Do you cycle to work?

[helios]

Honestly I'm glad that I have taken up biking to work. My city has gone with this new initiative where they've taken physically half of the busiest streets in the our metropolitan area and dedicated them to bicycle lanes. I for one am happy to put up with the added congestion in traffic and the resulting increase in aggression from everyone as a result. It just fills my heart with joy when I see both of the other people in our city utilising this now proprietary avenue

Yes, Buenos Aires also has that kind of bike path (the shitty kind). Horrible state of maintenance * inefficiently timed traffic lights * non-vehicular users[1] * generalized dickheadedness[2] = bike paths that are worth using only during gridlocks.

[1] E.g. people pushing carts.
[2] "Yes, this area where wheels without fenders often roll by kicking up debris seems like an appropriate place to have my dog defecate on. I could clean it up, but I believe those ten seconds are worth more than random passersby getting sprayed by my dog's feces."

[chrisname]

helios wrote:

Sweet gig, brah. What do you do there?

I'm part of the team which is building the optimising AOT compiler for Android 5.x. My first task is to reduce the branch density of generated code, because if there are too many branches in a given basic block, it reduces performance of the branch predictor by increasing cache collisions. It can be improved by inserting NOPs in between branches. Right now I'm writing a program to compute branch density statistics, and then I'm going to write scripts to benchmark code and see how much of a performance gain we'll get (IIRC they're anticipating a 20-40% improvement), and finally I'll be writing code to analyse where the performance gains would be most significant in a given program and insert some NOPs there, because doing it in every block would obviously make the executable much larger.

I'm only here for 3 months, though, and then I go back to finish my degree. Hopefully if I do well they'll hire me at the end.

[edit] I forgot to brag about the best part: my development machine has two CPUs with ten hyperthreaded cores each (so 40 logical processors), 64 GiB of RAM, a 256 GiB SSD and a 2 TiB hard drive. It still takes over an hour to compile Android.

[htirwin]

I ride a 1970's Schwinn 'Heavy Duty' to work. It was my fathers bike that he used when he was a paper boy. The ride is only about 2 miles.

[TheBeardedQuack]

I used to bike to school for at least 2 years as it took about the same time as the buses but the buses here were just so unbreakable. I could bike it there (3 mile, maybe 1 mile of up hill each way) in sun, rain or snow... and I actually find it easier to cycle in snow/ice than walking in it.

I don't cycle to work anymore as it would take longer than buses and I also can't be arsed to do double the distance in a single day, and a full days work. I have just started cycling on the weekend though just doing laps of the park to keep healthy :)

[chowmein]

I also rode to school until I was 18. It was a long journey (around 1 hour and 30 mins, don't know the distance) but I loved it. Some kind of exercise early in the morning really sets you up well for the day (well, me at least). Don't cycle to work now. No idea why - perhaps I should !

[jeckblack]

dont cycle but it would be good...