How old was the oldest bug that you discovered that you also wrote? Mine was six years old, a null pointer dereference that worked fine on the original architecture but caused a reset when moving to Cortex-M.
I decided to take a look and my current CPU has the same L1 as my high school computer had total RAM. And the L3 is the same as the total for the machine I built in college. It should be possible to run a great desktop environment entirely in L3.
Not that long ago I was working on TI's C2000 DSPs. They have a 16 bit word size, which would make this a convenient way to pack three characters into a single word. Ther ewould then be a single leftover bit which could be used for signaling, parity, or something else.
4GB to run well... I remember happily running linux on 4MB of RAM, complete with X and web browser. I also remember running BeOS on a machine with 64MB of RAM and having one of the the best desktop experiences I've ever used.
A single line comment would make it as easy to understand, and much more flexible if you wanted to add handling upper case letters or digits. Or even remap the values to a more standard 6 bit encoding.
Google has done studies and experiments with their hiring process and determined that after three interviews you aren't getting any more signal about candidate quality. Their internal interview training talks about this, I've read their reports and the methodology seemed pretty sound. Yet for some reason they still usually do five interviews. Why? I never did get a good answer for that.
I feel like every time I have changed jobs the number of interview sessions has gone up by one. My first job didn’t even have a coding session, just a single conversation with the boss and another engineer.
I’m job hunting right now and it is so ridiculous how many interviews I have for each place. The last one I went through an hr phone call, a manager phone call, a remote coding session, a presentation, a whiteboard coding session, a schematic review, a general C++ quiz/architecture conversation and a follow on remote coding session. 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.
Otherwise, you need to be some kind of freaking retro-engineering expert.
And as it turns out, there is a ton of financial motivation for less than ethical people to develop those skills and use them to hack proprietary software. And there is some, but less, financial motivation for ethical people to do the same.
I'm not concerned with tracking where my kids are with these, but tracking their shoes sounds kinda useful.
Average daily conversation in my house:
"Where are you shoes?"
"I don't know?"
"You were just in the middle of putting them on!?!!"
"Yeah but... I can't find them now."
"How? You had them in your hands?!?"
"That was, um, before I got distracted."
"*sigh* Let's go try and find them."
Meanwhile, I can run modern linux on a first gen Pentium, and many mainstream distros still support the Pentium Pro.