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jeffbee

24,581 karma · joined April 27, 2020

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jeffbee··on Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
I don't know why people fall for this stuff. It doesn't make any kind of sense. You put the panels in a rectangular array in any convenient place. That's what wires are for.
jeffbee··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
Staff SWE Bench: LLM doubts whether we should do any of this, calls the entire project into question, refuses to merge code, but is happy to delete it.
jeffbee··on Many people misunderstand the purpose of code review
Exactly. The procedure is to read the description of the change to understand its motivation, goals, and overall design. Then you read the tests, checking whether they are compatible with and cover all aspects of what was described. Then you can read the code under test but at that point you enjoy the assumption that it at least passed those tests.
jeffbee··on Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
Yes, I am 100% in favor of that.
jeffbee··on Fixing a kubelet memory leak in Kubernetes 1.36
Given that this happens on the main loop, one wonders how this escaped release quality checks. Is there another contributing cause that narrows the impact?
jeffbee··on Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
No, that's ridiculous. The number plate on a car is explicitly designed to be read from a great distance, to achieve public policy goals that offset the large and many social costs of cars. The function of the license plate is to identify the vehicle under real traffic conditions at a distance of at least 100 feet, day or night. Whatever identifying documents you may choose to carry do not have that same function.
jeffbee··on Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
99.99% of Americans have freely chosen to do this exact thing, so any concerns about this must be imaginary.
jeffbee··on Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
That's too generous. It is a propaganda piece by the driver lobby using a hypothetical, fabricated privacy argument to further the central driver lobby goal of total impunity.
jeffbee··on Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
People who pass through red signals need a night or two in jail, not enhanced privacy protections.
jeffbee··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
Even a well-mastered DVD can look better than online streaming.
jeffbee··on From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery
Patients should get a "My other hat is a superconducting quantum interferometer" hat.
jeffbee··on BMW iX5 Blows Away the Competition with 460-KW Charging, 435-Mile Range
1MW charging is a cute stunt but the economics simply do not make sense. The amount of copper and equipment to support that rate is ridiculous.
jeffbee··on BMW iX5 Blows Away the Competition with 460-KW Charging, 435-Mile Range
A scant 6,393 pounds, empty. California needs to outlaw this bullshit immediately.
jeffbee··on 30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech
Yes but, again for clarification, for the specific infraction that is obstruction of justice there has to have been some possibility that the action taken or intended could have or did actually obstruct justice. There government must prove "a nexus between the defendant’s conduct and a particular official proceeding before a judge or court of the United States".
jeffbee··on County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
jeffbee··on County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
jeffbee··on 30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech
The question is whether there exists a nexus between the supposedly obstructing behavior and the judicial proceeding. It doesn't even matter about the intent, if there was no nexus. Can the act of having moved these materials actually impeded the course of Justice?
jeffbee··on 30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech
Yeah, but I think the question is whether his actions did in fact obstruct justice. Both are relevant.
jeffbee··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
You're ignoring the other main economic foundation of VPNs: the service is in fact run by the cops, at a loss.
jeffbee··on NUMA: Cores, memory, and the distance between them
AMD's NPS4 mode isn't exactly user-friendly, I agree. But you can put it into NPS1 mode and relax. Graviton 5, as a counterpoint, doesn't give you the option. Physically there is a 2D mesh between the cores and the memory controller but the observable behavior is that every access gets the average mesh fabric latency. The efficiency you leave on the table isn't very large, whereas in multisocket NUMA you can't ignore the cost.

I think you can over-analyze this stuff and lose your sanity. On these multicore systems there are also hot cores in the center of the mesh and cold ones at the edges and theoretically you could be doing temperature-aware scheduling, gaining a bit more efficiency in doing so. But it's just easier to adopt the black box model of spherical frictionless CPUs.

jeffbee··on NUMA: Cores, memory, and the distance between them
My question: why do mainstream users tolerate NUMA? 99% of you don't need to. Single-socket servers exist and they are not only tolerable but better in most ways. Dealing with NUMA in software consists of trying to logically partition the machine, but you can instead physically partition the machine. It's so much simpler!

Amazon gets this. Except for the 4th generation their Graviton systems are not NUMA.

jeffbee··on NUMA: Cores, memory, and the distance between them
It's unfortunately a hard message to sell, but your program itself should never be backed by a file, for this exact reason. All code should be remapped into anonymous memory that is 1) right where you want it; 2) backed by hugepages; and 3) not shared. You are gaining nothing by trying to share objects with other processes, and you are losing a great deal of performance. The tradeoff made a little sense in the 1980s when they came up with it but in this century it simply doesn't.
jeffbee··on Why did one day of AI cost more than a month of servers?
This operation should not have been retried even once. The overall operation failed due to an unsatisfied precondition that a second attempt could not have rectified (the non-existent target resource). The status of the job should have transitioned to permanent failure, awaiting manual intervention.
jeffbee··on Researchers have developed pixels that can emit and analyse light together
There's lots of stuff in an electronic assembly that's microphonic, not just speakers. I don't think it's possible to look at an assembly and conclude that it doesn't contain any microphones.
jeffbee··on TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
I thought TPUs couldn't reasonably run LINPACK at all because TPUs do not acknowledge that FP64 exists.

I know Google wants to compare their stuff to El Capitan or whatever but the comparison does not seem valid to me.

jeffbee··on Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days
I mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on.
jeffbee··on Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days
le sigh, c-ares. Very predictable outcome. If you ever find yourself entertaining the idea that you will simply write non-blocking network protocol stacks in C with manual lifetime management, slap yourself. It doesn't matter if you think you are a super genius of unimpeachable taste. The job is impossible.
jeffbee··on A C++ implementation of a fast hash map and hash set using hopscotch hashing
Yeah. I typed the comments on my phone without bothering with the docs. I probably got all the other classes wrong, too.
jeffbee··on The US Army Issued Ocarinas to Soldiers in World War II
My favorite WW2 morale detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
jeffbee··on Task Failed Successfully: Saturating NIC and Disk Bandwidth
It seems that you could have reached this conclusion faster by elaborating on your use of the profiler. Don't assume that cycles are spent on instructions. Look at your IPC and drill down into what CPU-bound means for your workload. In your case I think a standard top down analysis would have made the virtual memory management cost jump right out.
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