on my OLED phone though, which does tend toward the dimmer side. My desktop monitors (IPS) on the other hand are rarely below 50%.
I have never noticed that problem. But I always adjust brightness as part of a full color calibration, with ICC profile and everything, which probably makes a difference.
I will say that it took a bit to adjust to the first time I did it, but now it's painful to use any monitor at "full" 200+ nit brightness.
Like many people, I've been making Kraft macaroni and cheese for decades by this point. The recipe is on the box. It's not hard to make.
Or at least, it didn't used to be hard to make. Whatever they've done to the stuff recently, they've actually broken the instructions. It no longer even cooks correctly. Three cooking failures in a row, means I will never buy your product again. Why should I? There's a dozen alternatives. Most are either unhealthy or don't taste right to at least one member of the family, but there's a dozen of them... one worked out.
Whatever the pasta is now, it cooks quite differently. You'll get softer noodles much quicker, and will congeal into a blob unlike the old recipe.
Additionally the water gets extra starchy with the new recipe.
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else but the quantity per box has decreased as well. Special shapes came in smaller weights, but now even the regular box does too.
That is the specific problem I get now. The powdered sauce-stuff just never turns into a sauce but instead likes to stay in these horrid blobs full of unreconstituted powder, while half the noodles aren't coated. When it happens three times in a row, with three separate batches/box date codes and different milk/butter, I can cook your competitor's product with no issues, and I used to be able to cook yours so I know I'm not just being dense, that means it's your fault and you're out. Forever. Having real alternatives means I have no mercy for enshittification.
I should probably also note that this is specifically the "Thick and Creamy" variant because the " 'Original' Flavor" got banned from the household a long time ago for somehow being inferior to store-brand generic. Kraft just really does not want our business.
They changed something about the noodles and now they are way overcooked if you follow the box instructions. And you need way more butter to get a similar flavor to before.
Related question which might fit here so I'm going to try:
What is the absolute cheapest way to get started on AI coding a simple website? I have a couple ideas I want to test out and get out of my head and onto the web but have resisted for years because my webdev knowledge is stuck in 2004 and I've had no desire to change that. These are not complicated things (all static, I think) but... I hate webdev.
I am not really willing to pay to do any initial explorations, but if I like where things are going then, sure, I'll pay up. I have a decently powerful machine that can run things locally, but it is Windows (because I'm an EE, sadly), which does matter.
You could start by experimenting in AI Studio - https://aistudio.google.com/ - then have a go at coding agents using their Gemini CLI or Antigravity tools.
For what you're describing the free tiers of the Claude and ChatGPT web apps would probably work fine too.
I wish! That number is kinda-sorta-related-to inches, but it's not, at least not anymore. I wear a 31 or 32 jean, but my waist is about 34.5 inches. And any jeans which fit my thighs properly (turns out to be about size 34) will fall off my waist.
Measure your own waist and pants, see what you find!
Sizing is chaos.