Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 6th 2021)
Increasing schooling does not improve social outcomes at a population level. Venitian glass was made near Venice as early as 450 BC. It spread worldwide through...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How does your programming language handle “minus zero” (-0.0)?
The ubiquitous IEEE floating-point standard defines two numbers to represent zero, the positive and the negative zeros. You also have the positive and negativeContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing Floating-point Numbers Really Fast in C#
Programmers often write out numbers as strings (e.g., 3.1416) and they want to read back the numbers from the string. If you read and write JSON or CSV files, you...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 13th 2021)
Researchers make inexpensive transparent wood. Our cells produce energy using their mitochondria. Researchers show that you can efficiently enrich cells with mitochondria...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On the cost of converting ASCII to UTF-16
Many programming languages like Java, JavaScript and C# represent strings using UTF-16 by default. In UTF-16, each ‘character’ uses 16 bits. To represent all 1Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 6th 2021)
You can use artificial intelligence and satellite images to count the number of elphants found in the wild. It appears that a billion people on Earth now use an...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Number Parsing at a Gigabyte per Second
Computers typically rely on binary floating-point numbers. Most often they span 64 bits or 32 bits. Many programming languages call them double and float. JavaScript...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 24th 2021)
Year 2020 was great for PC makers. We are selling more and more PCs. Reportedly, Sony sold 3.4 million PlayStation 5 in only four weeks, a record. The demand for...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 16th 2021)
You can tell people’s political affiliation by image recognition technology. There are far fewer stars and galaxies than we thought. The universe is relativelyContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technologie links (January 9th 2021)
The Earth is spinning faster and faster: The 28 fastest days on record (since 1960) all occurred in 2020, with Earth completing its revolutions around its axisContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My Science and Technology review for 2020
The original PlayStation game console (1994) was revolution thanks in part to its CD drive that could read data at an astonishing 0.3 MB/s. In 2020, the PlayStation...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 26th 2020)
Researchers used a viral vector to manipulate eye cells genetically to improve the vision of human beings. Seemingly independently, researchers have reported significant...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
In 2011, I predicted that the iPhone would have 1TB of storage in 2020
Someone reminded me of a prediction I made in 2011: Your iPhone will have 1TB of storage by 2020, assuming exponential growth, see my plot: http://t.co/iDiT1J7y...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 19th 2020)
The Flynn effect is the idea that people get smarter over time (generation after generation). The negative effect is the recent observations that people are getting...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Cognitive biases
One-sided bet: People commonly assume implicitly that their actions may only have good outcomes. For example, increasing the minimum wage in a country may onlyContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Virtual reality… millions but not tens of millions… yet
In February 2016, I placed a bet against Greg Linden in these terms: within the next three years, starting in March of this year, we would sell at least 10 million...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Converting floating-point numbers to integers while preserving order
Many programming languages have a number type corresponding to the IEEE binary64. In many languages such as Java or C++, it is called a double. A double value uses...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog