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AlecBG

85 karma · joined February 7, 2021

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AlecBG··on That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
First one water is lower. Ball is more dense than water, in boat displaces its weight in water, in water displaces it's volume

Dip for hill roll is faster

AlecBG··on Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
Java engineers write lots of HTML in java docs:)
AlecBG··on GitHub Actions is the weakest link
You can enforce at the org level to only allow actions pinned to hashes. You can also choose a small whitelist of actions to allow.
AlecBG··on Michael Rabin has died
First sentence starts with horrible antisemitism. Can someone fix it? (on my phone with kids so not in a position to)
AlecBG··on Show HN: CEL by Example
With certain macros disabled like .map the runtime is O(code length)!
AlecBG··on Quaternion Algebras
You can describe spinning particles in flat space and AdS space really nicely with twistors using this
AlecBG··on A recent chess controversy
Or similarly I flip a coin a thousand times, but only tell you when it's heads and don't tell you how many flips I did.
AlecBG··on Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised
Not sure I completely agree as you often use only a small part of a library
AlecBG··on Scaling our Observability platform by embracing wide events and replacing OTel
This sounds pretty easy to hack together with 10s of lines of python
AlecBG··on Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
well he certainly mentions a result where if there is an everywhere timelike Killing vector field (+ some other assumptions) you can prove that Hawking radiation doesn't occur and that does not include for example the Schwarzschild solution because the Killing vector field partial/partial t becomes non-timelike on the horizon.

So for example if you take a dead star in a vacuum with nothing else in the universe (and make certain technical assumptions) then you can prove that the star does not emit Hawking radiation. That's quite a strong result, and certainly does make the result seem shocking.

AlecBG··on Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
I'm not sure what more you want from him, there are many papers and even a textbook linked?

It's bloody John Baez, the man knows his stuff.

On you actual point, it is shocking because its claimed that baryon number is not conserved without black holes getting involved

AlecBG··on Preview: Amazon S3 Tables and Lakehouse in DuckDB
Does this support time travel queries?

Does it support reading everything from one snapshot to another? (This is missing in Athena)

If yes to both, does it respect row level deletes when it does this?

AlecBG··on StrictYAML
Why OrderedDict when dict is already ordered?
AlecBG··on US goverment seeks to rehire recently fired nuclear workers
If anything ICBMs are better at moving fast and breaking things than the tech industry
AlecBG··on The number pi has an evil twin
The lemniscate really looks like a homoclinic orbit in a 2d dynamics problem
AlecBG··on Entangled Photons Maintained Under New York Streets
I don't know how they did it, but verifying Bells inequality would do it if you made many pairs
AlecBG··on Numeronymize
Translation:

There is no better way to write with long words than to numeronymise them everywhere!

Or for the less obtuse among us, this version will only numeronymise words with length six and up:

AlecBG··on Grothendieck’s use of equality
I'm not sure I agree. That sort of type conversion involves inclusions, while the examples Buzzard talked about involved isomorphisms
AlecBG··on Algebraic Data Types for C99
Sealed interfaces in java 21 allow pattern matching
AlecBG··on A hacker's guide to Language Models
OpenAPI + OpenAI and now FastAPI and FastAI

How long until there's a RESTAI company?

AlecBG··on AWS Makes Cloud Formation Stack Creation Up to 40% Faster
I've found the exact opposite of that in practice. Had way more problems with tearing down CDK stacks
AlecBG··on K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due
I think Istio docs are great! I do agree that it's complicated, and I think their API is more confusing that it needs to be. The ontology of DestinationRules, VirtualServices, ServiceEntrys, Gateways (as in the K8s resource), gateways (as in the istio gateway Helm chart) is not the best.
AlecBG··on On the dimensionality of spacetime (1997) [pdf]
I think you end up with no degrees of freedom in 2+1 and below