“Who’s signal is this?”

“Oh, it’s that guy with the metal strips. His address is on a post-it note somewhere around here.”

Meh. He only had $23.50 in his account.

I’m all for the “SLEEP 8 HOURS” bit though. I need more of that in my life.

You had one job.

The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

TL;DR

If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:

• McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.

• For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.

• When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.

• They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.

• McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.

• Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.

• Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.

And after that?

Keelhaul them till they’re sober!

(Early in the morning…)

Or a witch.

Looks a bit like the Arachne browser for DOS.

KDE 4 was such a disappointment. Made me switch to Gnome too. The only bigger disappointment for me was Amarok’s change.

Got it, thank you!

It says that

Starting in 2014, OpenSSH defaults to Curve25519-based ECDH.

So what changed recently? (I didn’t watch the video, in fairness).