Programmer Humor

I had the great honour of seeing John Gustafson give a presentation about unums shortly after he first proposed posits (type III unums). The benefits over floating point arithmetic seemed incredible, and they seemed largely much more simple.

I also got to chat with him about “Gustafson’s Law”, which kinda flips Amdahl’s Law on its head. Parallel computing has long been a bit of an interest for me I was also in my last year of computer science studies then and we were covering similar subjects at the time. I found that timing to be especially amusing.