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zerd

586 karma · joined January 22, 2011

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zerd··on John Carmack on mutable variables
It's funny that converting the first example to the second is a common thing a compiler does, Static single assignment [0], to make various optimizations easier to reason about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_single-assignment_form

zerd··on A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec
WebSocket doesn't specify data format, it's just bytes, so they have to handle that themselves. It looks like they're using Arrow IPC.

Since they're using Arrow they might look into Flight RPC [1] which is made for this use case.

[1] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Flight.html

zerd··on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
[citation needed]
zerd··on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
I've had LLMs cite me bullshit many times, links that don't exist and claiming it does. It even cited a very realistic git commit log entry about a feature that never existed.

Haven't yet had the same issue with Wikipedia.

zerd··on Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support
I've had issues in a database with billions of rows where the PKs were a UUID. Indices on PK, and also foreign keys from other tables pointing to that table were pretty big, so much so that the indices themselves didn't all fit in memory. Like we would have an index on customer_id, document_id, both UUIDv4. DB didn't have UUID support, so they were stored as strings, so just 1 billion rows took ~30 GiB memory for PK index, 60GiB for the composite indices etc. So eventually the indices would not fit in memory. If we had UUID support or stored as bytes it might have halved it, but eventually become too big.

If you needed to look up say the 100 most recent documents, that would require ~100+ disk seeks at random locations just to look up the index due to the random nature of UUIDv4. If they were sequential or even just semi-sequential that would reduce the number of lookups to just a few, and they would be more likely to be cached since most hits would be to more recent rows. Having it roughly ordered by time would also help with e.g. partitioning. With no partitioning, as the table grows, it'll still have to traverse the B-Tree that has lots of entries from 5 years ago. With partitioning by year or year-month it only has to look at a small subset of that, which could fit easily in memory.

zerd··on 1 Trillion Web Pages Archived
Sounds a bit like Wuala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xKZ4KGkQY8
zerd··on Beginner Guide to VPS Hetzner and Coolify
I had similar issues, raid 1 on two hdd and the server would randomly reboot and be slow because it was resyncing the raid. Have to pay extra to get new refurbished drives.

It’s great for throwaway machines, e.g. CI. But don’t rely on them

zerd··on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?
This. the main trick, outside of just bigger hardware, is smart batching. E.g. if one user asks why the sky is blue, the other asks what to make for dinner, both queries go though the same transformer layers, same model weights so they can be answered concurrently for very little extra GPU time. There's also ways to continuously batch requests together so they don't have to be issued at the same time.
zerd··on Ursa: A leaderless, object storage–based alternative to Kafka
How is it different to bufstream?
zerd··on Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels
My ISP blocks port 25, 80 and 443, so need to tunnel those. Some don't want to expose their IP directly. If you have dynamic IP you don't have to update the IP in DNS (since the "application" connects to the tunnel endpoint).
zerd··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale
That would make the locked time shorter, but it would still contend on the global lock, right?
zerd··on Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip
It's annoying, around 10 years ago 10gbps was just starting to become more and more standard on bigger NAS, and 10gbps switches were starting to get cheaper, but then 2.5GbE came out and they all switched to that.
zerd··on I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric
Counter-counter example. When my wife was new to the city she took a bus ride and a girl randomly made contact with her. They hit it off and talked for the whole ride. My wife thought this girl sounds really nice, they actually got into deep conversations, and wanted to exchange numbers so they could hang out some time. Then she asked if she had heard about the book of mormons…
zerd··on Cloudflare was down
> it wasn't a widespread GCP outage.

If this wasn't widespread, what is?

Incident affecting API Gateway, Agent Assist, AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Apigee, Apigee Edge Private Cloud, Apigee Edge Public Cloud, Apigee Hybrid, Cloud Data Fusion, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Logging, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Run, Cloud Security Command Center, Cloud Shell, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Workstations, Contact Center AI Platform, Contact Center Insights, Data Catalog, Database Migration Service, Dataform, Dataplex, Dataproc Metastore, Datastream, Dialogflow CX, Dialogflow ES, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Composer, Google Cloud Console, Google Cloud DNS, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, Google Compute Engine, Identity Platform, Identity and Access Management, Looker Studio, Managed Service for Apache Kafka, Memorystore for Memcached, Memorystore for Redis, Memorystore for Redis Cluster, Persistent Disk, Personalized Service Health, Pub/Sub Lite, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Vertex AI Search

zerd··on Seedance 1.0
The ads will be subliminal so you won't even know that you're watching an ad.
zerd··on Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5
Like predicted in 2014 here: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
zerd··on Reservoir Sampling
Just noticed the physics simulator at the top is interactive. Then I was stacking squares on top of each other to see how tall I could make it, and started throwing things at it angry birds style. Fun stuff.
zerd··on Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI
> It has long been established that predictive models can be transformed into lossless compressors and vice versa. Incidentally, in recent years, the machine learning community has focused on training increasingly large and powerful self-supervised (language) models. Since these large language models exhibit impressive predictive capabilities, they are well-positioned to be strong compressors. In this work, we advocate for viewing the prediction problem through the lens of compression and evaluate the compression capabilities of large (foundation) models. We show that large language models are powerful general-purpose predictors and that the compression viewpoint provides novel insights into scaling laws, tokenization, and in-context learning. For example, Chinchilla 70B, while trained primarily on text, compresses ImageNet patches to 43.4% and LibriSpeech samples to 16.4% of their raw size, beating domain-specific compressors like PNG (58.5%) or FLAC (30.3%), respectively.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.10668

Transformers are also used in the top algorithm right now on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. https://bellard.org/nncp/nncp.pdf

zerd··on O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data
Interesting video about what goes on behind the unofficial coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp2Qgw44MsA
zerd··on “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps
"Are you sure you want to install OSM? Don't you know Google Maps is better? You should try Google Maps"
zerd··on Try Switching to Kagi
There's pretty much nothing you can't do with ffmpeg https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM?si=KJJOhnoa-2bFLkt5
zerd··on How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
That would be assuming they knew there was a bug in that particular part of the code, which they probably didn't, until Windows 11 24H2. And unfortunately Valgrind doesn't work on windows.
zerd··on How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
Still isn't available for windows from what I gather.
zerd··on How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
fmod takes in the order of 30+ cycles, probably more in year 2003 CPUs, vs 1 for cmp, 1 for sub, 1 for jmp.
zerd··on How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
I tried to use Valgrind to catch pretty much this exact bug 20 years ago, and it was nigh impossible. If you call any 3rd party code it'll have flag tens of thousands of false positives that you have to sift through. And that was on a small game engine, I can't imagine running it on millions of lines of code.
zerd··on But what if I want a faster horse?
No, it was not just JS. They were the first to do a ton of other optimizations such as prefetching. https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-pref...
zerd··on But what if I want a faster horse?
It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and "mindshare".
zerd··on But what if I want a faster horse?
My problem with turning it of is that if you _do_ want to watch the preview it's very cumbersome. Clicking on it goes to the movie/episode. So to get to the preview you have to go to the list of Episodes, scroll down (and try not to get spoiled) to trailers then play it. So I have one profile with it on and one with it off, depending on if I'm browsing or not.
zerd··on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries
https://bsky.app/profile/unusualwhales.bsky.social/post/3lmf...
zerd··on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries
> easily argued to be in his core powers

I'd say arguably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_second_Trump_ad...

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