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matthewaveryusa

2,534 karma · joined May 29, 2014

If you're reading this take a moment to figure out what life choices made you sink so low. Ha, just joking -- be easy on yourself and others.

feel free to contact me on any @matthewaveryusa.com

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matthewaveryusa··on Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
Ah thanks for the insight. I was wondering why not ‘block || majority’ to get around scenario 5. Quorum has nothing to do with majority and everything to do with trust structure. My mind is blown.
matthewaveryusa··on Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
I've been using deepseek and it's good enough for my personal use. It takes way more time/tokens/course-correcting to get things done, but I spend in a month what I spend in a day with opus 4.6
matthewaveryusa··on More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams
One common mistake when pointing out common mistakes: Show the good example!
matthewaveryusa··on How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents
All our kids were trained between 2-3 y.o, with overnight 3-4 (boys take longer (¬_¬)) honestly diapers isn't even a cost factor. When daycare is 2500-3000/month those first 3 years, diapers are picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.
matthewaveryusa··on Allocating on the Stack
It's kind of like the small string optimization you see in C++[1] where all the string metadata to account for heap pointer, size and capacity is union'ed with char*. Getting the stack allocation doesn't costs extra memory, but does cost a bit check. Not sure if slices in go use the same method. 32 bytes is a lot so maybe they fattened slice representations a bit to get a bit more bang for your buck?

[1] https://github.com/elliotgoodrich/SSO-23

matthewaveryusa··on Silicon Valley engineers were indicted for allegedly sending secrets to Iran
No you can’t. It’s formally called “the analog hole” when security folks yap about it. Usually it’s used to end DLP discussions after too many what-ifs
matthewaveryusa··on Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport
What’s also bonkers is our political whimpiness that allowed this to happen, right? If there is a drone response it’s pretty damning evidence that we are way too dovish in our policy against drug smuggling up until now
matthewaveryusa··on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else
That’s the bet! last time we had that growth was for a few years during the dotcom, followed by a lost decade of growth in tech stocks
matthewaveryusa··on Why I Joined OpenAI
I think it’s not about compensation or passion, but something a bit more abstract.

I’ll give it a shot; I think you’re successful in what you do and very altruistic and open, not only in your discoveries but also your opinions. You also have a higher sense of duty. as oscar wilde once said, we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. compensation is boring gutter talk. It’s hard for people to reconcile your benevolence with your success, and just as the trope of joining a company to change the world is a veil for making money, so is the trope of criticizing the agent of change entering an industry because the industry is bad.

Personally I can’t wait to read about the inefficiencies you find and have a little glimpse into openai tech from your opinionated point of view.

matthewaveryusa··on The Boomcession: Why Americans Hate What Looks Like an Economic Boom
I have a rolodex of quirky contrarian facts I like to whip out at dinner parties and this one is definitely a new one I'm adding to the stack. I'm still shocked at the mental gymnastics needed to make it sound rational, but from an economist's perspective it's the "rational actor" argument. "Surely they must love the service, why else would someone settle for less?"
matthewaveryusa··on The Boomcession: Why Americans Hate What Looks Like an Economic Boom
I really enjoyed reading this. it jives very well with my sentiment. When you go to a grocery store and see the stacks of sodas and chips while our country has an obesity epidemic, you need to wonder if the sale of these products should count towards or against our economic wellbeing. If products can have positive value, surely products can have negative value as well.

In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.

gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.

And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.

Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.

Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious

matthewaveryusa··on Margin Call
Can you elaborate? I own an iphone and pay for zero apple services. I imagine you’re thinking icloud? I have my phone backed up on the 5 gigs they give for free. photos is where data gets heavy. I previously ran things on google photos and paid, but recently moved to immich — either way it’s zero bucks for apple.

wrt hostility: they’re the most privacy focused phone provider out there (which is why they can’t produce an llm from user data)

matthewaveryusa··on Minnesota activist releases arrest video after manipulated White House version
realpolitik time folks:

First do a left-right on the link that Aurornis posted [1]. Notice the extra fat in the chin, the elongated ear, the enlarged mouth and nose, the frizzlier hair, the lower shirt cut.

You hate it. You think, intellectually, that this shouldn't work and surely no one would have the gall to so brazenly do this without the fear of being caught and shamed. And then you think, well once the truth is revealed that there will be some introspection and self-reflection on being tricked, and that maybe being tricked here means being tricked elsewhere.

Well someone, in an emotionless room, min-maxed the outcomes and computed that the expected value from such an action was positive.

And here we are.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-levy-armstrong-crying-...

matthewaveryusa··on Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU
Only for the past 70 years. Before that europeans were the bomb-lobbing record holders.
matthewaveryusa··on The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
I always read relevant sections of NEC, UPC, and firecode whenever I DIY. I find the code books to be very clear and thorough and really don’t understand the culture of fear mongering tradepeople have around code. Almost like the code is some sort of mystic hydra only a tradesperson can comprehend. it’s really not complicated: read it and apply it like a recipe.
matthewaveryusa··on Canada's deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US
FAFO* goes both ways. US is in an interesting spot. We have a 1 one-time reset button: Since we’re the reserve currency we can inflate out debt away at the cost of inflation. If and when we do that the world will pivot away, maybe, to another currency. At that point the great American tailwind will be over and we’ll have to be competitive at the global stage — interesting to see what that means, if anything.

As an analogy, imagine you’ve accumulated enough debt and bought yourself a house, a car, and invested in enough productive unseizable assets (very important), like a farm and whatnot, to sustain yourself. what’s the point in servicing your debt? If the only consequence is no one will lend you again, you already have everything so whatever, right?

I can poke a million flaws in this logic, but I _think_ that’s the megasupersmart move the current administration is gunning for. Hell do I know how it will pan out, but I have a hunch. FAFO I guess.

*fuck around, find out (◔_◔)

matthewaveryusa··on The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
Just to make it even more real: During covid I added a sub-panel and the wire (more like the sausage given the girth) between the sub-panel and main panel was aluminum because of cost. You just need to be a tad careful at the connection points with copper -- nothing a caring literate person can't handle
matthewaveryusa··on ChatGPT Health
That’s kind of how allergies are discovered though. Doctors will tell you to go on a restrictive food diet and tell you to binary search for it if it doesn’t cause anaphylaxis. Based on my experience with allergies if it’s not anaphylaxis then allergies aren’t considered super important to resolve by doctors. Finally the immune system is complicated and your daughter may have an unusual reaction which may not be IGe mediated. In other words it could be a reaction to a foreign protein and not an anti-body histamine spike in which case: yes it’s extremely unpleasant and feels like an allergy, but because it doesn’t lead to anaphylaxis it’s not a medical concern.
matthewaveryusa··on AI means we don't have to deal with nerds dreaming up over-engineered solutions
Cool content, but why are you posting it on tons of threads?
matthewaveryusa··on Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video]
Hyundai is already up 13%. I had no clue that CES annoucements could drive stock price this much!
matthewaveryusa··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
I appreciate your world view and politico-science philosophical approach, but Venezuela has natural resources, is close to the USA, and decided to mingle with American competitors.

Venezuela was supported via economic trade with nations not aligned with US objectives in exchange for security guarantees that would supposedly prevent US intervention.

More concretely: Russia was supposedly supporting them through economic activity and arms trades. Russia is overextended in Ukraine which is providing an opening and a cautionary signal to any other state that has Russian support that, in fact, any Russian security guarantees aren’t backed by more than words. See Iran and Syria as well.

This is very transactional and a spheres of influence move. It’s also pressuring Russia to find an Ukraine deal fast. The longer they’re in Ukraine the more their global sphere of influence is being reduced due to their inability to fight multiple military fronts at once.

Unclear how China fits in the picture.

matthewaveryusa··on Heart and Kidney Diseases and Type 2 Diabetes May Be One Ailment
>These three disorders could really be “CKM syndrome,” which can be treated with drugs like Ozempic

The article is trying so hard not to say that obesity is the cause. I call it the obesity pipeline: You start off young and obese and you don't have diabetes and it's all fine. Stay obese long enough and you get diabetes -> metformin. Stay in a diabetic state long enough and you get heart disease -> statins. These are obesity comorbidities.

matthewaveryusa··on Go's escape analysis and why my function return worked
Nope, this analysis is wrong. Decompile your code and look at what's going on: https://godbolt.org/z/f1nx9ffYK

The thing being returned is a slice (a fat pointer) that has pointer, length, capacity. In the code linked you'll see the fat pointer being returned from the function as values. in C you'd get just AX (the pointer, without length and cap)

    command-line-arguments_readLogsFromPartition_pc122:
            MOVQ    BX, AX     // slice.ptr   -> AX (first result register)
            MOVQ    SI, BX     // slice.len   -> BX (second)
            MOVQ    DX, CX     // slice.cap   -> CX (third)
The gargabe collection is happening in the FUNCDATA/PCDATA annotations, but I don't really know how that works.
matthewaveryusa··on South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity
That's a fine argument, but if we're trying, let's start by spending on it first. We're america, that's what we do when we have a problem.
matthewaveryusa··on South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity
Seems to be working so well all those demographic numbers are going up and to the right! That correlation between wealth and number of children is staggering it's almost causal if only I could prove it. Let's double down on it!
matthewaveryusa··on South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity
Let's take the beautiful state of Massachusetts where I live. For foreigners: it's a liberal mecca, a pocket of Americans with a yearning for european lifestyle. Let's look at the government from a systems perspective and say that we prioritize individuals based on dollars spent on them, shall we?

- How much does the state spend for a pre-k child? <10k/year/child

- An incarcerated inmate? >100k/year/inmate

- Drug-use rehab? >50k/year/user-seeking-rehab

- How much does that leave parents to pay? >30k/year/child (again average, any place where there's a job it's closer to 50k pre-tax)

We don't prioritize children and our societies are actively hostile towards them in terms of dollars spent. As simple as that.

matthewaveryusa··on Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public
This is my thought too. They de-risked any other AI startup from choosing AWS as their platform. If the hype continues AWS will get their 30% margin on something growing like rocket emoji, if they don't at least they didn't miss the boat.
matthewaveryusa··on School cell phone bans and student achievement
Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee

Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...

matthewaveryusa··on 100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
The only caveat being this assumes all your data can fit on a single machine, and all your processing can fit on one machine. You can get a a u-24tb1.112xlarge with 448 vcores, 24TB RAM for 255/hour and attach 64TB of EBS -- that's a lot of runway.
matthewaveryusa··on Blender Lab
So what's the issue here (I know what the issue is in terms of the subresource not loading, a bit like an oauth redirect not executing properly if a user needs to log back in.)

Is it because of a misconfiguration on blender's end that should allow css to passthrough without verification, the query param messing a cloudflare passthrough default, or something else?

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