Communications of the ACM
Refine your search:
How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why measuring productivity is hard
Studying productivity is challenging. About 15-20 years ago, I was obsessed over my own productivity. I created a spying agent to monitor my activities and time...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory-level parallelism :: Apple M2 vs Apple M4
The Apple M2, introduced in 2022, and the Apple M4, launched in 2024, are both ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs featuring unified memory architecture. That...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Just say no to broken JSON
JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is widely used for transmitting data between a server and a web application, due...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Base64 for compression
C and C++ compilers like GCC first take your code and produce assembly, typically a pure ASCII output (so just basic English characters). This assembly code isContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
From code reuse to the impact of generative AI
Back when I started programming, project teams were large. Organizations had dozens of programmers on sprawling projects. Reusing code was not trivial. SharingContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Life expectancy of men in Canadian provinces
In North America, my home province of Quebec has a slightly higher life expectancy than the rest of the country. It is also a poorer-than-average province, so that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Let us bury the linear model of innovation
There is an extremely naive model of science and innovation called the linear model: The model postulated that innovation starts with basic research, is followed...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast character classification with z3
We often need to quickly classify characters. For example, consider how the binary data that you send by email is converted to an ASCII string made of 64 distinct...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is the job market for software developers collapsing?
Concerns persist that artificial intelligence (AI) could render software developers obsolete, particularly with tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor streamlining...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Models and science
The ancient Greeks crafted extraordinary models that continue to resonate. For instance, Ptolemy’s geocentric model, with Earth at the core and planets tracingContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Dividing an array into fair sized chunks
Suppose that you have an array of N elements and you want to divide it into M chunks. It is a common task when trying to spread N units of work over M threads,Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Returning several values from a function in C++ (C++23 edition)
Many programming languages such as the Go programming language are designed to make it easy to return several values at once from a function. In Go, it is often...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Producing useful commands on the go using C++ and AI
A few weeks ago, I attended a software engineering seminar focused on the role of large language models in programming. The distinguished software engineering professors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
C++20 concepts for nicer compiler errors
In C++, templates enable generic programming by allowing functions and classes to operate on different data types without sacrificing type safety. Defined using...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Streamlined iteration: exploring keys and values in C++20
In software, we often use key-value data structures, where each key is unique and maps to a specific value. Common examples include dictionaries in Python, hash...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How can really smart people appear totally incompetent?
It is often puzzling to encounter organizations run by highly capable and ambitious people… appear dysfunctional. An example that I like are colleges that claim...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How helpful is AI?
Do large language models (AI) make you 3x faster or only 3% faster? The answer depends on the quality of the work you are producing. If you need something likeContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster shuffling in Go with batching
Random integer generation is a fundamental operation in programming, often used in tasks like shuffling arrays. Go’s standard library provides convenient toolsContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Mixing ARM NEON with SVE code for fun and profit
Most mobile devices use 64-bit ARM processors. A growing number of servers (Amazon, Microsoft) also use 64-bit ARM processors. These processors have special instructions...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog