Are we looking at the same image? I can’t even tell the brand of the drives, let alone the model or specs. One of them might be an HGST drive? It’s too pixelated/JPEGd to tell.

C++ already does that for short strings

I’ve already been discussing this. Maybe read the rest of the thread.

Also the case in the standard library

I think you’re missing the point of why. I built this to be a nearly drop in replacement for the standard string. If this wasn’t the case it would need to do even more processing and work to pass the strings to anything.

discontinued because it was against the standard.

Standards don’t matter for an internal type that’s not exposed to public APIs. I’m not trying to be exactly compatible with everything under the sun. There’s no undefined behavior here so it’s fine

I had blanked this from my memory, but my very first programming job was to reimplement some FoxPro code in… Visual Basic. FoxPro is so strange to work in. It’s like programming in SQL, and the codebase I was in had global variables everywhere.

I don’t use 256 bytes everywhere. I use a mix of 64, 128, and 256 byte strings depending on the specific use case.
In a hot path, having the data inline is much more important than saving a few hundred bytes. Cache efficiency plus eliminating heap allocations has huge performance benefits in a game engine that’s running frames as fast as possible.

22 characters is significantly less useful than 255 characters. I use this for resource name keys, asset file paths, and a few other scenarios. The max size is configurable, so I know that nothing I am going to store is ever going to require heap allocations (really bad to be doing every frame in a game engine).

I developed this specifically after benchmarking a simpler version and noticed a significant amount of time being spent in strlen(), and it had real benefits in my case.
Admittedly just storing a struct with a static buffer and separate size would have worked pretty much the same and eliminated the 255 char limitation, but it was fun to build.

One cool trick that can be used with circular buffers is to use memory mapping to map the same block of memory to 2 consecutive virtual address blocks. That way you can read the entire contents of the buffer as if it was just a regular linear buffer with an offset.

I came up with a kind of clever data type for storing short strings in a fixed size struct so they can be stored on the stack or inline without any allocations.
It’s always null-terminated so it can be passed directly as a C-style string, but it also stores the string length without using any additional data (Getting the length would normally have to iterate to find the end).
The trick is to store the number of unused bytes in the last character of the buffer. When the string is full, there are 0 unused bytes and the size byte overlaps the null terminator.
(Only works for strings < 256 chars excluding null byte)

Implementation in C++ here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons/blob/master/src/common/common/InlineString.hh

Edit: Since a couple people don’t seem to understand the performance impact of this vs regular std::string, here’s a demo: https://godbolt.org/z/34j7obnbs This generates 10000 strings like “Hello, World! 00001” via concatenation. The effect is huge in debug mode, but still has performance benefits with optimizations turned on:

With -O3 optimization
std::string: 0.949216ms
char[256] with strlen: 0.88104ms
char[256] without strlen: 0.684734ms

With no optimization:
std::string: 3.5501ms
char[256] with strlen: 0.885888ms
char[256] without strlen: 0.687733ms

(You may need to run it a few times to get sample numbers due to random server load on godbolt)
Changing the buffer size to 32 bytes has a negligible performance improvement over 256 bytes in this case, but might be slightly faster due to the whole string fitting in a cache line.

It’s not actually the transistors that break down in flash memory. Flash memory works by storing charges in what is effectively a grid of capacitors, and in order for the data to remain stored, the insulating oxide layers in the cells need to be preserved. Every time a cell gets written, a charge is forced through the insulation with high voltage, and this degrades the insulation. A single flash cell might only have a few 1000 writes before this insulation goes bad and it no longer holds data. Modern SSDs have wear levelling techniques to make the drive as a whole last longer.

Transistors on the other hand don’t have any inherent degradation that I’m aware of other than external factors like corrosion. The first thing that’s likely to die on a GPU is the electrolytic capacitors in the power filtering electronics, which have fluid in them that dries out over many years.

Elaborate?

This guy should be smart enough to realize he’s complaining about not getting free storage from Google. You can’t just run a business off other people’s infrastructure and expect it to work out without any business agreement or contract. Google Workplace is a thing, and it sounds like this guy is just cheap if he won’t pay for either it or his own harddrives.

I still have gmail polling my old hotmail//live addresses, and it’s been that way since the day I signed up. Back when the slogan was still “Don’t be evil”

Have you heard of the concepts of Internet bandwidth and compression? This article isn’t talking about poor quality microphones or cameras. You could have the best camera and microphone in the world, but it won’t do you any good on dial-up, low speed “broadband”, or unreliable connection to the Internet.

I guess not every place does this, because I swear the last few times I’ve been on hold I got transferred 2 or 3 times and had to re-explain my entire issue all over again to each person.

What prompted you to disable your eSIM? Airplane mode works just fine on its own to temporarily disable the cellular connection, and you can turn Wifi and Bluetooth back on while in airplane mode. There’s also several settings to turn off data roaming if you were worried about accidental extra charges on your phone plan.

It’s always a treat to find a new Monty Python sketch. I hadn’t seen this one either and had a good laugh

And? They operate the majority of online businesses across Canada, so good luck getting all the business to support some new payment method without integrating it into the systems they’re already using. This is a practical statement, not a political one.

How did she enter? Because airports have had portrait photos taken when going through customs for years now. At the land borders, cars are photographed and x-rayed at the border, and the only time they don’t ask you for ID is when they already know who you are (from something like Nexus). Maybe there’s crossings in rural areas that have way less security?

I’ve been traveling back and forth for the last 10-ish years, and I’m honestly confused as to what exactly is changing. It sounds like they might be adding additional checkpoints for exiting the country and taking photos at that point? I guess I’ll find out on my next crossing.

or maybe start accepting Euros to pay taxes

Why would Canada ever accept taxes in anything but Canadian Dollars? You get paid in CAD, and taxes are automatically deducted for most jobs. Exchanging to a different country’s currency first makes no sense and would give control to EU institutions for no reason?

Canada has the resources to set up their own system. They could easily expand Interac, which covers a lot of types of transactions already, at least in-person. Online shopping is going to be an uphill battle getting all the merchants to accept more than just Visa/MasterCard, but maybe with Shopify being Canadian they could make it easy.

they want them to be rich, happy and healthy so they keep coming back and spending more money.

See there’s the problem right there. They don’t need customers to be any of those things to suck every last cent out of them. Corporations would love nothing more than becoming a monopoly on human essentials like food, water, housing, etc… because people will go to great lengths to afford food whether they like it or not.

I guess in most cases a bunch of the ram used by things like Chrome isn’t being actively used, so it makes sense it’d be fine to compress. Usually you can only see one or two tabs at a time anyway. I think for some truely memory demanding tasks like compiling there’d be a pretty noticeable difference vs actually having more ram, but it’s good to know this is an option. And the SSD wear is definitely a concern with regular swap unless you go and buy some used Optane drives