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bheadmaster

5,628 karma · joined March 31, 2021

just some random guy on the internet
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bheadmaster··on Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types
Language is more than just its syntax and features.

The most important "features" of Go are fast compilation, orthogonality of features, and easy development.

Their propositions may "look like everyone else" if you're only looking at surface syntax, but there's a reason why it took 10 years to design an acceptable generics proposal, and the result is that compiling generic-heavy code is almost as fast as compiling plain Go.

Go being strict about features it accepts is not an ideological thing, but a practical one. If Go could have all the features in the world while still being easy to use, fast to compile, and internally coherent, it would. But it can't (see: C++, C#, Python).

bheadmaster··on Building a Fast Lock-Free Queue in Modern C++ from Scratch
On ARM systems with LSE both weak and strong compile to the same CAS instruction anyway. On LL/SC, using strong means CPU will attempt to retry the same exchange on spurious failure, which increases likelihood that another thread will update the value in the meantime, requiring an outer loop retry.

On any plaform which implements strong exchange with zero overhead over weak exchange, we can safely assume they compile to the same thing, and use weak. The only reason to use `strong` is if you have a one-shot CAS operation and you don't want to write a retry loop.

bheadmaster··on Building a Fast Lock-Free Queue in Modern C++ from Scratch
> NOTE: Throughout our implementation we strictly use compare_exchange_strong, but the C++ standard suggests that for some systems like ARM it mighe be a better idea to run a loop with compare_exchange_weak for better performance. The problem with that is a compare_exchange_weak call may fail spuriously, which essentially it can randomly fail even if everything is correct, thus it makes code code a bit more complicated, so I avoided it for this implementation.

The reason using `compare_exchange_weak` is a better idea for lock-free algorithms is that, in most cases, you'll run it in a retry loop anyway. Since `compare_exchange_strong` is compiled to a retry loop, if you do a retry loop of `compare_exchange_strong` you basically have a loop in a loop. Using `compare_exchange_weak` makes things both simpler and more performant.

bheadmaster··on AIs don't do what you want. This is bad
> allowing AI agents to act as abuse sponges for troubled people

People have been getting angry at machines for a long time. Work, you stupid printer! Asshole Windows updating at the worst time just to mess with me. Go to hell, toaster, you piece of garbage.

Getting angry at AI is the same in my book.

Yes, AI acts more human-like, yes, theoretically it could desensitie people to become bigger assholes IRL. But then again, they said similar stuff about San Andreas, where you could human figures in-game just for fun, and I don't see anyone randomly shooting people because they were bored.

bheadmaster··on Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop
VMs and containers are fairly isolated and reproducible. A separate user on your machine still depends on the programs installed locally.
bheadmaster··on Who manages the agents?
For the first time in human history, military power doesn't require advantage in numbers. The rich will simply build an artificial army and use it to control everything. Kinda like Mr House from Fallout New Vegas.
bheadmaster··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
Exactly. You've hit the nail on the head.

And quite frankly, your AI slop garbage radar is not just an indicator of good taste — it's the essence of humanity that keeps you above it.

bheadmaster··on CarPlay Is Additive
I can get the same thing with an aux cable
bheadmaster··on A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
In some corporate networks, everything is locked tight, and if you want any access (outbound or inbound), you have to send a request with business justification.

What we had was many devices behind such corporate networks. Instead of requesting exposed ports for each device, or setting up OpenVPN (never done it so I'm not sure how much the red tape would it be), I requested only outbound access to our bastion server's SSH. Since SSH is pretty standard, admins usually allow it fairly quickly.

There were also a few cases where non-HTTPS connections were also banned, so we set up an HTTPS proxy that tunneled the SSH reverse forwarding... But that's probably not needed in most cases.

bheadmaster··on A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
How do you use -J to connect to a device that isn't publicly reachable?
bheadmaster··on A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
There's an old blogpost I wrote at the time I came up with this method [0]. I think it contains most of the technical details.

Let me know if anything is confusing, I'll answer it here.

[0] https://paskozdilar.github.io/blog/entries/zero_code_ssh_jum...

bheadmaster··on A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
How would you use ProxyJump with Reverse Forwarding?
bheadmaster··on A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
If you have many different remote devices behind NATs or firewalls, a cool trick to access them all via EC2 server (or such) is to setup Remote Forwarding via UNIX socket on the server side, to devices' port 22. Preferably, UNIX socket filenames should start with a common prefix, so an SSH config can be written that will use ssh+socat in a ProxyCommand to establish the connection.

It's amazing how lightweight this method actually is. I have managed to connect hundreds of devices using a single EC2 nano instance.

bheadmaster··on Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
Maybe superficially, but most of them are unbalanced, leading to a handful of meta builds being overpowered.
bheadmaster··on Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
Meta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.
bheadmaster··on Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
By themselves, they don't. But quantum probabilities are unique. They cannot be explained by missing information about local, pre-existing properties. Therefore, to maintain determinism, you are forced to accept extreme alternatives like non-locality (actions here instantly affecting the other side of the universe) or the existence of infinite splitting universes. If we reject those unobservable overheads, non-determinism is the most direct conclusion.
bheadmaster··on Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
Any interpretation that asserts a deterministic universe must invent a "hidden" mechanism which causes the apparent non-determinism, and which we cannot measure nor predict.

By Occam's razor, it is more probable that the universe is simply non-deterministic.

bheadmaster··on Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
Care to elaborate?
bheadmaster··on Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
> Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice).

At a quantum level, it is also actually non-deterministic.

bheadmaster··on Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos
Sounds like a Death Note internal monologue.
bheadmaster··on I'm So Tired of Ads
What would constitute "consent" to being communicated information to?

With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?

bheadmaster··on Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
> When you write Rust long enough you settle on certain architectures (message passing, event loops) that go well with the borrow checker

So basically Go?

bheadmaster··on Local AI needs to be the norm
> And if you have a local app, how do you take a dependency on whatever random model is installed?

Why not ship your own model? In the age of Electron apps, 10GB+ apps are not unheard of.

bheadmaster··on Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs
It will take a few years until scheduled data center construction finishes, and together with software optimizations that may come up in the meantime, it may cause a significant decrease in token price.
bheadmaster··on Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
When you say "a society" sets a goal, it always implies a ruling group of people imposing their view of the common good unto everyone.

How do you make sure that whoever makes that choice makes it in a way you yourself will agree with?

bheadmaster··on Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
We should, but we also shouldn't decide what other people consider proper use of their time
bheadmaster··on K3k: Kubernetes in Kubernetes
GNU + kink
bheadmaster··on Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories
> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee

What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?

bheadmaster··on Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories
Not my experience. Grok seems to be perfectly willing to roast Musk for his shortcomings.

Where did you observe the bias? Can you share any example of the conversation or post by Grok?

bheadmaster··on Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories
So Elon Musk was right in his view that Grok should focus on truth above all, even if it became offensive?
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