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
Forwarding references in C++
In C++, there are different ways to pass a value to a function. Typically, at any given time, an object in C++ ‘belongs’ to a single function. The various waysContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Peer review is not the gold standard in science
Peer review as we know it today was introduced very late, over a century after the scientific revolution. It happened after Einstein’s time… arguably the most productive...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast can construct small list of strings in C for Python?
Python is probably the most popular programming language in the world right now. Python is easy to extend using C code. You may want to return from Python a small...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Should Node.js be built with ClangCL under Windows?
Under Windows, when using Visual Studio to build C++ code, there are two possible compiler strategies. The Visual Studio compiler (often referred to as MSVC) is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Careful with Pair-of-Registers instructions on Apple Silicon
Egor Bogatov is an engineer working on C# compiler technology at Microsoft. He had an intriguing remark about a performance regression on Apple hardware following...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) as research assistants
Software can beat human beings at most games… from Chess to Go, and even poker. Large language models like GPT-4 offered through services such as ChatGPT allowContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How do you recognize an expert?
Go back to the roots: experience. An expert is someone who has repeatedly solved the concrete problem you are encountering. If your toilet leaks, an experienced...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How quickly can you break a long string into lines?
Suppose that you receive a long string and you need to break it down into lines. Consider the simplified problems where you need to break the string into segments...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 13 2024)
Our computer hardware exchange data using a standard called PCI Express. Your disk, your network and your GPU are limited by what PCI Express can do. Currently,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Greatest common divisor, the extended Euclidean algorithm, and speed!
We sometimes need to find the greatest common divisor between two integers in software. The fastest way to compute the greatest common divisor might be the binary...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A simple algorithm to compute the square root of an integer, byte by byte
A reader asked me for some help in computing (1 – sqrt(0.5)) to an arbitrary precision, from scratch. A simpler but equivalent problem is to compute the squareContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
C++ web app with Crow: early scalability results
Last year, I looked at writing small “hello world” web applications in various programming languages (Go, JavaScript, Nim…). Go, using nothing but the standardContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 31 2024)
Large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) do better at legal questions that lawyers: Our empirical analysis benchmarks LLMs against a ground truth set by Senior Lawyers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast and concise probabilistic filters in Python
Sometimes you need to filter out or filter in data quickly. Suppose that your employer maintains a list of forbidden passwords or URLs or words. You may store them...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Passing recursive C++ lambdas as function pointers
In modern C++, as in many popular languages, you can create ‘lambdas’. Effectively, they are potentially anonymous function instances that you can create on the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How to read files quickly in JavaScript
Suppose you need to read several files on a server using JavaScript. There are many ways to read files in JavaScript with a runtime like Node.js. Which one is best...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How many political parties rule Canada? Fun with statistics
Canada has several political parties with elected member of parliament: the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Bloc Québecois, de NDP and the Green. But do the behave...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Book review: Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen
When I was young, science fiction was the genre of choice for many engineers and scientists. But the genre declined significantly in recent years. Part of the problem...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Measuring energy usage: regular code vs. SIMD code
Modern processor have fancy instructions that can do many operations at one using wide registers: SIMD instructions. Intel and AMD have 512-bit registers and associated...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog