pradn

I mean is "wait" even the ideal "think more please" phrase? Would you get better results with other phrases like "wait, a second", or "let's double-check everything"? Or domain-dependent, specific instructions for how to do the checking? Or forcing tool-use?

Omg, another fan of "Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server"!! It's one of my favorite papers ever - so clever.

I think you do point to a real issue. The "falsehoods programmers believe about X" genre can be either a) actual things a common programmer is likely to believe b) things a common programmer might not be be knowledgeable enough to believe.

This article is closer to category b. But the category a ones are most useful, because they dispel myths one is likely to encounter in real, practical settings. Good examples of category a articles are those about names, times, and addresses.

The distinction is between false knowledge and unknown unknowns, to put it somewhat crudely.

That's a great one, thank you!

An important design consideration for Hydro, it seems, is to be able to define a workflow in a higher level language and then be able to cut them into different binaries.

Is that something Akka / RX offer? My quick thought is that they structure code in one binary.

> these articles are annoying

You’re being quite negative about a well-researched article full of info most have never seen. It’s not a crime to write up details that don’t generally affect most people.

A more generous take would be that this article is of primarily historical interest.

Brand - it's the most powerful first-mover advantage in this space.

ChatGPT is still vastly more popular than other, similar chat bots.

That's a good insight. I had always thought the key to good algorithm / data structure design was to use all the information present in the data set. For example, if you know a list is sorted, you can use binary sort. But perhaps choosing how much of it to omit is key, too. It comes up less often, however. I can't think of a simple example.

> "de facto controlled by CCP"

Where is the evidence for this?

You're correct - that's a fair point.

The key is that the probes

a) are fast: they certainly incur the same network cost of a regular request. But more than that, all they do is read two counters, so they're super quick for backends to serve.

b) cheap: they don't do nearly as much work as a "real" request, so the cost of enabling this system is not prohibitive. They simply return two numbers. The probes don't compete with "real" requests for resources.

c) give the load balancer useful information: among all the metrics they could have returned from the backend, the ones they chose led to good prediction outcomes.

One could imagine playing with the metrics used, even using ML to select the best ones, and to adapt them dynamically based on workload and time period.

Optimizing tail latency isn't about saving fleet cost. It's about reducing the chance of one tail latency event ruining a page view, when a page view incurs dozens of backend requests.

The more requests you have, the higher the chance one of them hits a tail. So the overall latency a user sees is largely dependent on a) number of requests b) tail latency of each event.

This method improves the tail latency for ALL supported services, in a generic way. That's multiplicative impact across all services, from a user perspective.

Presumably, the number of requests is harder to reduce if they're all required for the business.

It makes total sense for European farmers to cry foul if cheaper imports get to masquerade as the real thing. This has been a big sticking point for the EU-Mercosur deal that recently concluded.

The price seems entirely reasonable. $200 is about 1-2 hours of a professional's time in the USA.

It's in everyone's interest for the company to be a sustainable business.

Cookie banners are just one more reason why it's so painful to use the web. They are nothing but required pop-ups! Making it painful to visit sites hurts the internet ecosystem. Might as well stay in walled-gardens, where ads are occasional, but less intrusive.

Twitter used to have an app, Periscope. You could start a livestream any time, anywhere. And viewers could fine live streams on a world map.

For a few months, it was possible to feel the incredible simultaneity and richness of human lives. Someone biking, another person cooking. Day in one place, night in another place.

It was ahead of its time. And too expensive for Twitter to keep running for too long. But it was a precursor to today's Snapschat's map view and Instagram live streams.

Honestly, for any serious query, the links serve mostly so you can double-check the AI. That's a useful function however.

I think we're going to see even fewer site visits as a consequence of AI search engines. The internet's ad-based funding model is going to dry up further, but the impact will be disproportionate. It'll be a few years til we see where the cards land.

Well the whole point of this product is to link back to websites. There’s no necessary link between the text and the links, which are chosen after the fact from an index. That’s different from traditional search engines, where links are directly retrieved from the index as part of ranking.

Valve is trying to obsolete Windows, so they can prevent Microsoft from interfering with Steam. Apple could team up with them, and help obsolete Windows for a very large percentage of game-hours.

There will always be a long tail of niche Windows games (retro + indie especially). But you can capture the Fortnite (evergreen) / Dragon Age (new AAA) audience.

Anyone know how well this works with Godot?

That's great to know - business customers require a lot more stability, I suppose!

I suppose business customers are savvy and will do enough research to find the best cost-performance LLM. Whereas consumers are more brand and habit oriented.

I do find myself running into Claude limits with moderate use. It's been so helpful, saving me hours of debugging some errors w/ OSS products. Totally worth $20/mo.

Great progress from Anthropic! They really shouldn't change models from under the hood, however. A name should refer to a specific set of model weights, more or less.

On the other hand, as long as its actually advancing the Pareto frontier of capability, re-using the same name means everyone gets an upgrade with no switching costs.

Though, all said, Claude still seems to be somewhat of an insider secret. "ChatGPT" has something like 20x the Google traffic of "Claude" or "Anthropic".

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...

Advanced civilizations get good at using unusual materials like lead and mercury. Some of these come with unforeseen consequences. Plastic and oil are the two substances most like these for us in present day.

I've stopped carrying my over-ear noise-cancelling headphones for this reason. They take up like a quarter/half of a normal item-sized backpack. I can sleep with plane noise. But I always bring a sleep mask, because I can't sleep with bright lights turning on and off all the time. I did recently get some in-ear headphones w/ noise cancelling, perhaps they're enough.

There's always the fear of losing stuff when you're moving objects around so much, too. One less thing to worry about.

The paper is at [1], and the summary chart is at [2].

The top chart shows which of the three bodies escapes the system given initial starting conditions. The bottom one makes it easier to see patterns by reducing noise. It uses the k-nearest-neighbors algorithm to find the dominant color near each pixel. More than the large pools of stability, what's interesting are the bands of stability - like electromagnetic fields.

I have no idea how one codes this up in a computer, with fixed precision math and all. Numerical methods is a black box for me.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202449862 [2]: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa49862-...

I wonder if you could just madvise the entire address space. My hunch is that it's for performance reasons only - fewer pages to scan, hash, and de-duplicate.

Ah, good to know! Thank you for explaining.

I guess much of this is why its hard to use shared libraries in the first place.

It's possible for the OS to recognize that several pages have the same content (ie: doing a hash) and then de-duplicate them. This can happen across multiple applications. It's easiest for read-only pages, but you can swing it for mutable pages as well. You just have to copy the page on the first write (ie: copy-on-write).

I don't know which OSs do this, but I know hypervisors certainly do this across multiple VMs.

You can still download specific files from torrents of many files, yes. You can pick a subset of files to download.

In theory, you could extend torrent clients to support archiving some subset of the files. You just tell it to keep around 100 GB of files in a 10 TB torrent. Since the client knows the status of each chunk in the swarm, it can make smart decisions about which chunks to download and seed. Clients already let to set preferences to seed the "least-seeded" chunks. So this isn't so far fetched.

The big problem with this is that it lets you work only with a fixed archive. Torrent files can't be mutated after they are created. So you'd be able to get people to archive a fixed version of a shadow library, but not an evolving one.

In practice, this should be fine enough. If we had high assurance that all the books added to the library before 2022 (or something) were copied in 50 machines, that's quite useful.

Being able to layer deltas on top would be amazing - you could evolve the collection as new books are added.