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Julia Evans

I'm really happy with this “the way computers do math is weird" framing we arrived at -- I think it gets at why floating point weirdnesses and integer overflow can feel so upsetting (“it's MATH! it's supposed to behave how I EXPECT!”)

5 comments
Michael W Lucas¹ :flan_mail:

@b0rk there's nothing like the joy of developing a great mental framework for thinking about a complex thing.

benjohn

@b0rk I suppose it is weird, but I kind of like integer overflow. I like how it’s a big circle that goes round and round for ever. I remember it being useful sometimes for computer graphics in assembly. But it is mostly useless when we usually want numbers that do normal things!

Julia Evans

@benjohn yeah absolutely, it's fun to see something that I spent a lot of time learning about in math class ("the numbers modulo n”) have such a mainstream real-life application

Ayke van Laethem

@benjohn yes indeed, with some clever tricks it can be quite useful in graphics! This is also what FastLED does:
github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wik

I like it when data is defined in a way that it naturally leads to very efficient code.

Ben

@b0rk
That was my favourite part of my numerical analysis and later discrete functions courses—the aspect of "so the rules we normally expect to apply _don't_, and here's how we can cope with that" helped understand so much about why things go wrong.

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