Monday, August 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 August 2026

Fuck Yeah Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Nvidia's DLSS 5 upscaling technology is here. Don't use it. (WCCFTech)

    Play Deep Rock Galactic - a fun but not graphically challenging game - on an RTX 3080 - an older but still powerful card - drops frame rates from 138 fps to 4.


  • Omarchy Linux, the new flavour, has a teeny tiny bug. (0xcc)

    The default user has access to everything.


  • Chess.com has launched a poker website. (The Verge)

    Apparently their Eight Queens Hold'em site wasn't bringing in the views.


  • Oops. My language blew its budget; compiler, runtime, and standard libraries now come to 7.5MB or 2.5MB compressed, making it 8% the size of Python. The two culprits were TLS (a.k.a SSL, the encryption used by every website), and regular expressions across Unicode, each contributing 20% of the total. For embedded use it automatically drops those and clocks in at a far smaller size.

    Also landed today: A full "math" library (those funny buttons on a scientific calculator), alongside autovectorising vector and matrix functions (vectors 100x faster and matrices 1000x faster than native), and a more general linear algebra library built on those, hashing, cryptography, passwords, HTTP client and server modules, and a curl / Python Requests style library.

    Claude has actually impressed me; it's a brand new programming language with precisely zero training data, and it's writing working code in it. Yes, it has specs; yes, it has access to the compiler and runtime internals; but the former is up to the developer and the latter will be open source.

    I pitted it against the Programming Language Shootout - since renamed - and it came out four times slower than Ruby. Not great, but that's the first time I've looked at performance numbers, and a quick code review found the problem and two, possibly three different fixes.

    Update: Tried out two of the fixes. One improved performance by 30%. The other improved performance by up to 56,000%. I'll do both, but the second trick is clearly the one to chase first.

    Further Update: Definitely needs both. That 560x speedup was on one specific benchmark; others are much more fussy.


Musical Interlude






Disclaimer: 996 is one thing, but 7117 is quite another.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:31 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 412 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Okay, I was thinking it would be off-topic to ask about vectors, matrices, and linear algebra.  Those with complex variables are one of the things I find interesting in a language.

The other thing is definitely off-topic and a distraction, certain specialized libraries for narrow applications.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 31 2026 10:51 PM (6eVrQ)

2 Complex numbers and quaternions are next!  After the optimisations.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 31 2026 10:55 PM (PiXy!)

3 Someone should ask the beastly bimbo how she feels about Canadia renaming all sorts of stuff in the last few years, including that one that looks like it's random letters from 3 different alphabets, including, for some reason, superscripted letters.  (I know that's not what's going on there.)  I'm sure all that stuff was fine with her.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 31 2026 11:10 PM (AGUBq)

4 I guess one takeaway from that LinkedIn article is that "educators" are extremely susceptible to "ooh, shiny new thing" fads.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 31 2026 11:10 PM (AGUBq)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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