dataflow

This is on MSYS2, yes, and that excuses absolutely nothing, because this shouldn't be happening in the first place for speed to be even relevant. At the risk of repeating myself thrice: the messages are confusing, the Ctrl+C handling is just utterly broken, the citation message adds to the confusion while being frankly obnoxious, and all of the delays and outputs are unnecessary in the first place as proven by literally every other program that doesn't make me wait a minute before I can use it the first time, including xargs. If Microsoft's own Windows tools did this, everybody would bash them (no pun intended) till the end of time. But since it's GNU Parallel and not Microsoft Parallel, it's Windows's fault for being slow and also my fault for having the audacity to expect better, apparently.

No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988369

> That's common on linux. Many tools read from stdin if a file path isn't given: cat, xargs, base64, cksum, etc.

No. I did pipe to stdin. It's not my first time using Linux...

Here's a command line I ran right now, and the output I see:

  $ echo "http://www.example.com" | parallel -k -j 8 curl -s "{}"
  Academic tradition requires you to cite works you base your article on.
  [...more nonsense...]
  To silence this citation notice: run 'parallel --citation' once.
  
  parallel: Warning: Finding the maximal command line length. This may take up to 1 minute.

So I wait a few seconds... until I get fed up and look at my process list, and I see perl is just... seemingly sitting there, doing seemingly absolutely nothing. I'm not going to waste a whole minute of my life waiting for this; I see no reason competently written software should take that long just to accomplish such a simple task where nothing is remotely close to reaching any limits.

So I Ctrl+C. And then the parent perl process gets killed, but the child apparently keeps running.

I press Ctrl+D to exit the terminal, and then:

  $ # (Ctrl+D pressed)
  logout

...it just sits there waiting. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+\ do nothing. I have to kill the lingering perl process manually.

xargs Just Works without any of this nonsense, yet somehow I'm the one holding GNU parallel wrong?

Oh man, parallel is awful. I have to rant about this because I literally tried it again today morning.

Every single damn time I try parallel and decide to give it another chance, something ends up not working or causing a problem. I can never get it to just do what I want and get out of the way.

Today I foolishly thought maybe I was the one who was holding it wrong every single time in the past, so I copy pasted another command that was supposed to work, and thought surely this would be straightforward. Boy was I wrong. I got some manifesto about academic citations and plagiarism, which confused the hell out of me. After I wasted time trying to figure out how to turn off that nonsense, the app just hung there trying to figure out how long its command line can be? Literally doing nothing? What the hell? I killed it but then my terminal didn't close because every time I did this apparently some perl command was spawned in the background blocked on nothing. Why the hell was perl even relevant? Nothing I wrote used Perl. Just run the darn commands I asked in parallel, is that so hard?

Edit: sorry, I misunderstood the post.

The blog post basically said exactly this:

> IMO the blame here doesn't lie on gcc or clang; it lies on the standard. that is, the standard is wrong and should be updated to make this implementation-defined.

> gcc and clang can't change their behavior because that would be a breaking ABI change

It's an API change. Breaking source code is generally an even bigger deal than breaking binary compatibility.

You mean like this? https://xkcd.com/903/

> In Europe "no 737 MAX" basically means "no Ryanair". Depending on how you feel about Ryanair, avoiding the 737 MAX can be very easy.

Eh?

- https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/AEA1517

- https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/LOT279

- https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ICE613

> Just use an AI

You mean like (a) assume this perfect AI that already exists never makes a mistake because AI doesn't do that, (b) accept all the security risks like prompt injection, (c) accept the fact that you don't deserve to enjoy the same privacy over your life as others do?

Is it working/being enforced? Anecdotally I haven't seen or heard of any changes in verbiage, but I haven't been paying that much attention.

Yes, exactly. It's kind of an... important distinction.

Citation needed? I'm not seeing anything indicating PayPal has a bank charter in the US.

> but the fact that PayPal has a bank charter

When did it get one?

Interesting that the drug enforcement administration can make it illegal to buy something as a chemical. Their name would suggest that they're merely the enforcement arm of the FDA regarding drugs.

> Are you saying that it is likely that at some point in the not too distant future, OpenAI and Anthropic will need bailout-size cash infusions from the US Government to continue existence and that the US government will do it and not face severe political consequences?

Didn't they say this themselves? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/06/tech/openai-backtracks-go...

> The current administration pays very close attention voter sentiment.

Is that how the Anti-Weaponization Fund came about?

> This is the most important part most people don't get

I wouldn't say "people don't get" it when it's not well-communicated. When the headline always says 2-3 degrees, of course people are going to shrug.

> On the second matter, it really is. The layman perception of a contract is usually a formal document that needs to be signed, whereas in no legal systems that I know of are these actual elements of a contract. In most legal systems a contract is a much broader concept: a private agreement between two parties, with the main defining elements being offer, acceptance and consideration. Most if not all trade transactions are contracts, they include the main elements.

Note the layman perception wasn't why I was doubting this; I'm aware not all contracts are that formal. The reason was I don't know if this is considered a sale or not, and whether other principles apply in that case (like first sale doctrine) and if they might somehow override this.

Not really, I was well aware of if-with-init and I still found this quite confusing. That one actually shows what the variable is initialized to. This one doesn't.

IANAL, but if you enter a contract with the intent to violate it, is that legal? My understanding is that it's technically illegal (only civil perhaps, but still illegal), the impracticality of enforcement notwithstanding. Also, I have no idea if the contract for a ticket "sale" is really considered a contract for the purposes of such laws.

> I don’t think she sees any benefit from scalpers.

If a ticket sells for $2k then the platform gets some massive portion of that (like $400?) - are you sure some of that doesn't make its way back to the artist, at least on the primary sale platform? I would be rather surprised if it didn't.

Honestly, people need to get over this debate. It's pretty irrelevant in a lot of cases. When people ask "what is the model thinking?", they're really asking "what caused the model to produce this response (as opposed to a bunch of other plausible ones)?"

Whether it's thinking or word prediction or whatever you want to call it, people are trying to understand the causal chain.

Another issue I don't see how to solve is: how do you even gather the data? That is: how do you even know if someone (a) is doing the same job as a graduate of your program would do, (b) actually skipped a program or its equivalent, and (c) is making more than a graduate of your program?

All of these are personal and private information. If I apply to a startup tomorrow and get hired without listing my engineering degree on my resume, then are they supposed to add me to some national database of uneducated engineers, list my compensation, and explain that they would've hired a graduate for the same role too? If I apply to another company and list my degree then is that gonna overwrite the database? How the heck would this actually work?

Whoops, looks like I somehow posted on the wrong page.

> You can get basically any medication or vaccination you want in the US as long as you can find a doctor to write the prescription.

Is that not usually true in other countries?

Another issue I don't see how to solve is: how do you even gather the data?

That is: how do you even know if someone (a) is doing the same job as a graduate of your program would do, (b) actually skipped a program or its equivalent, and (c) is making more than a graduate of your program?

All of these are personal and private information. If I apply to a startup tomorrow and get hired without listing my engineering degree on my resume, then are they supposed to add me to some national database of uneducated engineers, list my compensation, and explain that they would've hired a graduate for the same role too? If I apply to another company and list my degree then is that gonna overwrite the database? How the heck would this actually work?

Interesting, thanks!

Unless a program has a habit of sending the majority of its undergrads into PhDs, that part might not be so hard to resolve -- just exclude everyone who does that from the measurement sample.

Second comment for a semi-off-topic question: does the state of matter depend on the gravity?

Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no?

Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity? How does one distinguish what's a solid or a liquid when gravity seems to make them behave similarly?

I must be missing something.

If something is a fluid... or at least a liquid... that means it... flows, right?

Flow speed isn't infinite, so whenever you pull apart a liquid, you'll see some remnant of the pre-flow state. The thicker the liquid, the slower you need to pull it apart to see that.

Is this surprising? Why wouldn't every liquid do this? In what way is this somehow special to some liquids and not others?