<p>People wonder whether books have any power left at all in the modern world and I want to point out that Hillbilly Elegy was published only in 2016.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@lenary" class="u-url mention">@<span>lenary</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@regehr" class="u-url mention">@<span>regehr</span></a></span> oh yeah sorry I wasn&#39;t commenting on that part. I haven&#39;t had a _lot_ of need for fully generic MC layer personally, whenever it comes up I usually just reimplement it in a new piece of code and it&#39;s fine (I&#39;ve an MC layer I use for Binary Ninja, e.g. here <a href="https://github.com/whitequark/binja-avnera/blob/main/mc/instr.py" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">github.com/whitequark/binja-av</span><span class="invisible">nera/blob/main/mc/instr.py</span></a>)</p>

<p>Shower thought: how would you build a purely mechanical (no electrical components) light/dark detector?</p><p>My initial thought is two coiled bimetallic strips, one at ambient temperature in a shadowed space and another exposed to light and painted black to absorb as much as possible. Then some kind of comparator gizmo to check which one is longer.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> Of course, Pinker himself is a charismatic, polarizing figure. And there are people who would level that charge at both you and I.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://discuss.systems/@gwozniak" class="u-url mention">@<span>gwozniak</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@bremner" class="u-url mention">@<span>bremner</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> one of our friends suggested that the OAPC (One Anteater Per Child) initiative would be equally effective.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://bsd.network/@cynicalsecurity" class="u-url mention">@<span>cynicalsecurity</span></a></span> but also this depends on the type of the code being fed in. the C that wasm2c generates is very different from your C which would be pretty different from my 8051 C which is different from my desktop C</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@bremner" class="u-url mention">@<span>bremner</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> Such a good book. I frequently get nasty remarks when I point it out to those who still insist something like the OLPC initiative was a good idea, despite all evidence to the contrary.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://bsd.network/@cynicalsecurity" class="u-url mention">@<span>cynicalsecurity</span></a></span> as for whether it makes sense: i don&#39;t think the latest fancy opcodes will make even the top #3. my number one concern would be whether the compiler does inlining, which is arguably the single most important optimization (cross-module inlining even more so). my number two would be code density, which the choice of opcodes to emit affects but the choice of opcodes to optimize out affects more</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> I can miss a chance to recommend the book &quot;The Charisma Machine&quot; which has a lot to say about the acolytes of Papert.</p>