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aheppon Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

This seems like a classic "rationalism vs empiricism" issue, and it was interesting for me to learn that Galen (famous / influential ancient Roman physician) wrote a lot about that.

0: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/galen/#M...

aheppon PCI Express over Fiber [video]

How does this compare to something like RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)?

aheppon Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

With respect to the weapons programs, I'm not a historian, but I was not under the impression that the US stopped development of these weapons unilaterally or out of good will. My understanding is that it was due to a mixture of not perceiving a need or use for the capabilities, along with formal or informal international cooperation eliminating the need for deterrence.

Just a couple of thoughts since it seems like the next issues in this space are rapidly arriving or already here.

aheppon Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

Behold! Plato's man

aheppon The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

I guess the question is, are the issues not worth fixing because implementing a fix is extremely expensive, or because the improvements from fixing it were anticipated to be minor? I assume the answer is generally a mix of the two.

aheppon The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever?

I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.

aheppon The Cult of Vibe Coding Is Insane

There have certainly been periods of irrational exuberance in the tech industry, but there are also many companies that were criticized for being unprofitable which are now, as far as I can tell, quite profitable. Amazon, Uber, I'm sure many more. I'm curious what the basis is to say that Anthropic could never achieve profitability? Are the numbers that bad?

aheppon Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket

San Jacinto is 10,834 ft, for what it's worth.

aheppon Show HN: Xmloxide – an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2

Yeah I didn’t want to get into the weeds about inherently unsafe stuff, since the OP was about an XML parser

aheppon Show HN: Xmloxide – an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2

I guess I don't write enough rust to say this with confidence, but isn't that the bare minimum? I find it difficult to believe the rust community would accept using a library where the API requires unsafe.

aheppon Layoffs at Block

I don't think it makes a lot of sense to put those responsibilities on individual firms. In the USA, achieving maximum employment has been a mandate for the Federal Reserve to achieve through monetary policy. There are many advantages to allowing individual firms to optimize for productivity. There are also a lot of harms caused by forcing firms to adopt unproductive methods. Even Keynes' joking solution for unemployment was that the treasury might bury bottles of money for private industry to dig up.

aheppon Assistant to the Regional Manager

> Salaries, benefits etc have all not been keeping up with inflation for decades

I don't believe that's consistent with the data

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

aheppon AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

I read an article in FT just a couple days ago claiming that increased productivity was becoming visible in economic data

> My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade.

good for 3 clicks: https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/97861f...

aheppon Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

I think you're bringing up a great question here. If you ask a random person on the street "is your laptop fast", the answer probably has more to do with what software that person is running, than what hardware.

My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid and the battery lasts forever.

aheppon Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

My guess would be that ARM Chromebooks might run substantially more cut-down firmware? While intel might need a more full-fat EFI stack? But I haven't used either and am just speculating.

aheppon Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

what are you doing where you find the thermal limits noticeable?

aheppon Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

I think in the example the OP is making, the work is not useless. They're saying if you had a system doing the same work, with maybe 60 processes, you're better off splitting that into 600 processes and a couple thousand threads, since that will allow granular classification of tasks by their latency sensitivity

aheppon Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

I think it's substantially riskier. At the very least, it means you are trusting any directory you cd into, rather than just trusting your $home/bin.

Stuff that would not typically raise eyebrows has been made risky. You might cd into less privileged user's $home, or some web service's data directory, and suddenly you've given whoever had access to those users, access to your user.

Maybe you could argue "well, I just won't cd outside of my $home", but the sheer unexpectedness of the behavior seems deeply undesirable to me.

aheppon We mourn our craft

It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply.

If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue

If your worries are about ecology and sustainability I agree that is a concern we need to address more effectively than we have in the past. Technology will almost certainly be part of that solution via things like fusion energy. Success is not assured and we cannot just sit back and say "we live in the best of all possible worlds with a glorious manifest destiny", but I don't think that the future is particularly bleak compared to the past

aheppon Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

One could set an env var to their local bin dir which is otherwise not in the path, like L=/home/ahepp/.local/bin, and then do $L/mycommand. Doesn't meet the OP's requirement of no shift key.

Or prefix files in the local bin dir with a couple letters from your username, like /home/ahepp/.local/bin/ah-mycommand

aheppon Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Just to save the trouble of writing './'?

aheppon Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

The "solution" of only ever using full absolute paths works on any unix system, doesn't it?

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

How are you defining "general-purpose OS"? Are you saying IoT and robotics shouldn't use a Linux kernel at all? Or just not your general purpose distros? I would be interested to hear more of your logic here, since it seems like using the same FOSS operating system across various uses provides a lot of value to everyone.

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

I work on embedded devices, fairly powerful ones to be fair, and I think systemd is really great, useful software. There's a ton of stuff I can do quite easily with systemd that would take a ton of effort to do reliably with sysvinit.

It's definitely pretty opinionated, and I frequently have to explain to people why "After=" doesn't mean "Wants=", but the result is way more robust than any alternative I'm familiar with.

If you're on a system so constrained that running systemd is a burden, you are probably already using something like buildroot/yocto and have a high degree of control about what init system you use.

aheppon Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles to providing a graphical installer in something like an initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell it to)

I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

Unless you're one of the 0.00000000001% of humans using a farm-to-table laptop with coreboot, what's stopping that from happening today?

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

Increasing security for the system owner will necessarily decrease the ability of others to modify the system in ways the owner doesn't like.

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

https://0pointer.net/blog/authenticated-boot-and-disk-encryp...

Yes, system data should be locked to the system with a TPM. That way your system can refuse to boot if it's been modified to steal your user secrets.

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

Doing secure boot properly is kind of difficult. There are a bunch of TPM measurement registers for various bits and bobs (kernel, initramfs, cmdline, lots more). Using UKIs simplifies it a lot, but it’s not trivial to do right at the moment.

aheppon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

as you say, a lot of this stuff is already happening. Won’t it be good to have a FOSS attestation stack that breaks the iOS/android duopoly?