Someone Suggested Learning
In an age where it seems like actually putting in any effort at all is considered wasteful but spending trillions on “AI” to fail to do almost everything it is tasked with is smart, someone had the audacity to post an article suggesting people should learn about a particular aspect of programming.
This outrageous assault on the delicate sensitivities of The Modern Programmer, AKA someone who either pretends to be a programmer or has fully embraced their ignorance and is all about the vibes was about the usefulness of understanding SIMD, or Single Instruction, Multiple Data.
Shockingly the author contends that an understanding of how to leverage instructions in modern CPUs to operate on multiple values with a single CPU instruction might be beneficial to programmers and even has the gall to suggest this knowledge could lead to better, faster software being developed.
In case it was not clear, I am joking, and the author Mitchell Hashimoto is completely correct. Even if it turns out your software cannot actually make use of ways to process certain kinds of data in chunks instead of one at a time with the quite significant speed increases that can result from it, an understanding of this would nevertheless be useful.
But the “programmer” of The Current Year doesn’t really do the whole learning thing. They are busy wasting money, time and energy spinning up a multi-agentic workflow to loop a single prompt into an app you’ll never see working. They don’t have time for learning stuff.
Tip: Take a look at SIMD stuff, if there is an opportunity to use it in your project, it can make a big difference. If not, you learned something. Learning IS worth it. The process of learning itself really is worth it.