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MathMonkeyMan

2,664 karma · joined November 28, 2019

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MathMonkeyMan··on Four Months of Zig
Passing allocator pointers around has the advantage of allowing you to customize the allocator when you want, and to ignore it when you want (which is most of the time), i.e. just use the allocator you were given and pass it around like some piece of syntax or ctx in Go.

The trouble comes when you have data structures that manage memory, and you want to associate the allocation strategy with the particular instance of the data structure. Or, worse, you don't store the allocator pointer with the data and you require that all functions operating on the data structure happen to use compatible allocators.

At its simplest, though, passing allocators around is just removing an implicit global variable that is sometimes helpful to customize locally, but nearly impossible to customize locally if left as a global.

MathMonkeyMan··on Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often
Cars are different nowadays (hopefully even more reliable), but the '95 Toyota Camry that my parents bought new in 1995 or 1996 lasted until I was done using it in college in 2011. Then my dad sold it for a chunk of cash. The only thing wrong with it was that the roof paint was gone to shit from the Florida sun. You could probably paint it, redo the ceiling fabric, and run it for another 10 years. They sunk a fair amount into it over the years, but nothing catastrophic -- no powertrain issues, no "fixing this AC will cost more than the car" issues. In the six years I drove it I think it needed about $300 of work (something about the steering or suspension).
MathMonkeyMan··on How many shots are in the average movie today?
There's also the scene with the baby in Children of Men, and the synthesized long single shot in 1917.
MathMonkeyMan··on Passkeys are a trap
I like the writing in this article. The author did warn us, but the punchline takes a while to get to:

> I’d like to be clear that there are legitimate uses of remote attestation. By using a website that requires attested passkeys you can be sure you stay safe from accidentally installing a scammer’s fake passkey application that steals your data – the website will reject such a passkey. You might want an attested Passkey even if the website doesn’t require it, since you can use attestation to verify that your software has not been tampered with by a hacker while you weren’t looking.

> As for reasons to not want attestation: you might want to be able to use software that Twitter (formally X) doesn’t specifically approve of, such as Linux. Or a phone with a refurbished operating system.

So the bad timeline is the one in which the industry gradually transitions to "you can't log on unless everything about your system is exactly as we want." Figures.

MathMonkeyMan··on Fingerprints are the new cookies
I was the Gentle Owl. Then I connected to a VPN, opened a private window in the same browser, and didn't maximize the window. Now I'm the Nosy Toucan.

The article's points still stand, but the trick didn't work this one time.

MathMonkeyMan··on NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect
But now, as a New Yorker, I can complain. And we love to complain.
MathMonkeyMan··on The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
Almost nobody that I've ever worked with knows how the shell works. I send them [the docs][1] but what kind of world would this be if people read the docs? Also, not exactly a page turner.

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/V...

MathMonkeyMan··on FDA may allow some toxic chemicals to be added to food without safety review
True, but recognize the spin. Pretend that in the last election you were skeptical of the reigning government medical establishment and you did buy into some of the conspiracies, or at least thought they had some element of truth. Assume you were wrong and that you have good enough presence of mind to now feel duped.

I was always team "RFK Jr clearly bad," but to be honest I didn't put much work into forming that opinion.

MathMonkeyMan··on Whooping Cranes Learned to Migrate by Following Costumed Pilots
Same thing happened to Cheetahs and, to a greater extent, Florida panthers.
MathMonkeyMan··on AI Data Centers Not Paying Their Costs, Will Keep Using NDAs and Seek Tax Breaks
> Some obvious wordsmithing here intended to confuse. These are very weak arguments and I do not understand why it is a material concern to a Congressman

Interested to hear more!

> other than an interest to interfere in US commerce on behalf of foreign entities.

No longer interested!

The article does beat around the bush and the headline is clickbait. I assumed from the title that these datacenters were not paying their bills, but instead it's about the extent to which the operators should pay for public infrastructure built due to the datacenter being built. That's an interesting question, but I don't like the goalpost begin moved from "not paying their full costs" to "not paying what I define as a 'fair share'."

MathMonkeyMan··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
1631 bytes of text, by my count.

Then I disabled my ad blocker to see how much data comes down. So far it's at 31 MB, but it increases without bound by a few KB per second.

MathMonkeyMan··on A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
Microcontroller! The platform is the peripherals.
MathMonkeyMan··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
That's a good point. I'll add that killing someone (even yourself) with a public chat bot is a drawn out affair. With a car it happens all the time.
MathMonkeyMan··on We’re forgetting what darkness feels like
Fortunately it's growing smaller all the time. Very slowly.
MathMonkeyMan··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
The interstate highway system in the US has to straighten out every so often so that a plane can land on it. Otherwise I like the idea, except that you'd need more pylons per panel since a continuous run of panels might shade the road too much. Maybe run them in a strip over all of the existing light poles?
MathMonkeyMan··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
> For some people expressing their thoughts in words is really, really hard.

I suspect it is for everybody, but I might be blowing smoke up my own ass.

MathMonkeyMan··on Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
I didn't read OP's remark as "few people make long use out of e-readers," but rather "many more people have e-readers and don't use them," which I'm willing to believe but don't have any evidence of. At the very least it's likely to reflect the case with physical books. The people who don't read you don't hear as much from.
MathMonkeyMan··on English: A vs. An
Also [a history vs. an history][1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_...

MathMonkeyMan··on English: A vs. An
Is it "a LLM" or "an LLM"?

More generally, do you choose the article as if the first letter of the initialism were pronounced or as if the first word of the initialism were pronounced? Does it differ with acronyms? Does it differ between the UK and America?

MathMonkeyMan··on Eating Fruit Skins
My dad said that he older he gets, the more of the apple he eats.
MathMonkeyMan··on Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.
MathMonkeyMan··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
Funnily enough, I use Cloudflare Warp at work, and it breaks my site for what I think are DNS related reasons. Maybe there are some more exotic DNS keys that I need to add.

Or I could go back to IPv4 with dynamic DNS, but that would mean changing domain registrars.

MathMonkeyMan··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
Interesting

    david@carbon12:~ $ dig +short AAAA home.davidgoffredo.com
    2603:7000:5101:de1c::cafe:babe
I'll have to look into it, thanks for the QA testing everyone.
MathMonkeyMan··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
No, but IPv6 only these days. I never set up dynamic DNS.
MathMonkeyMan··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
The proper time (that is, the time the traveler measures on a clock) goes to zero very quickly towards the end. Even with both axes plotted logarithmically, it's just a sudden drop at the end towards light speed.

- [pic](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

- [plot](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

MathMonkeyMan··on Feather Atlas
I thought that it was going to be a new battery powered microcontroller board with cloud database integration.
MathMonkeyMan··on Scientists observe Einstein's gravity in the quantum world
Here's the [paper][1] on the arxiv.

I found it hard to believe that they accounted for other forces precisely enough that they could attribute the phase change to gravity, but this is beyond me so I trust the result.

At first I thought "they showed that you can measure a particle falling in gravity," which seemed dumb because we already know that particles fall in gravity. But they showed that you can measure a single (aggregate) particle falling in gravity, which is pretty cool because if gravity is quantum then that means that they observed an interaction between the graviton and their rubidium atom.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14535

MathMonkeyMan··on Simple Is Not Small
Maybe part of it is that fully functional notation necessarily preserves certain properties of the computation, while imperative style doesn't have to. For a complex piece of code, all of the hairiness is manifest in a functional style, but can be made implicit in an imperative style. So there's an economy to the imperative approach as things get complex, but in a sense we're just laundering the complexity from understanding the machinations of the code to understanding the correctness of the code.
MathMonkeyMan··on Simple Is Not Small
This is beside the point, and I'm being pedantic, but the unix pipeline and the clojure expression don't quite do the same thing.

The clojure expression reads the entire file into memory first, and then operates on that memory representation.

The pipeline processes the input in chunks. The two `sort`s might read the entire contents into memory, but an implementation like GNU sort will instead, for large inputs, create temporary files for sections of the input and then merge sort them to the output.

You could make clojure do the same thing, but it might not be as "simple" as the pipeline.

MathMonkeyMan··on Is There I/O After Death? What Happens to Io_uring When a Process Dies
I'm a lowly shell, but in another life I aspire to achieve greatness through docker.
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