Misdicorl

Your place of last resort with kafka is simply to replay the message back to the same kafka topic since you know it's up. In a simple single consumer setup just throw a retry count on the message and increment it to get monitoring/alerting/etc. Multi consumer? Put an enqueue source tag on it and only process the messages tagged for you. This won't scale to infinity but it scales really really far for really really cheap

One way to measure this that isn't moral judgements is the ecological depth of an environment. If one part of the system is destroyed (e.g. a blight on plant A) how devastating to the rest of the system will that be?

One of the hallmarks of human engineered environments is how shallow and fragile they are. Changes, like the reintroduction of wolves, are "good" because they give us deeper and more resilient environments

The story I've heard is that general motors down fall began when they stopped writing loans for other car manufacturers. They used to under write basically every car loan in the US.

I've never looked into how truthful it is, but it smacks of idiotic/arrogant executive tropes so well I almost don't want to discover it's false

I'll throw my hat in the ring for "disagree". Few kinds of work have such clear and unambiguous results as optimization work (its now X% faster!). Few kinds of work have such incredible and detailed tools to guide your hand in finding where to invest your effort (look at this hot loop!).

The fact that sometimes optimization work is tricky or requires some pre-thinking, or is even gasp counter-intuitive is such a hilarious way to say "this is hard". That's just table stakes starting points for so-so-so much work.

Edit: Heck, even deciding whether to prioritize optimization work or feature work is usually a harder problem than the actual optimization work itself.

Sometimes the vibes are wrong, and things go haywire. This is why zero tolerance policies have to be instituted in schools. That doesnt mean the general idea is wrong. Strict adherence to written law will always fail justice. The world is too nuanced and too fractal to handle every edge case well.

Would be really interesting to see what it does with clearly wrong EXIF data

Yeah I'd say kafka is not a great technology if your median and 99ths (or 999ths if volume is large enough) are wildly different which sounds like your situation. I use kafka in contexts where 99ths going awry usually aren't key dependent so I don't have the issues you see.

I tend to prefer other queueing mechanisms in those cases, although I still work hard to make 99ths and medians align as it can still cause issues (especially for monitoring)

Follow on: If you're using kafka to publish messages to multiple consumers, this is even worse as now you're infecting every consumer with data processing issues from every other consumer. Bad juju

I suppose it depends on your message volume. To me, processing 100k messages and then getting a page however long later as the broker (or whatever) falls apart sounds much worse than head of line blocking and seeing the problem directly in my consumer. If I need to not do head of line blocking, I can build whatever failsafe mechanisms I need for the problematic data and defer to some other queueing system (typically, just add an attempt counter and replay the message to the same kafka topic and then if attempts > X, send it off to wherever)

I'd rather debug a worker problem than an infra scaling problem every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

And now imagine how easy dealing with email spam would be if the marginal fiscal cost was not 0 like physical spam. All the technology and tools available and less than 1% of the viable spam surface area

> the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.

This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.

It wouldn't, but it might preclude using (future) optimizations that forgo those de-optimization hooks?

I suppose serializing the JVM state itself to avoid the cold start problem might take advantage of this?

The past decade is a difficult framing to ask the question in. Notable breakthrough results are usually understood in hindsight and a decade just isn't a lot of time for that context and understanding to develop. Science also doesn't necessarily develop in this way with consistent progress every X timespan. Usually you get lots and lots of breakthroughs all at once as an important paradigm is shattered and a new one is installed. Then observations with tiny differences slowly pile up and a very blurry/messy picture of the problems with the new paradigm takes shape. But none of those things feels like a breakthrough, especially to a layman.

That said: I'll submit the first detection of gravitational waves as two black holes merged together in 2020 as meeting the bar of "notable breakthrough in the last decade".

Ignoring inexperience/incompetence as a reason (which, admittedly, is a likely root cause) domain fuzziness is often a good explanation here. If you aren't extremely familiar with a domain and know the shape of solution you need a-priori all those levels of indirection allow you to keep lots of work "online" while (replacing, refactoring, experimenting) with a particular layer. The intent should be to "find" the right shape with all the indirection in place and then rewrite with a single correct shape without all the indirection. Of course, the rewrite never actually happens =)

You didn't understand the original claim which is that because Pi has an infinite decimal representation, every subsequence of it has a repeat

This isn't true as you can build an infinite sequence that never repeats. An example sequence in binary is (the number of 0s between each 1 increases by 1 every time)

01001000100001...

The goal can't be to solve every desperation case. But if the program wouldn't allow individuals living in dangerous and exploitative situations to confidently leave them (financially) Id argue the program was a failure

True. It would be nice to decouple it from children and expand its scope of economic impact dramatically.

$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.

If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally gets distributed as

1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X

2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)

Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the income distribution and other tax incentive phase space

My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state).

Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).

> but any user that thinks their media decode libraries will be bulletproof libs free of vulnerabilities are nuts.

Sure. And its a high bar to challenge the same or better vulnerability profile that the established players have. But a "small scrappy team" which is capable of doing everything this team has done certainly garners a lot of confidence that the bar is possible.

That advice has context. Do not roll your own if the feature is not your core product offering. So don't roll crypto if you're not selling crypto. If it is your core offering (and media decoding is absolutely a core offering of a web browser), you should choose carefully whether to get it off the shelf or roll your own.

Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?!

But it rather isn't. The temperature keeps going up as you add more fire. And then it stops going up even if you add more fire. That point is the temperature of interest and was from the very start. It isn't hard to find. It isn't hard to understand. It's just a bad example for this essay

If the discussion was about boiling pasta water I'd be on board (e.g. a discussion of the every day). But it's wearing the clothing of science and so falls flat (for me). None of the details turn out to matter for the real technical definition. Amusingly the one detail that does matter- air pressure and by proxy elevation- is omitted.

Every time this is posted I want to rebut the water boiling portion. It's finally time.

The author gets the details of boiling water wrong. He commits a fairly common error: using his experience of a practical and common phenomena to make/guess a technical definition. The technical definition of boiling water is simply the temperature beyond which liquid water will not go (let's ignore super heating- too much detail!). The rest of the exposition is unnecessary and wrong given the true definition (although could probably be reworked from a cooking perspective)

This is unlikely. There are many many theories of how dark matter could be accounted for with ordinary matter that we simply can't detect because our telescopes/etc aren't good enough.

Not all of these theories are completely excluded yet but most have very very thin margins of phase space left to explore (even when combining multiple explanations together). Every time a new telescope comes online we see the phase space diminish rather than hints towards first observations.

We are left with:

A) new particles that don't (or very weakly) interact with electro magnetic fields.

B) New theories of gravity.

C) New theories of the early universe that open up phase space previously thought closed to existing matter contributions

D) better instrumentation that sees actual contribution in the tiny phase space left to ordinary matter and ordinary physics

D is by far the least interesting of these options and so gets very little press. But it gets plenty of academic attention and you can be assured it is not being ignored by scientists

I've vacillated a couple times on whether to respond to you, but apparently you've poked me in a place I can't just ignore and move on from.

My goodness you are a sanctimonious asshole. We are disagreeing about how to express extraordinary love. I think the common expression of "unconditional love" is both a shallow platitude and a lie. You think it is this over-the-moon perfect version of love. Fair enough, we disagree.

And yet, you have somehow twisted that into me not having experienced "unconditional love" that you apparently just discovered for yourself in the recent past? Do you always resort to debasing someone else's life experience when you disagree with their perspective?

The height of arrogance and foolishness you admit to is absolutely staggering! You claim this sole understanding of love, a question which has plagued and delighted humanity as far back as our history goes. And yet you, a person who has very recently fallen in love. Someone who confuses a partner who today sacrifices themselves for your benefit with one who will forever love you. You have it all figured out. You know the love I experience and give to my parents, my sister, my wife, my children. You know that it is not true simply because I think calling it "unconditional" is a shallow cop out. That I would deign to tell the people I love their attributes, our memories, our shared experiences and challenges, our disagreements, everything about us that is the reason I have love for them. Somehow, this expression which contains so much. This is less than the simple word "unconditional". What a farce.

I challenge you to actually describe your love for your new found partner. Be specific. Anything that could be used to describe some garden variety love between the main characters in a romantic comedy cannot be used. After you figure it out, tell them too. See if that description does not in fact strengthen your relationship and help your love grow.