The old college try (was: Re: Bad faith and dishonesty)

On Fri, 30 May 2025 10:14:53 +0100, Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk>
wrote in <101bsud$de5t$1@dont-email.me>:

On 30/05/2025 10:03, Mikko wrote:

On 2025-05-29 16:42:09 +0000, olcott said:

 
<snip>
 

We must achieve 100% complete closure on each point one-at-a-time and
not endlessly flit back and forth across many different points never
achieving closure on any of them.

 
You are not and never have been asked to endlessly flit back and forth.
But you are doing it anyway. You have been adviced how to to something
more useful but you have never done.

 
 
Quite so. At some point, one must draw a veil across the nonsense. I
think I've reached that point. I do not plan to reply to any more of Mr
Olcott's articles. (Road to hell and that, but that's the plan.)

It's like jousting windmills.

You posted in good faith, and explained it to him...only
to have him ignore your multi-point refutations.  (By his
own admission -- he says he only answers the first point.)

Olcott isn't an honest correspondent.  The value I see in this
'froup has been reading the responses.

 * * *

However:  I actually had an on-topic post about
time-for-space, a term I learned from ChatGPT by
describing the pre-computing of values to save time
to the little beasty.

In the case I gave it, O(n) becomes O(1).  It was
a "trick" I figured out on the Commodore PET in
the 80's:  using the numeric keypad as an index
for arrays to add x/y values to compute a player's
movement in a rudimentary game I wrote.  (In BASIC,
I'm ashamed to say. ;)  The array computation replaced
a bunch of if-then statements, and it ran a lot faster
after that.

Anyway, after that learning experience, I always knew about
the principle, (trading space for time) but didn't know what
it was called, even though it has showed up over and over again.
ChatGPT set me straight on what to call it.

Another example:  I once wrote a library to cache /etc/passwd
and /etc/shadow in memory to speed up our RADIUS server's getpwnam()
and getspnam() calls, trading RAM space for decreased time to look
up entries.  (In the mid-90's, this was a big deal.  Wouldn't be
much of a deal today with the "db" lookups that can be used through
nsswitch.conf(5)   ).

--
-v