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scrubs

900 karma · joined April 2, 2021

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scrubs··on I'm Rewriting IBM SPSS Statistics in 100% Safe Rust, Alone
The title "I'm...100% Safe Rust, Alone" is obnoxious.

Op, is there any technical merit to this, or is this a step in some process to earn brownie points in some pathetic "I'm a morally superior hero club?"

What'd you expect the rest of us to feel? Chastened?

scrubs··on 'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack
When fraud, theft occur and/or claims on insurance when fraud theft occurs a regulator must have a legal system to find facts, prove charges, make a judgement that can be enforced etc.. And that means, for one thing, anonymous users are an illusion. Identity to get accountability is required.
scrubs··on 'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack
Absolutely agree. It's all awesome until it happens to oneself, then it gets real.
scrubs··on 'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack
It's done its job? How tone deaf can you be?

Because of human nature fraud, theft, errors, disputes over assets etc. that go along with money whatever its form need to be properly dispositioned too. A block chain has no answer for that. And without dispute resolution methods the system will die or merely attract the underside or 1-off users of society.

Second, an automatic no to power is simplistic so as to distort solutions. Power is fine provided it's not corrupt and accountable. Getting that and keeping it is a hard problem, but there's no end-run either.

Finally, how many examples of frauds, thefts N must occur before crypto is associated with fraud, theft? That N was long ago surpassed.

scrubs··on SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that's a problem for America's space agency
Excuse me? The long history of success for nasa with and without the esa is staggering to the good.

I got more stories that jd salinger I (nasa) hold the title, and you're (spacex) just the challenger (paraphrase of beastie boy song shadrach et al)

More seriously, nasa has purposely focused on satellites and robots for scientific research on purpose for a multitude of reasons including cost.

scrubs··on Four Months of Zig
I don't get the controversy over explicit allocators. C++ containers accept optional allocators since way back ... programmers making std like compatible containers have to deal with this aspect anyway.

I've spent quite a bit of time with zig after which I abandoned to rust despite starting with severe rust dislike. The switch was mainly due to:

- far better documented std lib. For example zig http stuff has bugs; and I could never find a public unzip inflate call despite the appearance of an impressive zig/unzip api.

- better library support esp for protocol. The zig stuff i found was few and had memory leaks.

- the fact struct fields are private by default (in zig all fields are public if you can get access to the struct). In complicated stuff the implementation has got to stay private

- the borrow checker was not a motivator, and rust compile times are nowhere annoying as I feared

- the zig i/o api i found too darn complicated and annoying

Things I still miss from zig:

- c/c++ ffi is solid. Gluing curl, zlib into zig was painless and worked day one. Rust takes more work.

- zig build and the ability to import a configuration as code is awesome.

- allocator story is good. It's darn simple to add custom allocators where performance matters

- Zig still has a couple of linker problems, or cross compliation bugs I immediately encountered when using it. One was fixed. One is still open.

scrubs··on I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets
Fawlty towers is one of the few 70s shows that still comes off well. Smartly written with great straight people (hotel custs) to play off, visual comedy (basil, manuel) with a fantastic mix of physical and spoken comedy.

There are many memorable lines. One I goto when I'm frustrated;

Basil: if he didn't order a cheese salad, poly, then why had he got one?

Poly: I ... I don't know

Basil: I know how he feels

So Basil is annoyed with the customer (who he thinks is a super uptight hotel inspector, but who only sells spoons) while sympathizing with him at the same time.

There are many more things to say, but it's worth pointing out how expertly it uses the British sense of manners to fake a lot of "misunderstandings." It's to politeness what Woody Allen does in Deconstructing Harry with guilt. It's both a formidable defense and weapon. If you haven't seen this movie, try it out. It's worth it. Plus you'll get to meet cookie who helps harry pull off his university speech.

scrubs··on I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets
I don't buy it. Data privacy is a customer concern that isn't going away nor will it be diminished.

Let's get a few things straight:

- I tell the supplier if I am satisfied with their service. They don't tell me.

- I decide if the cost in terms of time or dollars is worth it; they don't tell me nor may they infer I'm too stupid to know better.

- some customers are lazy or don't have a backbone. Suppliers can push them around. Btw - this happens a lot inside corporations where management explicitly or implicitly mandates internal suppliers. In some cases those internal suppliers lost bad because of their arrogance wit. migration to the cloud from on-prem. Ultimately tech+business knew they got a better tradeoffs elsewhere.

- the customer is right is not a straight jacket for suppliers; we are allowed to smartly exclude features we don't think we can compently do or are bad business.

The swarmy arrogance and laziness of the big three re: customer satisfaction cost them about 35% of the auto market in our own backyard to the Japanese they never really got back. Too many corporations are sliding into at times seeing customer feedback as a nuisance at their own peril.

Im a strong customer advocate. Know what your getting; hold the supplier to the line; be in charge of the relationship; never retreat from options.

scrubs··on Are we sleepwalking into World War III?
I hate to agree the Chinese government is competent in foreign affairs, but it's true.

Fundamentally China isn't Russia or USA which both have a proclivity to become entangled in foreign problems. For the US (I'm american) the civil side has four strategic risks:

- weak to no show congress which has ceded war making to the executive branch

- civilian leadership who think bomb it and declare success which is naive

- the inability to stop being suckered in by our own hurbris when others say but we can't get it done without US involvement

- an economy post WWII built on cheap oil, which has tentacles into the mideast

Meanwhile after having pissed away 50 years of culture wars particularly since newt gingrich and the tea party, the US fiscal situation is deplorable.

Most maddening? We did this to ourselves. Blaming immigrants isn't the flex people think it is

scrubs··on Comparing Chromium Development at Google and Igalia
When i read paragraphs of stuff about corporate culture from engineers --- thanks captain obvious for pointing out 180 employees isn't the same as 180,000 or that software has some of the same challenges in both environments --- I figure:

- this is sales and advertisement

- person has nothing serious going on

- can't be serious because people who care about company culture in a serious way are board members or senior managers at small companies not engineers giving anecdotes about what they think. Managers are accountable for decisions taken.

scrubs··on I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets
Their response attitude reminds me of basil from fawlty towers (paraphrasing):

I'm trying to run a business here. I can't get things done with you stupid customers bugging with me problems all the time. Go find something to do.

In the 80s and 90s customer satisfaction was important primarily in manufacturing. Today software treats customers like nyc realtors who know they have the balance of power:

that's too damn bad: the price is the price. Take it or i'll sell it to somebody else for wasting my time.

scrubs··on Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours
Well that's a long way of saying even in military offensive scenarios, Amazon is expected to have some zone up to use which is to say they're doing a decent job.

Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.

scrubs··on Unikernels were hard. key word: were
A natural r&d project would be a high frequency oms or something like an nyse bid/ask/match book manager.

These apps tend to do kernel bypass anyway for net i/o after hard scrubbing the os to remove as many interrupts and other superfluous jitter the oms does not need.

However, I believe the low level kernel bypass code (eg dpdk, libfabric) depend on Linux to talk to the hw in a disciplined way.

Anybody know better?

A decently faster oms this way could be a practical alternative to fpgas we sometimes see in that space. (hw would be co-located of course)

scrubs··on Homa: The end of TCP for AI clusters [video]
A few tidbits which may be of interest re homa:

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287718 is my post on tla formal modeling complete with examples and decent pdf to go with it. Self contained assumes no background on tla

2 - part of the reason for doing (1) was to model homa's basic protocol. See pdf. I did not go into homa details there because I wanted to stay focused on tla.

3 - I have a kernel bypass homa transport api in development

4 - as wonderful as homa is for intra-data-center IO, the srpt part of the protocol is a bit tough to performantly code. More or less homa wants each NIC resource to be managed by one owner who chooses from among all tx streams that could be sent, which one has smallest srpt (shortest remaining processing time). This applies despite the fact client/servers sharing the NIC run in their own threads. Ive been using mpsc memory rings moving the smallest amount of data i can.

scrubs··on CA tech executive arrested for allegedly smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips to CN
Sad indeed. But very true though!
scrubs··on How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
I've abandoned zig for rust. I expected to be annoyed by rust build times, but so far it's been quite good for my needs. To the contrary it has not been any impediment even when prost etc all drag in many deps from a cold build.

The zig compiler apart from a couple of cross build or linker issues is darn good. Switch to rust is a function of library support, private struct fields. Rust itself is better organized and far better documented compared to zig.

However, rust has got to get their allocators for container support straightened out soon. I do SAAS for fintech and low level packet transports. Both benefit greatly with allocators custom designed for job at hand.

45 mins strikes me as something else is amiss ...

scrubs··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
Folks, we also need to address why meta hired the guy if failing up hypothesis is to gain ground. Meta is either part of the problem, stupid, or wants his connections all arguably bad.
scrubs··on S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
I forgot about R2. And I just got a problem perfect for it. Thanks for the reminder. HN helpful yet again!
scrubs··on The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287718

With link to pdf, github

scrubs··on André Weil and the Hodge Conjecture
Agree. I give up isn't the MO of many with graduate degrees.
scrubs··on A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals
Last month I can report my better half's company let ai do a code review, which it then escalated into completing the PR since it was not approved for 72hrs, which lead to it logging into a remote office's voip and main IP router system which it shutdown. No phones. No internet.

Why in the hell do people let ai out with keys? I mean c'mon!!

scrubs··on Anthropic CEO says AI swarm could 'take over the Internet' in 6-12 months
But not before the second coming claims pentacostal fundamentalist christains!!

Congrats! Certain companies are running with the same fear driven crazy nonsense that blows through the other side time to time. Hell, get together! Maybe ill get a wedding invite. I'll hang on it the wall. It'll give me something to think about.

To be sure the craziness is for $$$$$$$. They want to look like the inevitable next big thing ... which has similarity to the other s... well they want their 10% cut regardless

scrubs··on I have a theory that software drives people insane
My long running message of the day: "eventually all programmers turn into mumblers."
scrubs··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
All the time? Oh, c'mon!

By the way two important social media strategies whether on TV or in text forums are,

1) appear unflappable

2) never deviate from the talking points

Read (1) and (2) with an implied parenthetical phrase: "when in public"

These are effective because the other side usually settles for small wins of seeing their counterpart flinch, feel lost or embarrassed i.e. to win in a fleeting way. Therefore, to the degree you can keep a straight face the better you deflect these small wins ... in public.

It has a strong secondary benefit of removing from context common sense, consistency i.e. the realm of cause/effect, policy where reality is more closely aligned. And when that goes out the window, your runway to BS is 10x longer.

Ejecting family wrongly arrested, misidentified, or those have followed the law (meager and crappy as it is sometimes), or who are denied due process is not unalloyed win in private people claim in public. Even if the guy is here is illegal and should be removed ... there's kids, money, and other dependencies involved. It's not the clean win people say.

What goes on off camera and off the HTML page is a whole other reality.

Here's an anecdote I heard personally: a guy I know went to Mar a Largo for a business function not related to Trump, but as a club house selling its meeting rooms and menu for revenue. My buddy is a non-white guy of considerable wealth, business success, and connections. This guy allegedly ran into Harris Faulkner (FOX news host) . During chit-chat she said she told this guy she does not associate with everything she says on camera. She continued to explain by saying she presents a viewpoint her employer pays her to convey.

scrubs··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
That 35% will change their tune if it screws their stuff up. Trump et al is great in the large unless he's your business partner or boss screwing your money and life up, hitting on your wife or daughter, owes you money etc. Cheap symbolism is appealing in a fog only, not in your face.
scrubs··on Never Forget How Eagerly Apple and Google Coddled Fascism
Pathetic. The most maddening words in corporate america are "ohhhh, mmmeeee tooo".

If it's minor then why comply? If it's major then it's a major error to comply.

Stop being an apologist for the stupidity of corporate America. And yah, I can and I do blame them.

A final point: the more political things get, the more things become about cheap symbolism and shadow boxing BS the more things get untied to reality which pre-sages failure.

scrubs··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
>Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.

True! And true all day long

scrubs··on Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault"
>How it is made should be irrelevant in the process

Bullshit. I dare any lawyer to say that to the face of a client paying 100s per hour for "services rendered."

You say you want respect but honey for what, exactly?

scrubs··on The oldest bar in every state
Strange: of all things possibly connected you mentioned that movie and Gene Hackman. I've had both the brain w.r.t. to the current administration.
scrubs··on Apple proposes to take a 15% cut of purchases made outside the App Store
Wow! Bold! That's bold leadership, Apple. Respect.

In fact it's so bold I'm going to take my own 15%. Oh, me too.

/s

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