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AlotOfReading

15,200 karma · joined June 8, 2017

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AlotOfReading··on C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For
That certainly convinced me. When I was doing my taxes recently and had to watch those forced loading animations, I kept asking myself "why can't my compiler do this?" Thanks to std::simd, now it can!
AlotOfReading··on Tesla reveals two Robotaxi crashes involving teleoperators
That's not teleoperation. Teleoperation has a human directly in the control loop, so latency and stability of the connection directly impacts the vehicle system's ability to maintain safety, because the input has to go vehicle<->network<->human to produce an output.

What those blog posts are talking about is a different strategy called remote assistance where the vehicle remains the only thing in the control loop, but a human provides guidance to help the computer navigate itself. This makes the latency and stability of the connection much less important for maintaining safety.

It's not unheard of for companies in the industry that use remote assistance to also have an local option for remote control (for things like lot operations and vehicle rescue events), but that's not part of routine on-road operations and it's usually limited to a <5mph limp mode where the operator is physically present.

AlotOfReading··on Tesla reveals two Robotaxi crashes involving teleoperators
Tesla's setup are a bunch of desks with steering wheels crammed together in a normal call center [0]. Waymo doesn't do teleoperation, but other companies exist that have like Vay. Compare their setup [1].

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GuE3ie2WcAAyeWs?format=jpg&name=...

[1] https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/6828f0...

AlotOfReading··on Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"
Every language has defined behavior. It's what you expect to happen through a program's execution. Sometimes there will be multiple possibilities, but you can still define them regardless. Laying this out explicitly is the purpose of a standard.

Undefined behavior is everything else. C and C++ are relatively unique in that their standards explicitly say "combining these constructs in this way is undefined", and we call those cases explicit UB. There's also a larger universe of implicit UB that standards omit. Most (all?) languages have implicit UB, even if they lack the explicit stuff. What happens when you get ENOMEM is a common one.

Rust does something similar to C/C++ and lists a bunch of UB that's only possible with incorrect code in unsafe blocks. Correct code placed in an unsafe block remains defined, as does code without unsafe (up to compiler/language bugs).

AlotOfReading··on Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"
"unsafe" is a promise to the compiler that you're going to ensure invariants that the compiler can't check. Rust only promises to eliminate UB if the invariants are held. You can still get UB by violating that promise, as this bug demonstrates.
AlotOfReading··on Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet
Any system where your defense in depth involves UDS is pretty much guaranteed to be broken though.
AlotOfReading··on Int a = 5; a = a++ + ++a; a =? (2011)
The point being that there are many other places where reproducibility fails to hold, especially when optimizations are involved. The standard doesn't mandate a way to disable contraction, nor the existence (or absence) of -ffast-math and others. They're simply different, legal compilations within the broad scope allowed under the standard.
AlotOfReading··on Int a = 5; a = a++ + ++a; a =? (2011)
Your compiler does many optimizations that break numerical reproducibility, especially in floats. I reviewed a PR the other day that wrote X=AB+(CD)+E;

And when I checked 3 different compilers, each of them chose a different way to use FMAs.

Even with integer math, you can get different numerical results via UB (e.g. expressions with signed overflow one way and not another).

AlotOfReading··on Int a = 5; a = a++ + ++a; a =? (2011)
It's a language feature that was in K&R, and the rules around sequencing were introduced in C89. There were good reasons to believe it would pessimize code in the following decades. Dennis Richie himself pointed out that Thompson probably added the operators because compilers of the time were able to generate better code that way.
AlotOfReading··on Int a = 5; a = a++ + ++a; a =? (2011)
It's valuable for compilers to be able to choose the instruction scheduling order. Standards authors try not to unnecessarily bind implementors. If post increment happened after the full statement is finished, then the original value has to be maintained until the next sequence point. Maybe the compiler will be smart enough to elide that, maybe not, but it's a lot more difficult to fix those kinds of edge cases than to say sequencing is undefined.
AlotOfReading··on "Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage
I guarantee you that the insurance company has zero clue or consideration for any physician and hospital resource constraints.

Gating access to medical care is the job of the patient's PCP and or other doctor. If the care is truly, meaningfully rationed (like transplant organs and blood banks), there are triaged priority lists managed by medical organizations.

AlotOfReading··on Starship V3
Let's not forget that physics confiscates satellites pretty quickly too. I realize I didn't say it explicitly, but I was assuming that this hypothetical land-based hardware would have access to only the same resources available to the satellites, namely sunlight and a network connection. That makes it somewhat less politically charged than a DC tied into local infrastructure.
AlotOfReading··on Starship V3
Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware as your chips fail (wasting that part of the resource budget) and the land hardware gets upgraded.
AlotOfReading··on Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers
That's a motivation to avoid tragedy of the commons, not because they're trying to maintain their own reputation to victims. It benefits the criminals even if they change their name.
AlotOfReading··on Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers
I'm not sure that attacker reputation is particularly meaningful. The group can rebrand into a new identity at any time. They're anonymous cybercriminals after all and there are lots of reasons they might need to do that beyond reputation laundering.

The calculus for the victims doesn't seem to change much whether the same people are using a "new" name or an old one to hold their systems hostage.

AlotOfReading··on Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties
The other major branch of the sino-tibetan languages is traditionally written in alphabetic scripts like Tibetan. If there's a meaningful practical difference associated with what kind of writing system you use, it's not obvious to me what it would be. Modern English is much less phonetic than classical Tibetan as well.
AlotOfReading··on Optimize for change not application performance
A traditional engineer can't force purchasing to buy the right parts, but that doesn't mean they should make do by ducttaping sheet metal onto the reactor as a substitute. Technical workarounds are a poor solution to social programs.
AlotOfReading··on GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills
As someone who's worked on this kind of stuff at GM, I don't really get the exuberance in this particular space (not just the comment I'm responding to).

If you want 100% coverage, you just autogenerate the test cases. LLMs can't properly check MISRA requirements, so they're really just a layer on top existing automated checkers. Same for complexity metrics, it doesn't get merged if it violates that (or it's a vendor dependency you won't touch anyway).

If you care about the spirit of the rules, they're not that big a difference. If you don't care, there are already ways to do this. In either case they're an incremental change, not what I'd call a godsend.

AlotOfReading··on TanStack NPM Packages Compromised
I wonder whether NPM has surpassed the costs of the billion dollar mistake, null references. NPM hasn't been around as long, but the industry is much bigger today than it was when systems languages were dominant.
AlotOfReading··on The Struggle Is Gone
Doing only interesting things tends to leave students with serious knowledge gaps. Anyone that's an autodidact or has interviewed/trained one will be familiar with this.
AlotOfReading··on Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI
TVA and the NY power authority are genuinely massive, government run utilities. Both are also known for pretty low power bills.
AlotOfReading··on Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved
I'd like to see better support for networks that aren't connected to the broader internet, or moving away from X.509. Note that these are contradictory. X.509 was intentionally designed to support offline verification and has a lot of elaborate ceremony to support it (like all the rest of the OSI stack). The industry just doesn't, so we get the worst of both worlds.
AlotOfReading··on GeoJSON
The Texas border with Mexico is formally down the centerline of the Rio Grande, even as the river moves (ignoring fiddly complications). Even if you could somehow take a perfect snapshot of it at a given time, you'd run into the coastline paradox when sampling it.
AlotOfReading··on Colored Shadow Penumbra
It happens in reality, though I've only noticed it with desert sunlight. It's caused by light cast into the penumbra from scattering and diffuse reflection. You can't see this in the lit area because your photoreceptors saturate, which looks white.
AlotOfReading··on DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal
This is built atop a tower of stuff people built with profiling and performance-oriented design.

That said, I've found that most corporate environments are unintentionally hostile to this kind of optimization work. It's hard to justify until the work is already done. That means you often need people with the skills, means, and motivation to do this that are outside normal corporate constraints. There aren't many of those.

AlotOfReading··on Appearing productive in the workplace
I know you didn't intend this, but a job where your main function is telling a machine how to copy someone else's half-baked CRUD sounds absolutely soul-sucking.
AlotOfReading··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
It's the Peter principle for computers. Codebases expand to the limits of the organization's ability to manage them. If you make one person use ed to write code for a bare metal environment, you'll get a comparatively small, laser-focused codebase. If you task a hundred modern developers to solve the same problem, you'll get a Linux box device running a million lines of JavaScript.

Same thing happens in other fields. A rich country and a poor country might build equivalent roads, but they won't pay the same price for them.

AlotOfReading··on Why airlines are always going bankrupt
Budget airlines have tried all of these things. Planes doing short haul routes often don't have comforts like screens, let alone meal service.

It turns out that in-flight entertainment helps minimize unruly passengers, and flight attendants are there for safety, not just to serve passengers. Same for legroom requirements (egress).

AlotOfReading··on Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
The non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0].

Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.

[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

AlotOfReading··on When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing
An assembly line is plumbing too. And just like software, while there are a finite number of variants at any specific time, the plumbing is constantly being rearranged for various reasons. A line won't look the same in 6 months as it does today.

    Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.

I've sat next to the industrial engineers designing the lines and MechEs working in CAD. My software job wasn't all that different at a high level. We all wrote requirements, made bugfixes, and complained about the tier 1s. They usually spent more time visiting the lines in Asia/Mexico/Michigan/Canada. I just emailed the factory when I needed to fix something.
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