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mwarkentin

700 karma · joined November 29, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mwarkentin; my proof: https://keybase.io/mwarkentin/sigs/W8W1ADGNvjCb10QTKZCkSneAxKTKSObDYwEoFzpC0SM ]
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mwarkentin··on The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
Just gives you an error if you have a link to a “news” site in your post.

> News content can't be shared in Canada In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can't be shared. Learn more (links to https://m.facebook.com/help/2579891418969617/)

https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/media-centre/blocking-of-news...

mwarkentin··on PGKeeper: Figma's Postgres connection pooler Renaissance era
Not open source? :(
mwarkentin··on Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English
Is it? If the spec is as detailed as the code would be? If you make a change to one part of the spec do you now have inconsistencies that the LLM is going to have to resolve in some way? Are we going to have a compiler, or type checker type tools for the spec to catch these errors sooner?
mwarkentin··on In praise of –dry-run
Or something like https://antithesis.com/
mwarkentin··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
Ah yes, all of the precedents and lawful authority that this president cares so much about adhering to.
mwarkentin··on Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
Crypto shredding?
mwarkentin··on Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups
Some have done it (repo includes links to main articles covering the process): https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-watchdog

Note: I work for sentry.

mwarkentin··on Don't push AI down our throats
If you’re on iOS, and don’t use swipe keyboard, disable that functionality. I found it made a big improvement for me.
mwarkentin··on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...
mwarkentin··on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres
There is a whole KIP that is “preview” on Kafka 4.1 to handle this use case natively: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...

Note: I haven’t had a chance to test it out in anger personally yet.

mwarkentin··on Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly
“I can stop any time I want!”
mwarkentin··on PYX: The next step in Python packaging
Uv solves this (with some new standards). ./script.py will now install the python version, create a venv, and install dependencies (very quickly) if they don’t exist already.

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # /// script # requires-python = ">=3.12" # dependencies = [ # "ffmpeg-normalize", # ] # ///

mwarkentin··on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
> Specifically, the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time. (I’ll unpack how this was measured in the next section.)

> Interestingly, Llama 1 65B, a similar-sized model released in February 2023, had memorized only 4.4 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This suggests that despite the potential legal liability, Meta did not do much to prevent memorization as it trained Llama 3. At least for this book, the problem got much worse between Llama 1 and Llama 3.

> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was one of dozens of books tested by the researchers. They found that Llama 3.1 70B was far more likely to reproduce popular books—such as The Hobbit and George Orwell’s 1984—than obscure ones. And for most books, Llama 3.1 70B memorized more than any of the other models.

mwarkentin··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
AI posts (including this one) are all over his employers blog lately, so there’s some stake (fly MCP, https://fly.io/blog/fuckin-robots/, etc).
mwarkentin··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
Yes, some think it’s happening now: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-progress-slowing-down
mwarkentin··on Uv's killer feature is making ad-hoc environments easy
Details here:

- https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2024/12/03/transferring-python...

- https://astral.sh/blog/python-build-standalone

mwarkentin··on Accident Forgiveness
FWIW there are protections for this now: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-lambda-introduces-r...
mwarkentin··on Verified Rust for low-level systems code
Probably talking about something like https://antithesis.com
mwarkentin··on How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
It doesn't look that hard: https://youtu.be/vuvckBQ1bME?si=eCGILMLlZHZnztCR
mwarkentin··on New GitHub Copilot research finds 'downward pressure on code quality'
Yes.

Although it’s also hollowed out the group of people using StackOverflow (and perhaps stack overflow has restricted open access to its data for further scraping), so future iterations of LLMs will have less up to date training data to use.

mwarkentin··on We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime
Back when we first tried out DMS there was a fun bug where booleans were interpreted as strings, so all false records were interpreted as “false” and translated to true on the target DB. It was fixed shortly after but was a good reminder to validate your data during a migration.
mwarkentin··on Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?
I leave my laptop plugged in 95% of the time so in practice this caps it at 80% (helpful).

I suspect quite a few people do that so it probably is net-good overall, but agree it doesn’t work well if you’re moving around a lot.

mwarkentin··on We Just Gave $500k to Open Source Maintainers
Yes, I think that's about right (SRE at Sentry).
mwarkentin··on Software disenchantment
Pretty sure we had people spin up a Slack instance at our company while we were still on Hipchat officially. Slack was a big improvement over what we had before that IMO.
mwarkentin··on Functional Source License
The Functional Source License (FSL) is a source-available non-compete license that converts to Apache 2.0 or MIT after one year.
mwarkentin··on Database Performance at Scale – A free book
Uh, reference for s3 prices going up? I’ve only ever seen them heading down over time.
mwarkentin··on When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
Yep, we just had a cabinet with a bunch of hardware keys for anyone to take.

Remote employees take a bit more support though.

mwarkentin··on Global Google Kubernetes Engine Outage
We're using their "stable" release channel which means most of our clusters are currently on a version of 1.25. We only have a few deployments using PVCs so impact is pretty minimal anyways for us as far as I can tell.
mwarkentin··on A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call
There's rust stuff too: https://github.com/getsentry/relay
mwarkentin··on FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank
Looks like 2.7% of their deposits were > 250k. So yes, it seems relatively unique (there are only 5 banks on this list with <15%).

https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/1634208652595699713?s=20

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