The Let's Play Archive

SHENZHEN I/O

by Quackles

Part 41: Spam: Incredible Opportunity - Land Rich in Rare Earths

Incredible Opportunity: Land Rich in Rare Earths



In the book Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens, there's a section set in the then-burgeoning US of A. The title character travels to the US to seek his fortune, being told of a wonderful opportunity of prime settling-down land, where there is a town called 'Eden'; the land turns out to be a malarial swamp, and the offer a fraud.

TLDR: This swindle is about as old as the probably-not-rare-at-all dirt in question.


Carbon dioxide posted:

Hey, how're you surviving the Shenzhen hurricane season?

No big typhoons aimed (directly) at us for 2026, so far - thank goodness.
Mind you, I spend something like 95% of my time indoors and I've been assured that a lot of these buildings have been extra-reinforced to withstand high winds (especially after Typhoon Mangkut blew out windows, etc. in 2018) - if there was a typhoon on the way, I'd probably get time off work. Apparently standard procedure is just to stay indoors and wait it out.


Dareon posted:

It's more complex than I would have expected for a musical greeting card.

That's just the bass line.


Deathwind posted:

Modern programers are spoiled by fast processors and spare memory. It's suprising how inefficient many of the compilers for higher level languages can be. Working close to the iron is one of the only ways to truly optimize execution speed and memory usage.

Foxfire_ posted:

Conversely, there's a bunch of important optimizations for fancy chips that compilers are much better at doing than people.

I guess what you're all saying is that for optimal results, you need human optimizations AND compiler optimizations... but couldn't compilers learn to do the human optimizations? Some energetic people should look at it.
Mind you, I know 'compiler maintainer' isn't a job for everybody... or many people. I once took a compilers class in college, but then I took an arrow to the knee.