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
Hasty comparison: Skylark (ARM) versus Skylake (Intel)
In a previous post, I ran a benchmark on an ARM server and again on an Intel-based server. My purpose was to indicate that if one function is faster, even much...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Technological aging
We are all familiar with biological aging. Roughly speaking, it is the loss of fitness that most animals undergo with time. At the present time, there is simply...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 23rd 2019)
Half of American households subscribe to “Amazon Prime”, a “club membership” for Amazon customers with monthly fees. And about half of these subscribes buy something...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
ARM and Intel have different performance characteristics: a case study in random number generation
In my previous post, I reviewed a new fast random number generator called wyhash. I commented that I expected it to do well on x64 processors (Intel and AMD), but...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The fastest conventional random number generator that can pass Big Crush?
In software, we sometimes want to generate (pseudo-)random numbers. The general strategy is to have a state (e.g., a 64-bit integer) and modify it each time weContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t read your data from a straw
It is common for binary data to be serialized to bytes. Data structures like indexes can be saved to disk or transmitted over the network in such a form. Many serialized...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 16th 2019)
There is mounting evidence that clearing old cells (senescent cells) from old tissues has a rejuvenating effect. There are very few such cells in most cases, but...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Age and the productivity of professors
Professors tend to earn more as they become older. Woolley believes that professor’s contributions take a sharp turn downward after a certain point. If this isContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Multiplying by the inverse is not the same as the division
In school, we learn that the division is the same as multiplying the inverse (or reciprocal), that is x / y = x * (1/y). In software, this does not work as-is when...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 9th 2019)
In 2007-2008, the recipient of a bone-marrow therapy (Timothy Brown) was cured of HIV. Another person was cured following a bone marrow transplant. And then yet...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Should our kids use pencils or keyboards?
In Montreal, most kids have to write on paper using a pencil. They have paper dictionaries. My kids have spent an enormous amount of time learning to write in cursive...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 2nd, 2019)
Shapiro in his book The New Childhood argues that we should stop worrying so much about how much time our kids spend on video games and on their phone. He calls...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing JSON quickly: early comparisons in the wild
JSON is arguably the standard data interchange format on the Internet. It is text-based and needs to be “parsed”: the input string needs to be transformed intoContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 24th, 2019)
Dooley interviews Barabási (a famous researcher) on his book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. Here is an interesting quote: It is true that major breakthroughs...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
More fun with fast remainders when the divisor is a constant
In software, compilers can often optimize away integer divisions, and replace them with cheaper instructions, especially when the divisor is a constant. I recently...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 16th, 2019)
In their new book Empty Planet, Bricker and Ibbitson argue that within the next 30 years, Earth’s population will start to rapidly decline. They believe that official...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My iPad Pro experiment: almost two years later
Soon after the first iPad Pro came out, I bought one and started using it daily. The experiment is ongoing and I thought it was time to reflect upon it further....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 9th, 2019)
Though deep learning has proven remarkably capable in many tasks like image classification, it is possible that the problems they are solving remarquably well are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster remainders when the divisor is a constant: beating compilers and libdivide
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves slower than divisions....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog