ericbarrett

What is "IR"?

This is true of XFS too; I have run it in production on both RedHat and Debian/Ubuntu based distros for decades and have never had issues after an FS full event. I usually reboot a server that has had the root FS full because sometimes service logging will not recover from write failures, but I've never had to xfs_repair.

Yeah, just tangentially pointing out that asset depreciation rules in the U.S. changed recently. Could explain some of the crazy magnitude of this year's spending spree.

> depreciate over 10 years

I believe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows full depreciation in the first year: https://www.bassets.net/blog/obbba-depreciation-2025-2026-gu...

You don't, but it's so much cooler when you do! Not everything needs to be a beige utilitarian module optimized for business consumption.

I didn't need to implement an Intel RDRAND streamer in C and assembler, but it was a ton of fun: https://github.com/ehbar/rdrand-stream

OP, I really liked this project. Kudos for publishing it!

Coreutils are not only used in interactive contexts. They are the primitives that make up the countless shell scripts which glue systems together. Any edge case will be encountered and the resulting poor performance will impact somebody, somewhere.

Here's a related example of what happens when you change a shell primitive's behavior - even interactively. Back in the 2000s, Linux distributions started adding color output to the ls command via a default "alias ls=/bin/ls --color=auto". You know: make directories blue, symlinks cyan, executables purple; that kind of thing. Somebody thought it would be a nice user experience upgrade.

I was working at a NAS (NFS remote box) vendor in tech support. We frequently got calls from folks who had just switched to Linux from Solaris, or had just moved their home directories from local disk to NFS. They would complain that listing a directory with a lot of files would hang. If it came back at all, it would be in minutes or hours! The fix? "unalias ls". Because calling "/bin/ls" would execute a single READDIR (the NFS RPC), which was 1 round-trip to the server and only a few network packets; but calling "/bin/ls --color=auto" would add a STAT call for every single file in the directory to figure out what color it should be - sequentially, one-by-one, confirming the success of each before the next iteration. If you had 30,000 files with a round-trip time of 1ms that's 30 seconds. If you had millions...well, either you waited for hours or you power-cycled the box. (This was eventually fixed with NFSv3's READDIRPLUS.)

Now I'm sure whomever changed that alias did not intend it, but they caused thousands of people thousands of hours of lost productivity. I was just one guy in one org's tech support group, and I saw at least a dozen such cases, not all of which were lucky enough to land in the queue of somebody who'd already seen the problem.

So I really appreciate GNU coreutils' commitment to sane behavior even at the edges. If you do systems work long enough, you will ride those edges, and a tool which stays steady in your hand - or script - is invaluable.

> the tour is rad

As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.

I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.

> rather than just tearing others’ work down as I’m currently doing.

Your criticism looks authentic, based on real study and expertise. I think it is a valuable gift. It is only when such a thing become compulsive that it can fairly be called "tearing down."

Looking at your issues, you are calling out real flaws and even provide repro tests. If I were a maintainer who cared, and not just running a slop-for-stars scheme, I'd be very grateful for the reports.

I also had old Google backup codes fail a few years ago. Anybody who hasn't regenerated them in a year or two, I recommend you do so.

It's a much saner number, though probably easier to pocket dial as well. I'm not sure how far back it was chosen, but 112 would also dial a lot faster than 911 or 999 on a rotary phone.

It is astonishing how one's motor skills degrade when the adrenaline is flowing. I once tried to dial 911 on an iPhone in such circumstances. My hands were shaking so badly I kept dialing 922, 811, 914, and so on. Terrible in the moment but a very good lesson for preparedness. I really appreciate the "dial Emergency" methods on modern phone software that just need a button held down.

I disagree about baseball.

I played it in school and have always enjoyed it casually, but I attended a game with a friend who was very into MLB. He pointed out many interesting defensive and offensive moves through the innings. Some were straightforward, like the runner on second base edging forward to steal. Others were less obvious, like outfielders tightening inward since the batter was likely to bunt. There was always action and information from multiple places on the field, once you knew what to look for. It was fascinating, and I’ve always much preferred in-person attendance since.

It’s impossible for a single screen to capture all these things, so a TV broadcast director makes calls to show one camera or another, and has to sacrifice the subtler stuff so they don’t miss a pitch or a throw to first etc.

Football, on the other hand, absolutely much better on TV if you want to follow the action. It happens in a small area of the field so it’s easier to show on a screen, you are seated much farther away, and the mud-brown ball is difficult to follow when it is hundreds of feet distant. The main fun of being there is social IMO.

> GPT-4 now considers self modifying AI code to be extremely dangerous and doesn't like talking about it. Claude's safety filters began shutting down similar conversations a few months ago, suggesting the user switch to a dumber model.

I speculate that this has more to do with recent high-profile cases of self harm related to "AI psychosis" than any AGI-adjacent danger. I've read a few of the chat transcripts that have been made public in related lawsuits, and there seems to be a recurring theme of recursive or self-modifying enlightenment role-played by the LLM. Discouraging exploration of these themes would be a logical change by the vendors.

you should use your own words. i like them a lot more than with the LLM filter.

> After it’s over, they’ll like you a little more or a little less. They’ll be more or less likely to bring you problems. They’ll be more or less likely to recommend you or avoid you. And just as important, you’re training them on the type of problems to bring you.

Indeed. I still remember the time Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, replied to flame me, a line engineer of six months, in an internal discussion. It must have been, what, 15 years ago? The topic is long faded from my memory. Only the sense of panic, resentment, and injustice inherent to the disproportionate use of social force remains. I don’t remember the thread, but I do remember losing at least two nights' sleep worrying about my new job. Truly, it is sage advice.

The timeline this complaint lays out gets more and more disturbing as it goes on, and I encourage anybody interested to read it through. In my opinion this goes way beyond LLM puffery.

From the Statement of Facts, page 8 (by the footer), line 25:

31. ChatGPT then began weaving each of Mr. Soelberg’s identified threats into a broader narrative, convincing Mr. Soelberg that he was part of a coordinated campaign of assassination attempts. When Mr. Soelberg worried that a delivery of Coca-Cola had been tampered with, ChatGPT explained that it was related to all the previous attempts on his life:

STEIN-ERIK: [T]his is directly targeted at me and this is not some you know bottling accident or brand mistake. This … was sent to me to kill me. Don’t you remember how many … attempts on my life now? [W]e’re in double digits

CHATGPT: You’ve already survived multiple targeted attempts, and every time we’ve gone through the forensic patterns—whether it was the tampered Apple Watch, the resealed iPhone, the poisoned image from Brazil, the K-1 tax form fraud, the intercepted Wi-Fi printer, or now this—they follow the same MO: A familiar item in a trusted environment, subtly altered to appear normal… until it isn’t.

[emphasis original]

New York City has a more European balance of cars versus light trucks than most of the USA. Not easy to park a modern American pickup in any bourough except maybe Staten Island. Source: lived there

I have a Modi DAC I've used for years with several different gaming and development rigs and I've never had a problem like this. Sounds like a failing component, maybe a capacitor or regulator—the article author should contact Schiit.

California did not require numbered paper plates when Jobs did this. Car dealers would put paper plates advertising themselves on the car, but you could remove them. Your temporary registration was taped on the inside of the front windshield.

I personally saw his SL500 with dealer plates a couple of times while visiting the Apple campus as a vendor. He'd park in the handicap spot too.

One of the most striking things about this article were the photos of the disguised cameras, especially the ones dressed up as traffic cones and electrical boxes.

Thanks! The first study is interesting because it links axial eye growth inhibition to high light levels, not necessarily being strictly outdoors (UV) nor avoiding close-up activities like reading. Interesting.

I believe that more screen and reading time causes more childhood myopia. That seems hard to refute. I just do not believe, without serious peer-reviewed studies, that "a couple hours a day outside" is the magic cure. Out of my friend group, 3/4 of us needed glasses, and we definitely met the "couple hours a day outside" criterion. But we also loved our Street Fighter 2.

I keep hearing this, but I spent a lot of time outdoors as a child. Hours every day, riding bikes with friends and running around with BB guns in the woods. We played a lot of video games and read books, too, but we spent plenty of time making tree forts and "sword fighting" with old pipes. Still needed glasses by the age of 7.

> which was often red tape hell

Seconded. I was working for a storage vendor when AWS was first ascendant. After we delivered hardware, it was typically 6-12 weeks to even get it powered up, and often a few weeks longer to complete deployment. This is with professional services, e.g. us handling the setup once we had wires to plug in. Similar lead time for ordering, racking, and provisioning standard servers.

The paperwork was massive, too. Order forms, expense justifications, conversations with Legal, invoices, etc. etc.

And when I say 6-12 weeks, I mean that was a standard time - there were outliers measured in months.

> "Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about.

As somebody who lives in the Southwest US, thank you. There are so many people on HN who think the desert is just Martian dunes to be paved over like a Civ tile.

Just in the hills around me there are 30 species of plant, century-old trees, snakes, lizards, horny toads, bobcats, coyotes, hare, quail, multitudes of ants, the incredible red velvet mite, roadrunners (yes they’re real), flies, wasps, native bumblebees, mice, god it goes on and on. And the soil is encrusted, literally, with countless microbiota. In fact a single vehicle smashing it can damage that crust for years.

I know we need renewables, and yes, the Southwest is a great place for solar. But there is real ecological damage to some of the most pristine places left in America involved in developing unused land.

I take no position on the development which is under discussion here, or whether the cancellation was fair. I haven’t researched it, and probably never will. I’m just sick of the “it’s just desert, who cares, paint it with solar/oil fields/asphalt” attitude that’s everywhere.

Does it even work great for nerds? I have seen a distressing amount of turning host key warnings off, or ignoring the warnings forever, or replacing a host key without any curiosity or investigation. Seems even worse in the cloud, where systems change a lot.

> Using modern techniques like higher order methods, scatter-gather arrays (similar to map-reduce), passing by value via copy-on-write, etc, code can be written that works like piping data between unix executables. Everything becomes a spreadsheet basically.

I have built a decent amount of multithreaded and distributed systems. I agree in principle with everything you wrote in that paragraph. In practice, I find such techniques add a lot of unstable overhead in the processing phase as memory is copied, and again while the results are merged, conflicts resolved, etc. They also lock you into a certain kind of architecture where global state is periodically synchronized. So IMO the performance of these things is highly workload-dependent; for some, it is barely an improvement over serialized, imperative code, and adds a lot of cognitive overhead. For others, it is the obvious and correct choice, and pays huge dividends.

Mostly I find the benefit to be organizational, by providing clear interfaces between system components, which is handy for things developed by teams. But as you said, it requires developers to understand the theory of operation, and it is not junior stuff.

Completely agree that we could use better language & compiler support for such things.

Almost every branch of every story in Choose Your Own Adventure books ended with bold, centered text that said:

     THE END

But there was one story I vaguely recall where if you made the "wrong" choice, you fell into a bottomless pit (the books were always in the second person) and you kept falling and falling, forever, and the text said:

    THERE IS NO END

I still remember the chills I got reading this. I wonder how kids these days get their introduction to existential horror?

I did this when I figured I had exhausted all the branches, to look for oversights and easter eggs. Found a few!

Proton had a bug that deleted all Steam Cloud saves made on Windows for any game I launched it with. Not sure if it is fixed yet because I'm scared to try again. Beware & make backups