#177 – September 18, 2016
I've always been fascinated with patterns. It doesn't really matter what kind of patterns; I've played with networks, leaves and leaf venation, branches, lightning, flocking, tracing outlines of shapes, river formation, rock sediments, landscapes, slime mold, lichens, reaction-diffusion, cellular automaton, some fractals, and a few other things.
A tale of an impossible bug: big.LITTLE and caching
When someone says multi-core, we unconsciously think SMP. That worked out well for us until recently when ARM announced big.LITTLE. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture is the first mass produced AMP architecture and as we’ll see next, it raises the bar for how hard multi-core programing is.
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has. I like this idea because I’ve found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it’s useful to see that there are many possible paths into programming.
New programming language delivers fourfold speedups on problems common in the age of big data.
You should, intentionally and tactically, decide which piece of information you can do without, for now. But you should also, intentionally and strategically, decide when to pay back that debt.