In Lex Fridman's podcast, Carmack says he's officially only working 1 day at Meta in advisory capacity, though sometimes chimes in on other days as well. He also says he wants to completely focus on AGI, so I wouldn't rely on Carmack to push the VR field forward in the near future.
"-->" is not an operator in the C language, it's just a way of writing the unary operator "--" and comparison operator ">" together without any whitespace between them, since whitespace is ignored by the lexer.
I'm sure someone will come along and explain why I have no idea what I'm talking about, but so far my understanding is those names exist because of the difference in CPU word size. Typically "int" represents the natural word size for that CPU, which matches the register size as well, so 'int plus int' is as fast as addition can run by default, on a variety of CPUs. That's one reason chars and shorts are promoted to ints automatically in C.
Let's say you want to work with numbers and you want your program to run as fast as possible. If you specify the number of bits you want, like i32, then the compiler must make sure on 64bit CPUs, where the register holding this value has an extra 32bits available, that the extra bits are not garbage and cannot influence a subsequent operation (like signed right shift), so the compiler might be forced to insert an instruction to clear the upper 32bits, and you end up with 2 instructions for a single operation, meaning that your code now runs slower on that machine.
However, had you used 'int' in your code, the compiler would have chosen to represent those values with a 64bit data type on 64bit machines, and 32bit data type on 32bit machines, and your code would run optimally, regardless of the CPU. This of course means it's up to you to make sure that whatever values your program handles fit in 32bit data types, and sometimes that's difficult to guarantee.
If you decide to have your cake and eat it too by saying "fine, I'll just select i32 or i64 at compile time with a condition" and you add some alias, like "word" -> either i32 or i64, "half word" -> either i16 or i32, etc depending on the target CPU, then congrats, you've just reinvented 'int', 'short', 'long', et.al.
Personally, I'm finding it useful to use fixed integer sizes (e.g. int32_t) when writing and reading binary files, to be able to know how many bytes of data to read when loading the file, but once those values are read, I cast them to (int) so that the rest of the program can use the values optimally regardless of the CPU the program is running on.
That explains "int", but it doesn't explain short or long or long long. Rust has "usize" for the "int" case, and then fixed sizes for everything else, which works much better. If you want portable software, it's usually more important to know how many bits you have available for your calculation than it is to know how efficiently that calculation will happen.
I suppose short and long have to do with register sizes being available as half word and dword, and there are instructions that work with smaller data sizes on both x86 and ARM, but I agree that in today's world, you want to know the number of bits. On those weak 4MHz machines, squeezing a few extra cycles was typically very important.
I've built a C compiler and have read the dragon book. I wish I read Crafting Interpreters before reading Compilers by Aho. It's good, and there's no nonsense. The author knows what he's talking about. Plus it's free to read online. 10/10 would recommend.
I assumed OP has a relatively high cost of living in NY, and can work remotely (either at current job or an equivalently paying one).
Then Philly is close-by (can still get to NY for friends/family, similar east coast culture), still a cool city (I had a lot of fun visiting), and MUCH lower cost of living. I saw nice houses there in cool neighborhoods for 300k. It made me strongly consider the emotional cost of starting over in yet another city, just to be able to own where I live and have it be very comfortable.
I think you misunderstood the comment you replied to. Their point wasn't that 12s to 9s is a negligible improvement generally. The point was that the improvement only applied to a tiny fraction of their users and it was still a bad experience, precisely because it was so far from 1s.
I thought there was something wrong with the last bottle I had, other than the label, and now I read this:
"Newcastle Brown Ale is no longer available in the United States. A product labelled “Newcastle Brown Ale” is still sold but it is produced by Lagunitas Brewing Company and has little in common with the original product."
