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FooBarWidget

7,887 karma · joined December 5, 2008

Co-founder of Phusion, developer of the Passenger application server for Ruby, Python and Node. Passionate about web development and computing infrastructure.

Twitter: @honglilai

Github: FooBarWidget

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/foobarwidget; my proof: https://keybase.io/foobarwidget/sigs/fW8xkjqf1o2IGTE7IiFu5wub8NYnF4_mxjmj38WXkQs ]

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FooBarWidget··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Or the answer is even easier. There is public data consisting of chat transcripts with ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek, and all AI providers train on that data. You don't need distillation for the text "I am ChaGPT/Claude/DeepSeek" to often appear in your trraining data.
FooBarWidget··on Setting Up SSH Keys on macOS with Touch ID
I don't get it even after reading the guide. How do you deal with backups when using YubiKeys? The private key is stored on the YubiKey with no ability to export it, ok... then what do you do when you lose the YubiKey?

Are you supposed to have multiple YubiKeys (multiple private keys) and then ensure that all your systems accept the matching multiple pubkeys?

The guide's Backup section is... super vague. It says exporting keys, of which some are private keys, which I thought shouldn't be possible?? And then it goes off about partitioning and filesystems?

FooBarWidget··on China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024
What is "wrong" is that they have a culture of being conversative when it comes to 0-1 innovation. Everything is set up to reward concrete results. With 0-1 innovation you have no idea whether it's viable, so few people have the risk appetite and would rather pursue proven venues.

But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.

0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.

FooBarWidget··on China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024
It doesn't, at all. Unlike the US (and to a lesser extend, Europe), Chinese do not have a majority of their wealth invested in stocks.

Besides, the Chinese st9ck market has been atrocious since.... pretty much forever. You'd think they still live in mud pools if you think the stock market is representative of overall development.

FooBarWidget··on China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024
Have you looked at China from 15 years ago? It was also said to be in a depression and youth unemployment was also high. Just look at articles from back then.

What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.

Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.

When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.

FooBarWidget··on Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
Deepseek never subsidized their plans. At some point they dropped pricing, then after a while they raised them, but that's because they had capacity issues, not because of dropping subsidies. They don't want your money, they'd rather have fewer users.

OpenCode is building their own inference and they've independently stated that DeepSeek's old (cheaper) pricing is achievable without subsidies.

FooBarWidget··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
Ok fine. But again: any repeatable way to prove your thesis or disprove the trashing-code-pages thesis? And how to do this when the system is freezing up?
FooBarWidget··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
So you're saying processes are stuck for minutes on end at trying to get memory from the kernel? I find this implausible because relatively simple processes such as ssh and bash shouldn't be getting memory from the kernel at a continuous basis. Unless they're suddenly processing a lot of new data (like me trying to cat /dev/urandom), they should be spending most of the time working with the memory they already have. Especially when all I'm doing is pressing keystrokes in ssh+bash, not even hitting enter. Note that malloc doesn't ask memory from the kernel at every call. Glibc malloc is (in)famously stubborn with caching memory it has gotten from the kernel, hesitant to release it back to the kernel.

Any repeatable way to prove your thesis or disprove the trashing-code-pages thesis?

FooBarWidget··on Claude Haiku 5.5
Then why are AI plans still so super expensive, and AI spending going through the roof, while all the subsidies are ending?
FooBarWidget··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
It's the explanation that I've read when scouring forums for reasons why it happens. I'd love to hear alternative explanations and how to measure/verify them. But the measurement tools also become unresponsive so I can't check anything.

But frankly, as a user I don't really care what the real technical reason is. I just don't think the system should become unresponsive for minutes on end during memory pressure. Just OOM-kill earlier, when it's supposed to.

FooBarWidget··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
> The active code pages are specifically excluded from being discarded during the reclaim process.

This is not true, or the system wouldn't grind to a halt due to having to reload code pages (even those that are recently in use) from disk over and over.

For example, key presses and output streaming in SSH become unresponsive. The code pages for handling key presses and output streaming are obviously in use — I just used them!

FooBarWidget··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
I wish this is true but evidence is against you. Just try testing memory pressure on a no swap system. You will see that the system grinds to a half for a few minutes before you even get to an OOM event.
FooBarWidget··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
While I've seen systems grinding to a halt due to evicting code pages, the idea that disabling swap distributes load between code pages and data pages makes no sense to me. Data pages are also disk backed, so they could also be evicted at any time. Why would data pages be written to swap if they came fron the disk in the first place?

So that only leaves anonymous data pages, i.e., regular data in memory, that could be swapped. Ok but you're not easing the load on code pages, those still get evicted during memory pressure whether you have swap or not.

FooBarWidget··on Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
I heard that is mostly a myth due to misunderstanding what life expectancy means. It's an average over populations, pulled down mostly by enormous infant mortality. If you made it to 15 then there was a good chance you'll make it to 60.
FooBarWidget··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
I find Luna vs Terra more clear. I know what a haiku is only because it hss some sort of hype factor among certain crowds. But I have no idea what a sonnet is, I heard of the word but never seen or written one. Opus vaguely reminds me of something in Greek mythology but also no idea what that, let alone the apparent implication that it's supposed to be longer than a sonnet.
FooBarWidget··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
I find those (Italian?) names super confusing as a non-Italian. I automatically read "tall" in English and think "ok it's tall as in high so this gotta big" -> "wait, what is 'grande' then and how is that different from tall?" -> "venti? Genshin Impact character??"
FooBarWidget··on Footguns with Postgres “at time zone 'UTC'”
? Footguns as a synonym for "caveat" or "gotcha" were in use long before LLMs. I hate Claude speak too but there's no need to knee-jerk blame everything on LLMs.
FooBarWidget··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
Going faster... until now. It's screetching to a halt. And they want us to get off gas in a few years while also being unable to handle the electrical load. I'm gonna buy a gas boiler thank you very much.
FooBarWidget··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
China's plan to be self-sufficient in semiconductors was a failure before western sanctions, because all the Chinese chipmakers found it too easy to buy western chipmaking equipment or to fab through TSCM. No Chinese company wanted to buy from other Chinese companies. Nobody was incentivized to develop self-sufficiency. "Because the government wants it" was not enough incentive.

Western sanctions have succeeded in achieving China's self-sufficiency goals where their own government failed.

FooBarWidget··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
The "abysmal" yield using DUV is an overblown statement by western commentators who don't look closer at the development. Certainly yield is worse than with EUV, but after multiple iterations of development, yield has become pretty good, within economically acceptable bounds, still making scaling possible. Volume is still ramping up. A lot of capacity will come online in 2027. The removal of western middlemen such as Mediatek actually improved the economics. Further yield improvements are still coming. Volume is already so high that domestically made phones and NPUs are making a real impact, yet are also selling like hot cakes.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
The point isn't whether you pay for art when no AI alternative exists. The point is whether you would be willing to pay premium for non-AI artwork, vs whether you'd just continue to complain about AI usage while expecting non-AI at no additional charge.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
This is about paying for better-than-AI human artwork, not any human artwork. Would they pay premium for non-AI? That matters much more than whether they pay when they have no choice.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775715
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
None of those things are battlegrounds for AI art complaints since AI usage is still minimal there. The AI complaints are about anime, posters, YouTube videos, etc.

There was recently an anime in which they used one AI generated background in the ending theme, which spurred countless complaints. It's common knowledge that anime animators are badly paid and work on insane schedules, so they used AI to cut corners. How many of those complainers proposed better wages and less pressure for animators, vs demanding free replacement of the background at no cost on their own? This is entitlement.

When a significant amount of movie scenes are AI generated, let's see whether viewers are willing to pay premium for non-AI scenes, or whether they only complain that they're not getting non-AI at no additional charges.

FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
No, this is merely about what is sustainable, not morals. The supply is shifting towards increasingly AI generated. Almost all of the complainers are consumers and do not change the supply side of things. Until they do, the ultimate result is clear: they will die on a hill.

If you want to die on a hill while feeling morally superior, be my guest.

FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Which critic is proposing funding better artwork, made by good human artists? Sometimes, silence says more than words. Non-decision is also a decision.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Do you think the vast majority who criticize AI pays for good human artwork? Now that is a bizarre stance.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
You're really overestimating how many people can draw something "decent" in Inkscape. Most likely they will take a template. That's not necessarily better than AI either.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
True. But an organizer who doesn't care, will also not be willing to pay for good artwork. AI haters should put money where their mouths are and fund human top artwork.
FooBarWidget··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
None of the AI haters (or haters in general) are willing to put money where their mouths are. None of them are willing to pay for better human artwork, yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output.
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