FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

dc is the RPN arbitrary precision calculator that's long been a standard on UNIX systems (but not actually standardized by POSIX)

Yesterday a friend was noticing how .. weird .. it is with fractions in non-decimal radixes. gnu dc is particularly spectacularly broken, while bsd dc is somewhat better.

gnu dc failing: 16dio 8k .02p (set precision to 8 places, input and output radix to 16, and print 1/256(decimal)) prints "0". Ideally, it would print ".02". bsd dc prints ".020000".

bsd dc failing: 99k 3o 1 3 / p (set precision to 99 places, output radix to 3, compute 1/3, and print it). Ideally it would print ".1" or ".1000..." but bsd dc prints ".022....21"

This is because internally all dc arithmetic takes place in decimal; additionally, gnu dc incorrectly counts how many decimal digits of precision are needed.

So of course .. I wrote my own incomplete dc implementation. It uses Python and infinite precision fractions. Only the very basic operations are implemented, but at least you can calculate in hexadecimal floating point notation and get accurate results.

pydc> 8k 16dio 
pydc> .8 .FFE *p
0.7FF
pydc> 1 3 / p
0.55555555

For now the code lives in my junk drawer and has no explicit license, but you can use it if you want. https://codeberg.org/jepler/junkdrawer/src/branch/main/bgj9ls82/dc.py

#python #unix #rpn #calculator

I had a brain idea so I made a picture of it. #pride

Wikipedia, and the entire Wikimedia movement, has been a democratic, anti-authoritarian experiment since the day of its inception.

It's a project that matters, something I've been proud to have made a career of.

I spent my 20 years at the Wikimedia Foundation trying to further that experiment on a professional basis, and I have never been prouder of my former colleagues at WMF than I have been these past few months as we've been making @wwu a reality.

You should organize your workplace too.

Q: How does a capacitor work in Soviet Russia?
A: Dielectrical Materialism.

Word, Ms Word

there's no copilot or claude support for Borland Turbo C++ 3.0

it's especially funny seeing the "aren't you worried about getting left behind?" argument about AI, speaking as a retrotech person.

Like, come on. I'm still writing software for DOS and Windows 95. What even is "behind" at this point?

Nurses can't have fun like this anymore, because of woke.

I may be annoyed by how unnecessarily JS-centric a lot of news sites are, but on the plus side most of them serve up their content on initial load and *delete* it with JS if it’s paywalled so reader mode accidentally bypasses a ton of paywalls these days

Bolivia: Venceremos!

#Bolivia #Strike

🇧🇴 This is what Bolivia's highways look like at the moment.

Each town and village blocks their stretch, and the union members in each community take turns at the barricades.

This is part of the general strike against Bolivia's neoliberalist government, now entering its third week.

#Bolivia #Strike

oh man, I just ran for a full kilometre / six minutes, and it wasn't even hard. I often begin the morning walk with a short sprint, but this time I just kept going and covered half the route without stopping running

we're actually getting fitter, god

i love dan toomey's sense of humor

If your webpage renders like this without JS, you should be permabanned from building webpages.

I'm sick of hearing how LLMs are warping projects & people I care about. Here's what I want to hear about instead.

You want to create something amazing, that'll reach & last? You need help. Build a team culture of respect, humor, genuine affection, curiosity, patience, sympathy, delight. Build a place where good people want to do the best work of their lives. Help them grow, help them leave.

It's not the commits. It is not the *fucking* *tools*.

It. Is. The. People.

Help the people.

Well there's your problem.
This chip has a pimple outbreak. 😅

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that's how i've always done it, Microsoft