XKCD: It's more than a comic

I had engaging the handbrake drilled into me during driver's ed and it's stuck. Kuala Lumpur can be quite hilly in parts, so it's a good idea here anyway.

As I said, pulling the lever is satisfying to me.

You should always *always* use the parking brake. Always.

Also, cars have a lot more electronics in them then you’d intitallycexpect that make hacking their systems easy. https://www.google.ee/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed-steering-acceleration-hacks/amp

Cars weren't be so easily hacked if they weren't connected to the internet. It's really as simple as that. Or at least they should separate the internet-aware part and the driving electronics by hardware. It won't work in a self-driving car, but as long as you drive it, the driving controls really don't need to be connected to the internet.

Besids, there is a new comic.

New strip.

I always forget Lisa's supposed to be eight.

The alt text cracked me up, but that's because I like insane crossovers (also, I don't think anyone would want to see Bart learning magic).

Homer is supposed to be 36?

His childhood was depicted as being the 60s (and some googling has found he was born in 56 according to an earlier episode) and the show premiered late 80s so I guess, though long-running cartoon time always makes it ambiguous.

edited 23rd Feb '18 2:52:23 AM by FerrousMaelstom

I fall within the target of this comic. I was eight when The Simpsons debuted.

Me too, a few years short but still.

I know, but its just that Homer seems older than that. Its probably the fat and baldness.

@C105: Yeah, you're right. Bart Simpson and magic; terrible combination. x_x

The security vulnerabilities strip sent me on a wiki walk ending in quantum computing. Time well spent.

Code Golf

I have to admit, this got me to chuckle.

It took me a while to get it. And that is a nerd's joke for nerds if there ever was one.

I had to look up what code golf was to get it. The fact that I am a coder myself is kinda shameful. Although we occasionally discussed how to obfuscate a code that way.

Ugh. Code obfuscation, to me, is one of the worst sins a programmer can commit. Code should be readable, first and foremost, because you never know who's going to have to maintain it (including yourself, years later).

I try to make sure that everything I write is cleanly organized, laid out in a visually aesthetic manner, indented properly, and thoroughly commented. Hell, it helps me work with it.

Sure, there are sometimes issues with proprietary source code, and you can use technological obfuscation when distributing it, but the working source should be as easy to read as possible.

edited 26th Feb '18 9:06:12 AM by Fighteer

For the record, the discussions on obfuscation I mentioned were mainly in the context of joking. I otherwise completely agree with you on the need to have a clear source code, especially since I'm part of a project involving half a dozen different coders (and about as many former coders). Unreadable code is too easy to achieve anyway (I was responsible for some of that with the use of preprocessor macros).

I agree, except for the comments part. I only put comments where the intention of the code is not clear (usually where hacks are necessary), but otherwise a well-written code is readable without comments. Except for Doxygen/Javadoc/etc., which is for documenting the usage of a library, and is very much useful.

Code golf is mostly a game, whose purpose is to excercise our brains, and of course to have fun. Except when it's not. Ever saw those *.min.js files? Those are obfuscated javascript that's used to minimize load time of web pages. They are made with automated scripts though, which is not that much fun as "real" code golf.

I am also a coder, and I also had to look it up.

It seems that "reverse code golf" should be trivially easy to "win" by just mashing keys until your hands get tired for the variable name, and inserting lots of extra statements that don't do anything at all. Transcribing famous books is probably the most artful way though.

Maybe the more exciting version of reverse code golf would be code that remains longest after a modern compiler hacks away at it, and which an opponent cannot make shorter by only deleting statements without adding any. That throws out bad variable names and increment-decrement loops at least.

edit: On second thought that's still probably game-able by making key variables go through an arbitrarily long series of "If x==apple then x=banana" type statements, alternating variables so you can't skip to the last statement that writes to it. Provided that the code needs to correctly handle both the case where x is and is not apple at the start.

edited 26th Feb '18 3:04:51 PM by Brickman

Can compilers optimize away chains of increment/decrement that go through function calls, like we're seeing here?

I don't know about all compilers, but I'm pretty sure that gcc does optimize through function calls to a certain depth.

edited 27th Feb '18 3:49:19 PM by Fighteer

Given that it can see through the functions. If they go through compilation units, it can't optimize much.

Compilers can do pretty complex stuff, especially if all the functions are defined in the same source file. They will for instance include the body of the called function into the caller (inlining), and also tend to compute as much as they can during compilation (so if your code contains a snippet that performs a computation with fixed values, chances are the compiler will replace it with the result).

They are not as effective for simplifying things if the functions come from different source files, but we are getting there.

GCC has a total of 219 optimization options, and typical optimized builds (-O2) switches on 83.

Many of the additional optimizations come with significant costs in terms of compilation speed and/or other trade-offs.

#1961: Interaction

I find myself wondering on more than one occasion if Randall suffers from social anxiety.

edited 28th Feb '18 7:10:06 AM by Fighteer

And now I'm having flashbacks to A-Level English.

Thanks, Randall.

edited 28th Feb '18 9:30:49 AM by JamieBGood