Decades worth of windoofs hate. Finally did the full switch a few months ago. I have been using windoofs for gaming only anyway and professionally I already had plenty of Linux experience.

Linux isn’t great either though and can be a real pain in the ass. Recently had to fix few lines of code in the kernel, because I had no audio. But the fact that one can do it in principle is already a huge win over windoofs. And although some games stubbornly won’t run (stable), a lot do without having to tinker much, thanks to Wine, Proton, and a couple of startup parameters.

Professionally I mainly use Ubuntu, for gaming I did so at first as well but switched to CachyOS recently.

Tesla? Legendary? For trapping people and burning them alive? Already done multiple times throughout history.

People should stop being condescending at all and regardless what it’s about.

That is so ridiculously accurate. And sad. And infuriating. And then funny again because I am reuglarly going mad with those fucking drivers since I have to work with them on Linux professionally. I hate it. It is funny and tragic. Just like life.

What always triggers feelings of cosmic horror is the question: “Whom is this reported to?”

Contributing is such a wonderful way to give back to the community. And isn’t it heartwarming to know that a contribution you have made, regardless how small, is then being integrated into something that is used by dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people?

That’s a little way to leave a mark on this planet, and possibly improve the life of people.

but enough for that answer to be valid

Highly arguable. Especially without specifications on the lamp. It could be a rather dim and small one. Then, you either need special equipment or supersenses.

Here you can test how identifiable you are:

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

https://amiunique.org/

gnew?

The more experience I gain over the years, the more this feels relatable. I had to pull myself together to keep my comments regarding kaputt Nvidia APIs civil in my code and commit messages.

Ah Nvidia. Always a fucking PITA (not the bread kind). I wonder how they have managed to become the most valuable chip manufacturer worldwide.

Good question! I have read a bit more about it and this does indeed heavily depend on the respective compiler implementation. Depending on the compiler, it may prefer default if-else ladders for few cases. For more, dense cases, LUTs may play a larger role. For less dense cases binary search might be chosen.

I inspected the generated assembler code of your (slightly extended) example via https://godbolt.org/

The code I used:

void check_uv();
void check_holograph();
void check_stripe();
void check_watermark();

void switch_test(int banknoteValue) {

    switch (banknoteValue) {
        case 5000:
            check_uv();
            check_holograph();
        case 2000:
            check_stripe();
        case 1000:
            check_watermark();
    }

}

Using x86-64 gcc 15.2 this leads to a couple of cmp followed by je instructions, so “compare” and “jump to label if equal” which basically is a typical if-else ladder. I get the same for x64 msvc v19.43.
Changing the cases to 1, 2 and 3 instead of 5000, 2000 and 1000 does not change the outcome.

Increasing to 23 different but incrementally increasing cases (cases 1 to 23) does not change the outcome as well for gcc. But here msvc has introduced a performance optimization: it decreased the input value by one to get a range of 0 to 22 and then created a jump table, so a LUT with execution addresses. (I am not going to detail the assembler commands logic here, but you can use the C++ code below and take a look yourself. :) )

So even in this simple example we can already see how different compilers may implement switch cases differently depending on its structure. Even though gcc chose the apparently less efficient solution here, usually one may trust on the compiler choosing the most efficient switch implementation. ;)

As far as I know, we would not even get the chance of similar optimizations if choosing if-else ladders directly instead of a switch-case structure. It would be interesting to put this to a test though and see whether some compilers translate if-else ladders equivalently with the performance benefits that can currently come with switch structures.

The inflated code:

void check_uv();
void check_holograph();
void check_stripe();
void check_watermark();

void switch_test(int banknoteValue) {

    switch (banknoteValue) {
        case 1:
            check_uv();
            check_holograph();
        case 2:
            check_stripe();
        case 3:
            check_watermark();
        case 4:
            check_watermark();
        case 5:
            check_watermark();
        case 6:
            check_watermark();
        case 7:
            check_watermark();
        case 8:
            check_watermark();
        case 9:
            check_watermark();
        case 10:
            check_watermark();
        case 11:
            check_watermark();
        case 12:
            check_watermark();
        case 13:
            check_watermark();
        case 14:
            check_watermark();
        case 15:
            check_watermark();
        case 16:
            check_watermark();
        case 17:
            check_watermark();
        case 18:
            check_watermark();
        case 19:
            check_watermark();
        case 20:
            check_watermark();
        case 21:
            check_watermark();
        case 22:
            check_watermark();
        case 23:
            check_watermark();
    }

}

That falls into the “very desparate” part. As long as there are companies that have better recruitement processes it will help if most people prefer those over others. If all of these companies reject an applicant then this applicant might become “desparate” and turn towards worse companies. So it’s more the mass of people that influence the market and can therefore improve its conditions.

/j: joke
/s: sarcasm
/i: irony

Easy:
You take GPU. And then you put GPU.
Understood? /j

switch case structures are very efficient in c and c++. They work similarly like an offset into memory. Compute the offset once (any expression in the ‘case’ lines), then jump. Using primitives directly, like here with chars, is directly the offset. Contrary to if-else branches, where each case must be evaluated first and the CPU has basically no-op cycles in the pipeline until the result of the branch is known. If it fails, it proceeds with the next one, waits again etc… (Some CPU architectures might have stuff like speculative branch execution, which can speed this up.)

However, code-style wise this is really not elegant and something like your proposal or similar would be much better.

At first I thought, "How are they going to compress 256 values, i.e. 1 Byte sized data, by “rearranging into integers”?

Then I saw your code and realized you are discarding 228 of them, effectively reducing the available symbol set by about 89%.

Speaking of efficiency: Since chars are essentially unsigned integers of size 1 byte and ‘a’ to ‘z’ are values 97 to 122 (decimal, both including) you can greatly simplify your turn_char_to_int method by just substracting 87 from each symbol to get them into your desired value range instead of using this cumbersome switch-case structure. Space (32) and dot (46) would still need special handling though to fit your desired range.

Bit-encoding your chosen 28 values directly would require 5 bit.

I ended up not getting it because the whiteboard guy didn’t like that I didn’t remember the formula for an n-dimensional plane off the top of my head.

What do they want? A walking wikipedia or someone who knows how to look up necessary stuff, evaluate it and put it appropriately into practise?

Don’t participate in such a process and the problem solves itself (unless you are very desperate). As long as companies find some idiot who jumps through these hoops, they will continue to do this. When they realize that they are deterring candidates with this shitty process, they might start changing it.

There is Windows IoT.

Haha, meaningful, informative comments that make it easier to understand the code of course. ;)