"Emacs, rewritten in Rust — unleashed on the GPU, fixing what 40 years of C never could."
809 karma · joined March 23, 2010
Worktrees worked great for me when my agents' work was mostly contained to a single repo (they got me to finally hitting rate limits, not that that was a goal). As my homelab scales, agents increasingly work across multiple repos, and that's where (my approach to) worktrees broke down; agents were spawned in a repo worktree and so avoided stepping on the toes of other agents in the same repo without any special instruction, but as soon as they needed to touch another repo, they would default to working in that repo directly, without a worktree, and thus collide with other agents, and muddy a merge process that expected the main repo clone to be clean (which turns out to have been an unnecessary design quirk, but resolving it would still not stop agents from stepping on each other's toes in secondary repos).
After a detour through ZFS dataset clones and some mounting magic that made /srv/src/ appear to be a distinct hierarchy for each agent process, I am simplifying even further and giving each agent a bare directory (sth like /srv/dev/<slug>/) where they can check out any repos they want. The git remote (/srv/git/) becomes the only integration point.
Maybe I should just bite the bullet and move into containers, but performant as they are the ergonomics still bum me out.
Edit: I may actually hold on to ZFS datasets with mounting magic. It does add a bit of complexity to dev tools, but it also reduces path-based trust bloat in harness configs, provides some interesting zfs features (zfs diff, etc)... And it's done.
Okay, so I'm here to brag a little. I love that I also get 30 t/s on $1500 of decade-old hardware: dell r720 w 2x tesla v100s!
And be careful with that dismissal! Not that I'm helping my case, here, but Pollack doesn't think it's baloney (see related chapter in his book "The Fourth Phase of Water").
While admittedly contested and only reproduced by a few labs outside Gerald Pollack's at University of Washington, there is a solid case that it could play a role in transporting water and sap to the tops of trees. At least, it's involved in the motion induced in hydrophilic tubes when there is sufficient ambient radiant energy (uv/infrared).
Relevant papers:
"Exclusion-zone water inside and outside of plant xylem vessels." 2024 Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62983-3
"Surface-induced flow: a natural microscopic engine using infrared energy as fuel." 202 Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba0941
"Long-range forces extending from polymer-gel surfaces." 2003 Phys. Rev. E. https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.68.031408
Pollack's site: https://www.pollacklab.org/
Some critiques of Pollack's theory:
Schurr, J.M. (2013). Phenomena associated with gel–water interfaces: analyses and alternatives to the long-range ordered water hypothesis. J. Phys. Chem. B, 117(25), 7653–7674. https://doi.org/10.1021/jp302589y Elton, D.C., Spencer, P.D., Riches, J.D. & Williams, E.D. (2020). Exclusion zone phenomena in water — a critical review of experimental findings and theories. Int. J. Mol. Sci., 21(14), 5041. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21145041 (open access; the most thorough critical review) Elton, D.C. & Spencer, P.D. (2021). Pathological water science — four examples and what they have in common. In Water in Biomechanical and Related Systems (Biologically-Inspired Systems, vol. 17), pp. 155–170. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67227-0_8 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07287)
Yes, it's a relatively recent concept (decades) pursued mostly by Gerald Pollack at University of Washington and not widely replicated, though there is some replication that has prompted critical review (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7404113/). It's also downstream of work by Albert Szent-Györgyi (Nobel prize for vitamin C) and Gilbert Ling. And, of course, there are a bunch of folks Pollack distances himself from commercializing the concept.
From the horse's mouth: https://www.pollacklab.org/research
If I had a coloring book for every person who cited wikipedia as a reliable source on cutting-edge science... I'd have Christmas presents for a bunch of people I don't know!
Rouleaux formations are clumps of red blood cells, and they're bad because 90% of our circulatory system is < 1 cell wide, so clumps cannot pass. Hematological literature of past 50 years is a bit of a mess regarding mechanisms, seemingly has not considered structured water because it's recent and looks a little fringe. Structured water is known to be disrupted by WiFi, so if a clearer connection can be made between structured water and rouleaux, it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF; would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible.
I did an n=5 study on sauna and rouleaux (positive result; draft report: https://thespacebetween.xyz/p/sangre-y-sauna/), and some n=1 observations of myself with grounding and wifi. Blog post: https://thespacebetweenx.substack.com/p/blood-and-the-specte...
Nobody involved in the study or the article has ever done even a small dose of psilocybin and interacted with crystals.
If the claim these folks make is "time spent struggling through a default config on an unfamiliar machine" > "time saved by crafting an workshop to fit your mind", then we are not the same.
(Probably, the dividing line here is time spent coding vs time spent managing infra.)
If the goal was simply to learn and stay sharp, then perhaps an incomplete project is a success——you did some coding, and learned something about what motivates you. If the goal was more specific, then perhaps you've (subconsciously) re-evaluated the requirements for success, and it no longer feels achievable or worth the effort.
I could be wrong, of course, but this sounds less like a problem of technical ability than one of deepening your understanding of your own motivation. If that sounds right, maybe check out https://x.com/scottdomes — I like his writing about how to identify what you want and why.
or starting a bidding war
Remote: yes
Willing to relocate: unlikely: maybe to major metro for dream job
Technologies: Python, JS, Linux, Docker, iOS, Elm, SQL, AWS
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronboehmer/
Email: cameron.boehmer@gmail.com
Bachelor's in Computer Engineering, 20+ years of experience (Google, YouTube, Facebook) in consumer web doing front-end, full-stack, and systems work; would love to do ML-infra or related!
> But the work is tedious enough that I am too tried in the evening to do something interesting.
Same; sounds normal.
> Have you been able to detach yourself from the constant flow of information and focus on your own stuff?
I put the xbox in the closet for while and made it just a little harder to indulge the impulse. Don't tell yourself you have to swear off podcasts or HN or whatever forever—just ask yourself if you'd be willing to try a brief but significant break, and make sure you have some ideas for what you'll replace it with.
I also rarely spend free time programming. Once in a while I'll get an idea and the motivation to do so, but I find that if I spend a significant chunk of my productive/creative energy during the day on work, I'm much happier if I then spend the rest of the day socializing, exercising, doing stuff around the house—basically anything not in front of the computer.
Habit change can be daunting, but the hardest part is often recognizing something that you want to change, and you're already there! Good luck with the rest :)
1) Not.
I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.
If you don't know SF well, Polk street is one of two frat boy rows.
The core of a tree is much less alive than the bark—so much less, in fact, that if you walk in a circle around a tree scraping off a thin strip of bark and make sure to stop where you started, the tree will die.
Having googled this just to be sure, I also learned that trees can only lose up to about a quarter of a circumference of bark (in the fashion describe above) before facing mortal peril.