Agingcoder

Yeah this is willy wonka

Well, I’ve been writing code for decades so I know because there was a time ( when I was younger ) where I did just this.

I also know that these days, for all kinds of reasons, I do not have the time to write the tools I’m writing now without AI. I don’t lack the ability, and I could - it will simply be multi months side projects that I can’t / won’t complete.

Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise .

I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later.

I have also learnt a lot technically in the process, since I’ve been able to venture into what was for me unknown territory but at controlled cost

I plan to create more such apps in the future. What is certain though is that my cooking app has immediately displaced all the others on the market , because none of the others cater to my requirements.

The production side is indeed of specific interest - most users don’t run production software so I had to think about that one. Tailscale and Cloudflare came in quite handy and there is indeed a market here

I didn’t find that many - you can find graded readers, but very few ‘graded novels’ ( as in a full novel where chapters are progressively harder, not multiple independent tiny stories ) if I may say so

For those interested in learning old English, I’ve been going through Oswald Bera by Colin Gorrie -

https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/

Basically it’s a full blown story/graded reader with no modern English apart from vocabulary. You build an understanding of the language as you read the book and what is initially gibberish becomes quite clear as you progress . It does help if you’ve had a lot of exposure to German ( vocab and grammar), or barring this any case inflected language.

What’s noticeable is that it’s about 200 pages long, so the story gets quite sophisticated , and rather unexpectedly the book is a bit of a page-turner !

À lot

It is unfortunately very heavy (2.4kg vs 1.5 for my mb air 15)

I take note though that the 13 inches framework is bigger than it seems because of the aspect ratio

This looks suspiciously like something I could buy : a lightweight well made Linux laptop, with long battery life. I currently use a MacBook and won’t get near a windows machine.

Two questions 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens ) 2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?

Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.

I understand his frustration : I have a similar issue with video games - Xbox gamepass games sometimes leave the service. So I built an app that takes all my games across the various gaming services ( steam etc ) including the Xbox gamepass ones, and it grabs them from the achievements ( games I have played ) on top of the catalog ( available games )should they have left the catalog

That way games that are gone remain and I have a Netflix like interface to view all my games past and present

You do but you then make a career out of it : you become the fixer ( and it can be a very good career , either technical or managerial)

I tried subscribing to pcgamer ( as in, I literally paid for it ) two years ago but this didn’t seem to change structurally the amount of ads i was getting. I also tried to contact them directly but couldn’t find a relevant email address to reach out to.

I now use an ad blocker instead. I’m not proud of it, but being actively hostile to me is something I don’t quite understand especially when I’m trying hard to give them money.

I work for a mega corp, and our global overlord( who is ex dev) has tried Claude code at home, and figured out that generating large amounts of code comes with its own challenges - they explicitly don’t want this to happen so there’s no such metric.

This is one of the books I recommend to my coworkers who are interested in operating systems - it teaches a surprising amount of things by telling you what an OS will do for you and therefore why you need it, instead of telling you how it works inside.

It also remains being very pleasant to read in spite of its very large size( I read the whole book cover to cover ). Obviously you can also read the classics ( minix book, tanenbaum, Bach , and probably modern references ) but this one somehow gives the operating system a purpose which I find absent in the others I’ve read .

If you don’t mind developing, what made you switch stance ? many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence , and based on your prior level of support, I’m quite curious about the actual process .

‘In other words: AI is making it possible to detect severe security vulnerabilities at highly accelerated speeds.´

Isn’t it rather : we now have a new family of security flaws detector, which find other issues on top of the ones already found by conventional ( human or regular static analyzers ) methods ?

If they supersede all the existing ones , then it’s quite major, and quite a bunch of vendors will disappear …

Same thing here , but triggered by tiredness/stress. If I sleep a lot and well, then it somehow fades until I’m tired again.

I assume my brain is somehow able to filter it out, unless it’s too tired/busy.

:-) never forget Occam’s razor !

No you were not abrasive at all - I’ve learned to assume good faith in forum conversations.

In retrospect I should have started by giving the context ( march of 9s is a good description) actually, which would have made everything a lot clearer for everyone.

We’re in agreement.

I think we diverge on ‘making it go away in my book’.

When you’re the one having to debug all these bizarre things ( there were real money numbers involved so these things mattered ), over millions of jobs every day , rare events with low probability don’t disappear - they just happen and take time to diagnose and fix.

So in my book ecc improves the situation, but I still had to deal with bad dimms, and ecc wasn’t enough. We used not to see these issues because we already had too many software bugs, but as we got increasingly reliable, hardware issues slowly became a problem, just like compiler bugs or other elements of the chain usually considered reliable.

I fully agree that there are lots of other cases where this doesn’t matter and ecc is good enough.

Thanks for taking the time to reply !

Well my admins eventually believed me , so I’m fairly comfortable with what I said.

We also had a few thousands of physical servers with about of terabyte of ram each.

You are right : we did see repaired errors, but we also saw (indirectly, and after testing ) unrepaired ones

I fully agree with you ! Neither soft nor hard memory errors, nothing… but but flips ,and reproducible at that.

We scanned all our machines following this ( a few thousand servers ) and found out that ram issues were actually quite common, as said in the paper.

It depends on what you bitflip.

I once had a bitflip pattern causing lowercase ascii to turn into uppercase ascii in a case insensitive system. Everything was fine until it tried to uppercase numbers and things went wrong

The first time I had to deal with faulty ram ( more than 20y ago ), the bug would never trigger unless I used pretty much the whole dimm stick and put meaningful stuff in it etc in my case linking large executables , or untargzipping large source archives.

Flipping a pixel had no impact though

No it doesn’t :-)

I’ve had plenty of servers with faulty ecc dimms that didn’t trigger , and would only show faults when actual memory testing. I had a hard time convincing some of our admins the first time ( ‘no ecc faults you can’t be right ‘ ) but I won the bet.

Edit: very old paper by google on these topics. My issues were 6-7 years ago probably.

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

Optane was supposed to fill the gap but Intel never found a market for this.

Flash is still extremely slow compared to ram, including modern flash, especially in a world where ram is already very slow and your cpu already keeps waiting for it.

That being said, you should consider ram/flash/spinning to be all part of a storage hierarchy with different constants and tradeoffs ( volatile or not, big or small , fast or slow etc ), and knowing these tradeoffs will help you design simpler and better systems.

Yes exactly.

The kernel tries to guess as well as it can though - many years ago I hit a fun bug in the kernel scheduler that was triggered by numa process migration ie the kernel would move the processes to the core closest to the ram. It happened that in some cases the migrated processes never got scheduled and got stuck forever.

Disabling numa migration removed the problem. I figured out the issue because of the excellent ‘a decade of wasted cores’ paper which essentially said that on ‘big’ machines like ours funky things could happen scheduling wise so started looking at scheduling settings .

The main numa-pinning performance issue I was describing was different though, and like you said came from us needing to change the way the code was written to account for the distance to ram stick. Modern servers will usually let you choose from fully managed ( hope and pray , single zone ) to many zones, and the depending on what you’ve chosen to expose, use it in your code. As always, benchmark benchmarks.

Yes there are scheduling issues, Numa problems , etc caused by the cluster in a box form factor.

We had a massive performance issue a few years ago that we fixed by mapping our processes to the numa zones topology . The default design of our software would otherwise effectively route all memory accesses to the same numa zone and performance went down the drain.

My kids make fun of me because I know the shopkeepers around me by first name, along with the details of their businesses , and that shopping takes forever because I talk to everyone, customers included.

I just love it, it’s easy and I get a lot in return - from perks to incredible encounters. At work it’s been very helpful.

I developed that skill while traveling alone for a year , and it boils down to practicing and reading whether the person you’re talking to is ok with your talking or not.

In any case, it makes me immensely happy.

This is very different

Most random encounters have a pretext, from smoking a cigarette to talking to the shopkeeper, or being in a queue for a long time.

Talking to a woman ( esp given that many of them are harassed from what I understand from my female friends ) without any reason to is much harder

You virtually never bother them - worst case they’ll turn you down.

On the contrary, they’re usually very happy to tell you about what they do.

I read the book years ago so might have forgotten - what intergenerational romance ?

The intonation is different, there are harsher sounds, but there are diphtongs everywhere in Dutch, and to me thisbis what makes it sound like English. French, Spanish, German etc don’t have diphtongs ( or they’re quite rare )