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isignal

359 karma · joined May 24, 2017

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isignal··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
Some individual has an understanding of each of those areas. Why does one individual need to know the entire food chain? The discussion point is about each specific area.

Even for the COBOL based systems someone understands it well enough at the conceptual and business level. And when there's no one to the company migrates and modernizes.

You are conflating the subject matter expert who understands one area well and others not so well with a general newbie who understands nothing well

isignal··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
One explanation could be that they know Western consumers will never use the llms directly, so they can open weight the models and collect licensing fees from hosting providers in US who run it. Moonshot seems to have such terms in their open weights releases.

But it does not explain publishing techniques like the ones referenced here in this article.

isignal··on The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6
You can use a distributed database like yugabytedb or crdb. They are horizontally scalable, support postgres (yugabytedb has much better postgres compatibility). Yugabytedb also supports the Cassandra API.
isignal··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
Two concurrent deductions of inventory do contend but only during the actual DB update. That is just normal DB locking for SQL isolation levels. The blog refers to explicit locking by the app, which is where skip locked comes in.
isignal··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
Yes, at a high level. It doesn't rely on skip locked, which is not cheap at DB level. DB has to still typically run query and keep going until it finds an unlocked item. Deducting and checking inventory counts are simpler ops inside the DB.
isignal··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
It seems there could be a simpler solution.

1. Deduct the reservation from the inventory when the user starts to order, but in the same txn also maintain a separate row for the in progress order flow. 2. If the order flow is aborted or times out have a background process that returns these to the inventory.

That seems simpler than this approach and involves no locking. Though their presented approach is also reasonable, there must be some reason not to choose a simpler flow. It is not that difficult to have a gc service that scales, but may be they didn't want to separate that.

isignal··on Trumpcard (Official US Government Website)
The EB5 visa, by comparison, has much more clear requirements. It is not sure if this intended as a backdoor to EB5 or a replacement.
isignal··on Trumpcard (Official US Government Website)
There already was such a system with more concrete requirements. It is called the EB5 visa and has a path to green card. What does this new method bring to the table?
isignal··on The first year of free-threaded Python
Processes can die independently so the state of a concurrent shared memory data structure when a process dies while modifying this under a lock can be difficult to manage. Postgres which uses shared memory data structures can sometimes need to kill all its backend processes because it cannot fully recover from such a state.

In contrast, no one thinks about what happens if a thread dies independently because the failure mode is joint.

isignal··on Databricks acquires Neon
Thanks for the pointers!
isignal··on Databricks acquires Neon
Aren't the alternatives you mentioned - icerberg and duckdb - both storage solutions while spark is a way to express distributed compute? I'm a bit out of touch with this space, is there a newer way to express distributed compute?
isignal··on Wyze pays $255k of tariffs on $167k of floodlights
https://www.patentlyapple.com/2024/04/apple-now-makes-14-of-...

You are incorrect.

> Apple Inc has assembled $14 billion worth of iPhones in India in fiscal 2024, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

isignal··on Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL
Postgres supports indexing an arbitrary json document. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-json.html

Not sure if the query capabilities and syntax match azure docdb but the basic functionality should be workable.

isignal··on Every System is a Log: Avoiding coordination in distributed applications
The transaction log maintained from time 0 would be equivalent but too expensive to store compared to the tables.
isignal··on The Toyota Prius transformed the auto industry
Resale values are lower in US because they factor in the 7.5k USD tax credit and the state tax credit mostly, there is plenty of demand for used teslas for example.
isignal··on Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT
Consumer side can allow you to run ads and get Google like revenue in the future.
isignal··on Intel's Humbling
Intel also had a later chance when Apple tried to get off the Qualcomm percent per handset model. This was far after the original iPhone. Apple also got sued for allegedly sharing proprietary Qualcomm trade secrets with Intel. And Intel still couldn’t pull it off despite all these tailwinds.
isignal··on Updates on Grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft
Are they cheekily quoting the CEO who made a similar statement last week?
isignal··on Systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer
Just a note that this requires the admin to enable linger if the units need to be started before the user logs in and run after they logout.
isignal··on Amazon's Silent Sacking
Microsoft, Facebook, google, Apple, Amazon etc are all hugely profitable companies. If anyone can afford to ride out wall streets short term thinking, it is them.
isignal··on S3 Express One Zone, not quite what I hoped for
For a key value store you expect server side latencies less than 5 ms for point gets and writes.
isignal··on 'Greedflation' study finds many companies were lying to you about inflation
Even if wages did catch up, retired folks are permanently disadvantaged. There’s a reason why the Fed targets a low inflation rate by default than letting it float freely.
isignal··on One sleepless night can rapidly reverse depression for several days in mice
Body scan meditation is one particular form of meditation that I’ve found effective for sleep.
isignal··on CEO of Web Summit tech conference resigns over Israel comments
He did condemn the attacks, not sure why you think he didn’t take the context into account.

https://twitter.com/paddycosgrave/status/1713659060153618680

isignal··on India suspends visas for Canadians as row escalates
Is it a leak driving this? Trudeau apparently brought it up in the G20 summit so it wasn’t a last minute call. I would expect internal pressure from his political partners.
isignal··on Lie still in bed
Where there’s lack of sleep, willpower is one of the first things to be affected. So the authors advice only applies in a narrow set of cases. Exercise, for example, might be a better way of getting out of the vicious loops caused by lack of sleep.
isignal··on Chandrayaan-3 Lands on the Moon
Wouldn’t say they missed the boat. ISRO did launch some of the OneWeb constellation recently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewSpace_India_Limited

It’s just a slow ramp up. India’s rockets aren’t yet capable pf heavy payloads like SpaceX.

isignal··on FedNow Is Live
Yes, that part is unfortunate. It requires full routing number and account number. Maybe the phone number to account number mapping might be seen as a privacy risk in USA.
isignal··on FedNow Is Live
It is live on star one credit Unions mobile app. On their interface, it still requires you to specify the target’s routing and ac number like an ACH transaction. So not the most usable now.
isignal··on FedNow Is Live
Another difference is the use of phone numbers and simple email like identifiers in UPI. That doesn’t seem to be part of FedNow itself. What makes UPI very usable is that entering the phone number or a simple UPI id brings up some metadata about the person to confirm that the transfer target is accurate. In FedNow such a layer has to be added by Zelle or similar layer above, it appears.
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