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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It is important to know that these are books for computer scientists more than for software engineers. They are basically mathematics textbooks, about the mathematics of algorithms. They focus on proving theorems rather than implementing useful algorithms.

    There is a book called concrete mathematics that is sort of an introduction to TAOCP. If you’re interested in the basics that may be a good place to start. It has a better title than TAOCP in that it explicitly mentions mathematics, but also an equally bad one because it’s very much theoretical rather than concrete.











  • I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

    Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

    And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

    Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

    I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.









  • You should be aware that “maintaining” that PC may be more than you expect. Just this weekend I had to help my aunt because the bank’s website had a “big thing in front of it” that she couldn’t get rid of. It turned out to be a cookie banner that was just a bit too big for her laptop screen, and the buttons to close it were out of the frame.

    That’s just an example of course, but depending on the person(s) using it, there may need to be someone at hand to help at all times.