[b5n]

> The meme is wrong

The third panel is generally meant to be the correct technical answer, while the last panel is reserved for the punchline.

Understanding the 'galaxy brain' format might have saved the author the trouble (or at least guided proper expectations), although it was a cool exercise.

[saagarjha]

lol, no. Galaxy brain starts somewhere (generally sane and reasonable) and then moves progressively in a certain direction (generally more complicated). In this case the starting point is an instruction sequence that is reminiscent of RISC architectures and then it gets progressively more CISC as you go down the page. The whole point of galaxy brain is that it follows this sequence, and because there’s no special third panel the sequence is extensible to arbitrary lengths.

[comex]

I've seen galaxy brain comics where the last row is the punchline. The comic might start out moving in a certain direction in a logical way, which may or may not be humorous by itself, but then the last row has a twist, an unexpected interpretation of the direction.

Some bad examples I found on Google:

https://i.redd.it/j0wwzqe2287z.jpg

https://in.pinterest.com/pin/366128644701746892/

The x86 comic may or may not count, depending on whether you expect the reader to know that using those sorts of legacy instructions is not actually an improvement…

[saagarjha]

Sure, my point is that the twist doesn't need to be at a particular point, nor does there even need to be a twist. It's just a progression of related images–I think the progression in the ones you're showing is similar to the "evolution of a programmer" joke where a junior engineer starts off with something simple, progressively makes it cleverer and more complicated as they learn more, and eventually return back to the simple solution.

[howdydoo]

I always thought of the last panel as an initially silly-sounding answer that could still be considered correct in some unexpected way. In this case it fits, because if you compile with `-Os`, xlatb is probably the ideal output. I doubt llvm can output xlatb, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if it could

[DrPhish]

If this meme was posted to pouet or another demoscene site in the context of writing 4k (or other) space constrained demos, it would operate as you expected.

If space efficiency (or fitting in cache) are important, then this instruction being more compact but having worse execution performance could be a good tradeoff!

[dspillett]

> while the last panel is reserved for the punchline

The meme gets used in a number of similar but different ways. Sometimes the last panel is the sequence taken to a logical but unrealistic extreme.

[charcircuit]

I'm not really sure this meme has a punchline. The number of instructions decreases in each panel.

[notriddle]

The punchline is that they use an instruction that Intel themselves do not recommend.

[jleahy]

The punchline is that they didn’t think of:

movzx rax, al

mov al, [rax+rbx]

[mizaru]

movzx eax, al

is one byte shorter, but I'm not sure if any of this would make a difference. x86 is tricky.