devonkim

I don’t really see the software ecosystem catching up that quickly is the thing. Sure, we have some support for hardware like Google’s TPUs and Coral but the field’s practitioners and researchers are oftentimes so behind the curve of general systems work like dealing with the nuts and bolts of libraries and package management that anyone trying to compete against NVIDIA will need to spend a lot of time investing there rather than yet another group of ML engineers that shudder at the thought of packaging and distributing their software to the public and supporting frameworks for years with partnerships and continued investments doing a lot of work that’s basically toil and extremely undesirable for said ML engineers.

Xtreme marketing was absolutely going on back then - remember the Mountain Dew ad campaigns? Yeah....

Any long-lasting solution requiring continuous investments is going to require more impact on the people side than the technical side. Hiring maybe one or two technical wizard asshats at a company may work for a bit but can’t scale in that eventually asshats will either drive away enough potential contributors or clash with another asshat. Any company actually needing said asshats to conduct business has a form of organizational tech debt in that they’ll need to spend a lot of resources managing around said persons in the end while said person’s ego continues to grow convinced they’re primarily responsible for successes.

Also read something casually that (I am suspecting probably falsified but a new one at least) that plastics were found in a lot of cardiovascular deposits following autopsies.

A lot of the point of the experiments is specifically to provide for evidence that critics tend to have about what poor people do with money. Because a great, great many people basically believe (falsely) that poverty is essentially a choice made by poor decisions more or less and that it is a personal or moral failing. There’s so little evidence for this it’s kind of crazy but then we take a look at those with that kind of attitude and see a huge bias

FWIW, Kreator, Scorpions, Destruction, Sodom, and basically every other German metal band probably have better English than most native speaker groups for the past 40+ years. Americans in particular seem to do quite poorly at speaking other languages partly because to be American, particularly in cities, one needs to know several dialects given the many different creoles and vernacular groups due to the country being so massive and diverse.

Maybe I’m a bit misguided but talking to sales and marketing folks historically marketing is like sales at scale.

Sports teams may be a very poor example because they’re similar to movie stars - the workers are _also_ the sales folks in those labor markets. Not a lot of engineers have the kind of influence to bring entire swaths of investment and interest besides celebrity engineers basically. If we look at it from this lens Big Tech is what it is partly because we don’t have anything like a draft to help ensure fairness of access to highly skilled labor that is a massive influence upon the success of the organization.

There’s nothing like SAG to help mere mortal engineers that struggle with ageism and have trouble breaking into more lucrative companies for whatever reasons either.

But unlike sports we can’t really distill down everything an engineer does these days into a line item sheet of statistics because so much of engineering isn’t execution-focused but design and project focus.

Also, I’ve realized that a ton of software companies - arguably the majority - basically exist to take existing proprietary business knowledge that engineers have little clue or concern about and put it online essentially. Technology in itself isn’t the competitive differentiator at all for these companies that is as opposed to more trade-like relationships, business know-how, etc. that basically acts as social mediation for a lot of incumbent wealthy people’s whims. These would be a lot of enterprise software companies where your sales team basically buys you access to certain accounts and unlocks markets.

So this to me is the difference between a company that makes money because of its technology advantages like most of Big Tech rather than existing business domain and market influence advantages (I think this is really close to the classic rent term and in the technology area all that raw data could be considered rent maybe).

One thing I found a bit unsettling about some products is how manufacturers can say they support a standard when they’re really using it as a basis for a proprietary lock-in strategy. I didn’t realize the standards were so loose until I started researching some newer devices to support Home Assistant, namely the Aqara U100 which seems to require the Aqara hub to be able to support standard Zigbee when it’s advertised as supporting Zigbee

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/aqara-u100-smart-lock/...

Given that single use plastic bags are rather difficult to get recycled in so many metro areas (I remember reading a single digit percentage of it is even recyclable) it’s not clear if it going into the trash instead of recycling is not a huge impact. But increased use of single use plastics is certainly not desirable IMO similar to fossil fuels unless they’re compostable or similar types that at least can break down cleanly.

I’m going to go on a limb and say that a fetus will be counted under interstate commerce jurisdiction of the US Constitution so there will be a federal law level decision on whether abortion is illegal or not if one doesn’t exist already. Because then I’d imagine that supremacy clause means that states actually do not have the right to restrict procedures like abortions either.

What I was looking at was a different manufacturer’s product which talks about how they use vegetable oil which seems intriguing. I’m going to use the espresso wax / stain and see how it turns out with different numbers of coats https://www.interbuild.shop/route/product/product?product_id...

Hardwax oils are also used but oftentimes have quite bad VOCs. However, I’m familiar with at least one manufacturer that has low/no VOC oils which certainly shows it’s possible but perhaps there’s a good technical explanation for why VOCs are so common in these oil treatments.

I’ll never forget the time a network engineer escalated a ticket of his to me on the infrastructure side (think L4+ support) that a developer threw his way saying that his web pages were loading really slowly and that this was a high priority, high urgency project. I asked how they came to the conclusion that it was something related to the cloud infrastructure rather than something else? They said the developer didn’t really know besides to ask “network people.” So I get on a webex with the parties where even a VP is on there because his product launch is on the hook and then I ask the developer to open developer tools to which he responded “what’s that?” I think I had to mute myself for a bit while I screamed for a while that this was what qualified one to be a senior front end engineer at the company. So I stepped through and got the network transfer chart and pinpointed that all traffic was coming through quickly except there was a big initial delay while doing DNS look-ups that was super slow to get the first byte. The network engineer on the call was stunned that such a thing existed and thanked me for saving him a ton of grief because he got a LOT of ticket like this one.

This wasn’t in like 2010 when Firebug was just coming out and people still used Firefox as a rule, this was like 2015 when dev tools was in every shipping browser approved for corporate use by a technology laggard company.

So the moral of the story is just blame DNS first.

I don’t understand how front end devs can get so far without learning how to use the developer tool console now standard in every major browser. How can one not learn about a POST vs GET when things like request caching and back button complications are a reality? I hit these issues as a senior backend dev fumbling around with front end so many years ago so I have a hard time understanding how that isn’t even close to the experience kids these days get.

Sounds like an argument for Starlark perhaps?

Except much of the alt media ecosystem of grifters and influencers are precisely providing people what they want to hear and raise massive amounts of money doing so. They oftentimes do not think they’re grifters because they feel they are responding to a “market need” and so they are providing a service even if they might not even agree ethically with the output necessarily. This is how we wind up with so many conspiracy theorist nutjobs dominating recommendation algorithms again and again across many different platforms. People are highly, highly fallible and what they want may be, in fact, some of the worst things for them. As such I’m convinced that most adults are only physically and legally that way given how incredibly naive and immature people appear to be as a baseline regardless of cultural or even educational background.

That kind of rhetorical mental gymnastics is quite often what happens when we debate people that have a vested interested against a commonly held and supportable belief. The problem I see is that skepticism and contrarianism are commonly conflated with educated, informed criticism by people even well educated and informed in a topic area, but now we have to debate things as fundamental to many other things holding up like the concept of gravity. The implications of a flat earth, for example, are incredibly outrageous and when people want to go to any length to explain away their tightly held and emotionally motivated position it’s not going to turn out to be a very productive conversation whatever topic may be at hand anyway.

Most forms of decently productive discourse tend to involve multiple parties going back and forth with observations and some criticism that’s not taken personally at least so some semblance of an agreed, cogent world is formed from the discussion. This really doesn’t work if people don’t have some very basic fundamentals agreed upon sometimes, especially if they are relevant to the topic. Like it doesn’t matter if someone’s a creationist on an accounting application development team but it probably matters a lot as a policymaker for public sector.

Last I remember as of at least 7 years ago Google et al were using custom NIC firmware to avoid having the kernel get involved in general (I think they managed to do a lot of Maglev directly on the NICs) because latency is so dang important at high speed networking speeds that letting anything context switch and need to wait on the kernel is a big performance hit. Not a lot of room for latency when you're working at 100 Gbps.

From what I’ve heard of and used myself LINQ works pretty well as an embedded DSL because it’s more like a language extension with some solid semantics rather than a classic embedded DSL that is not terribly far from transpilers

And at this point I’m starting to see that for long term health reasons there is basically nobody except those with specific injuries that should be sitting for hours at a desk. I used to get some back and neck pain on occasion and now that I’ve switched to standing at my desk and finding a monitor height that is optimal for my posture (the standard recommendation by most ergonomic standards caused odd compensation for me) I’m healthier overall than I was 10 years ago. There’s almost no reason to sit except to take a quick break.

I’ve even stopped driving as much after I noticed that my back is a bit stiffer from road trips.

Software ecosystems like libraries and frameworks have completely different propagation and remediation mechanics compared to federated systems like core Internet backbone routers and switches is the thing. Try as we might conceptualize otherwise the modern Internet from a packet’s purview is more like a loose confederation of ultimately privatized or state-run fiefdoms than a cellular automata digraph explosion. So actors that try to act maliciously against the network will be basically shut out given the rule of an iron fist being the default.

I’m having some nightmare flashbacks to the “plugin” ecosystems of various PHP CMSes including WordPress

In Python the comma acts as a tuple creation operator inside parentheses with no other context like function invocation.

Also, last I remember in JS a trailing comma meant the creation of an extra array element that’s null so I became conditioned to only use trailing commas for separators in languages where it’s consistent and specified very explicitly like in HCL

The actual staffing of DCs is rather sparse for hyperscalers and are typically outsourced if not prime DCs to a few companies that also do it with fairly low headcount.

Hyperscalers in particular currently can’t scale out very easily necessarily because many of the DCs have hit local power restrictions so compute power efficiency and density are the primary means to grow capacity. Think apartments in skyscrapers v row houses. So electricity _efficiency_ is what is being sought rather than just pure operational costs of the DCs.

I’m the northern Virginia exurbs hyperscalers have bought out so much of the land it’s now perhaps greater land use than family farms there and starting to encroach upon housing developments. Locals also complain about the noise (there’s a sort of hum from the sheer mass of air and whirring fans) from DCs impacting health. Some areas have been reporting increased rates of hearing disabilities although I can’t recall a study being conducted yet.

The point of short sessions last I saw is not necessarily for technical reasons but for helping with legal reasons. That is, it means to lawyers that an authorized user could not have performed actions outside of a certain time window. This makes the discovery period for legal proceedings substantially faster.

If there's a lot of thankless, mundane work for the majority of projects that seems rather routine from what I've seen described thus far across multiple decades, so this seems quite ripe for some form of automation sans projects that seem to keep requiring changes constantly. C extensions, interop across languages, and ABI considerations are certainly much more complicated and require a lot of complicated work but given that 90% of the issues even power users run into are things like "the lxml library I installed won't get detected by package X when I run autoconf, please help."

There's nothing sustainable as an industry about something like software dependency management and versioning being so critical for things "just working" while people are sticking their heads in the sand saying "not my problem" as a rule. I'm so tired of solving the same problems that were already solved in the past because of developers wanting to work on "more interesting things" and doing the bare minimum to get stuff compiling and running again regardless of the package format. In fact, Docker may have made this situation even worse with so many Dockerfiles that will basically be unable to work. This is part of why I'm interested in the Nix ecosystem because there's so much work being done to make software installations repeatable and easier to manage. Unfortunately, it's squarely aimed at developers and is way, way too complex for most sysadmins to put the time into understanding, especially when they're so overwhelmed like everyone else with so many tasks.

The most appropriate group of folks may be those that already maintain software for the OSS community. The skillset more resembles trades where time and experience matters substantially more than any intrinsic talent or overall intellect to be effective at the job.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if this is perhaps an under-considered area for Generative AI applications given how much drudgery is involved yet precision tends to matter.

Isn't this what part of the point of cryptographically signed artifacts such as via GPG is for anyway? Historically Linux package managers explicitly avoided using TLS / SSL for distributing binaries over networks because they wanted the userbase to build a habit of verifying signatures and checksums provided by the distro maintainers at every step of the process as part of the shared responsibility model.

I am really confused by the communication thread and am interpreting that the toddler is somehow in charge of running the infrastructure as a joke. Yet I can’t see it as either a joke or serious.

I’m a native English speaker but sometimes I swear I’m losing grasp on communication in the Internet age and am sincerely trying to understand this all.