It also triggered some memories for me too. A college professor wanted to teach all the bit manipulating stuff and gave an assignment where students had to transform branchy code into branchless code using shifts and bit operators. Had a lot of fun doing that.
Yeah this is the kind of thinking opening up new heights when you get it!
These type of exercises should be mandatory for all compute intensive related jobs, especially for all data science people (i know some of them know this stuff but that does not seem to be the majority)
