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dpratt

712 karma · joined August 12, 2009

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dpratt··on JVM Options Explorer
Modern JVMs will detect orchestrator-set cgroup limits and size themselves accordingly. If you, for example, set a cpu limit for a pod to “1”, the JVM will size itself as if it was running on a single core machine.
dpratt··on Intuiting Pratt Parsing
I will never forget the amusing attention I got from the professor when this topic was covered during my undergrad. It's only happened once, sadly, but this is only seconded by the time I was assisting a junior engineer with a related problem and was able to say "Oh, that's just a Pratt Parser. Let me show you."
dpratt··on Nissan eyes shifting Rogue production to U.S. due to tariffs
In the same range of the probability of it happening anywhere else, but (if you’re honest with yourself) a bit lower. Seizure of property and/or nationalization of whole industries is not a novel concept.
dpratt··on Java 24
JEP 484: Classfile API is going to be huge. It will take a while for full adoption, but finally being able abstract the backend of ByteBuddy/ASM/etc will be a gigantic boon. Being able to read/write classifies is one of the biggest hurdles at upgrade time.
dpratt··on Chicory: A JVM native WebAssembly runtime
This looks very cool - I'm going to read into the implementation, there's something about producing JVM bytecode from WASM instructions and then having the JVM JIT compile it into native instructions that amuses me.
dpratt··on Monocle: Optics Library for Scala
Imagine my disappointment when I spent the time to set up a Cassandra instance and it did not immediately materialize a demigod woman who knew the answers to everything but was cursed to have no one believe her.
dpratt··on Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
Any discussion of the game’s requirement to install kernel-level anticheat hooks that inspect the memory of every process running on the system?
dpratt··on Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public
Well, it's nice to know that Sable's entire portfolio is going into the public domain, it's a shame that the likely 50-100 other shell companies owned by this troll still have an arsenal of useless, but incredibly complicated, patents to use to extort money.

A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.

dpratt··on Watching "Grizzly Man" with a bear biologist
How much do you weigh?
dpratt··on ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack
I will start to believe the "7 years of updates" promise for Pixel phones when the first model that was released with this promise is approximately 7.5 years old. At that point, I may begin to reconsider my opinion. I fell prey to Google marketing when they released the very first Pixel model - I spent an exorbitant amount of money on it, only to have it utterly abandoned and deprecated, with support and updates dropped just over a year later.

As in all things relating to anything stated by Google with respect to the privacy, availability or expected lifetime of a consumer product, the maxim is not even "trust but verify", it should be "distrust, watch carefully, and assume the worst".

dpratt··on Power over fiber
"Danger: Not Only Will This Kill You, It Will Hurt The Whole Time You're Dying"
dpratt··on Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34
| its case insensitive by default

This is obviously up for debate, but subjectively I find this to be an absolutely terrible design decision.

dpratt··on Why don't we get our drinking water by taking salt out seawater? (2008)
Yet another example of how the American education system is falling behind the rest of the world. Students in the US only learn one kind of math, but apparently the rest of the English speaking world is taught multiple kinds of maths.
dpratt··on A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married
I’m not entirely sure - it would be interesting to break down the cohort of the 78% of never-marrieds who live alone. Presumedly, they are single or not in a serious relationship, which might indicate that there’s a deeper societal and cultural problem than just marriage.
dpratt··on Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones
There is no way this would ever even pass initial consideration at the Federal level, in that there is no incentive for the Federal government to limit the weaponry available to it's law enforcement apparatus. They would see such a law as containing no upside for the government itself, and therefore it will be, at best, laughed out of committee and more likely any Congressman or Senator who proposes it will mysteriously find that a lot of his or her donors are suddenly turning on him.
dpratt··on America Has Too Much Pork
It’s delicious and nutritious in moderation?
dpratt··on The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives
At the very least, and the cost for this perhaps would be prohibitive, but some mechanism to duplicate the raw flux off the tape onto another tape in an identical format, a backup of the backup. This would allow for attempts to read the data that may be potentially destructive to the media (for example, breaking the tape accidentally) and not lose the original signal.
dpratt··on NYC skyscrapers sit vacant
Nobody predicted this except pretty much everybody who thought about what the long-term effects of COVID would be on commercial real estate around mid-2020 or so.
dpratt··on Journalist writes about discovering she’d been surveilled by TikTok
"They were both temporarily excluded from the public eye, but they were not arrested."

Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

dpratt··on Journalist writes about discovering she’d been surveilled by TikTok
I have very little to fear, on a personal level, from the CCP. They may or may not be collecting data on me, and I find that distasteful and somewhat scary, but they are not a direct threat to my personal liberty, safety or civil rights.

The NSA, CIA and the US intelligence-industrial complex, however, is a direct and credible threat to me. Perhaps not today, and hopefully not tomorrow, but as history has shown us, governments change, sometimes wildly so, in a short period of time while still holding the trappings and lip-service of their predecessors. If you dismiss the concerns about warrantless data collection, tracking, active suppression of free discourse and political targeting of people who ideologically threaten those in power (no matter the political background), well, you just haven't been paying attention.

dpratt··on Netflix loses 1M users in Spain over password policing
This extension seems rather interesting, but I suspect you may have harmed your brand more than you helped it by making the above post.
dpratt··on FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations
“Dear citizens, please be wary of attacks on your devices designed to compromise your privacy and personal information. It would be unfortunate if we had competition in the game.”
dpratt··on Meta is cutting prices for its VR headsets
The fair price for one of these devices is somewhere between ‘free’ and $100.

The mind boggles at the concept of paying Meta $1000 for the privilege of capturing (and controlling) everything your eyes see and everything your ears hear.

dpratt··on EU will require Apple to open up iMessage (2022)
> I don’t think we need to identify Google’s motives as malicious

I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance. With all other things being equal, and without evidence to the contrary, it makes sense to operate under the assumption that Google will enthusiastically and universally do everything they can to violate your privacy in any manner available to them, no matter how subtle.

dpratt··on Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse
> One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that the end result can end up still being right.

“ On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” - Charles Babbage

dpratt··on Apple Books digital narration
“Mitchell” is clearly Ray Porter, an absolutely phenomenal voice actor/narrator. He’s done a range of audiobooks across many genres, and anything he does is a pleasure to listen to.

I sure hope that he negotiated a gigantic amount for his data/training set provided to Apple, as this tech sounds like it’s getting advanced enough to obviate a giant chunk of the narration business overnight.

dpratt··on If aliens contact humanity, who decides what we do next?
> “The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet,” he said.”

This is a long winded way of saying “we don’t like competition, and allowing somebody that’s not us to do this could threaten our perceived legitimacy, therefore it must be suppressed at all costs.”

dpratt··on Apple Sued Alleging Racial Bias Against Minorities on Watch's Blood Oximeter
Are you really backing the argument that Apple’s product team is composed of mustache-twirling racists?
dpratt··on Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
You feeling uncomfortable, or even offended, isn't even remotely what most people consider "harm", and frankly it's a little bit offensive that the equivalence has been made.
dpratt··on Everything SBF is doing is in singular pursuit of not going to jail
She provided no benefit or advantage to those in power, the success or failure of Theranos and her personal status had no bearing or effect on the ruling class, therefore she is subject to the same laws and punishments as the rest of us.

SBF, on the other hand, donated a significant amount of the stolen money to politicians of all stripes, and there's (as yet unproven) hints that the overall FTX/Alameda hierarchy of shell corporations may have been involved in other financial shenanigans that would benefit those in power.

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