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bigdubs

1,747 karma · joined January 4, 2011

https://charczuk.com
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bigdubs··on San Francisco, AI capital of the world, is an economic laggard
Straight into landlord's pockets.
bigdubs··on Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
Adding to this, a solution might be enabling continuous releases and leaning into release channels could help in terms of getting more out to users.

In practice it's a challenge because the OS bundles a lot of separate things into releases, namely Safari changes are tied to OS changes which are tied to Apple Pay features which are tied to so on and so on.

It would require a lot of feature flagging and extra complexity which may reduce complexity.

Another way is to start un-bundling releases and fundamentally re-thinking how the dependency graph is structured.

bigdubs··on Sigma BF Camera
IMHO SD cards fail much more often than the USB-C connector would, what's the worry? If the camera mounts as a mass storage device it's one fewer thing to go wrong.
bigdubs··on Constraints in Go
That's not a random limitation, there are very specific reasons[1] you cannot easily add generic methods as struct receiver functions.

[1] https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/refs/heads/master/des...

bigdubs··on Apple found in breach of EU competition rules
People assuming this is a competitive posture exclusively are missing the point.

The app store isn't just about making more money, it's about enforcing privacy and security guidelines for apps through the review process and through checks for unauthorized api usage.

Apple's product is privacy; they view privacy as a premium feature worth paying for, and 3rd party app stores that are the wild west for privacy are antithetical to this.

bigdubs··on Multi-Array Queue
Many ring-buffer implementations grow the backing storage array transparently on enqueue but do so in place, discarding the old arrays; what's the advantage of keeping the previous arrays? Naively I'd say it would reduce GC churn because you wouldn't have to free the old arrays, but I'm curious what the impact of that is in benchmarks.

Separately; the simulator is cool and very helpful!

bigdubs··on Lobsters
Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice!

I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.

bigdubs··on DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system
Shockingly fast and nice and having the intermediate files be immutable is super nice.
bigdubs··on DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system
We query them directly in most cases with the httpfs plugin, but for hot paths we fetch them and cache them on disk locally.
bigdubs··on DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system
We use DuckDB extensively where I work (https://watershed.com), the primary way we're using it is to query Parquet formatted files stored in GCS, and we have some machinery to make that doable on demand for reporting and analysis "online" queries.
bigdubs··on The Winamp Skin Museum is powered by a SQLite3 database with 1.2GB of metadata
Tailscale has some server components (account management etc.) that are powered with SQLite.

Can read more here: https://tailscale.com/blog/database-for-2022/

bigdubs··on Choose Boring Technology (2015)
What one engineer can operate confidently doesn't necessarily extend to the rest of the team, who will have to support that system if that engineer leaves or has to work on other projects.

The lowest common denominator on a team is boring.

bigdubs··on How Go mitigates supply chain attacks
Yes Node.js ships with what is effectively a very thin standard library for some low level things like interacting with the file system, the process model, some security features like TLS.
bigdubs··on How Go mitigates supply chain attacks
There is a deeper strategy here with go vs. node; having a standard library maintained by professionals.

I would rather build on a common set of libraries secured by people who are paid full-time to maintain them, and maybe have slightly worse ergonomics, than have a community of libraries that come and go and have inconsistent quality.

This standard library approach yields fewer dependencies, fewer changes over time, and better consistency between projects.

bigdubs··on Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable
CockroachDB targets a different workload, namely, lots of reads and writes of individual records, versus returning large chunks of even larger tables.

So it might help with inserts but would struggle with larger queries.

bigdubs··on If the US Market for SWEs is on fire why isn’t Europe’s, or India’s?
I would maybe consider it the other way; these companies are wildly profitable with huge margins, why don't the employees capture _more_ of the value they create?
bigdubs··on Go 1.18 RC1 is out
So far in the betas the generics support has been really great, some issues with inferring the types of functions but otherwise going to be a welcome addition to the language.
bigdubs··on Coral, a Cobra fork with nearly all its features, but only 4 dependencies
4 ... of its 5 dependencies. It's just missing Viper. We should do a better job with the title here.

See: - [0] https://github.com/muesli/coral/blob/master/go.mod - [1] https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/master/go.mod

bigdubs··on OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog
The ars technica extended interview with Andy Gavin is a great watch (mentions lisp from his time at MIT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSHj5UKSylk
bigdubs··on Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
This is not a good comparison because big mining farms are not equivalent to people playing video games at home.
bigdubs··on Why Rust Is the Future
Not every project is large, there are plenty of things that don't need the burdens that larger projects place on the code to just get things done and get them done well.
bigdubs··on Why Rust Is the Future
Rust definitely has advantages for safety and correctness.

Those advantages come at a cost, specifically in terseness and readability, which are both _strengths_ of Python. As a result, they're very different tools, and comparing them shows that the author doesn't grasp their relative strengths and how those apply to their typical use cases.

bigdubs··on TSMC “Apple-first” 3nm policy leads to AMD and Qualcomm mutiny
Big point of strength for TSMC in negotiations is they're the only fab that can make 3nm chips in volume, which gives them a ton of leverage to push back against Apple.
bigdubs··on The sticky issue of consent in street photography
You're obviously allowed to feel what you feel but if you've ever seen a "good" body of work taken on the street, and a "bad" body of work taken on the street, the skill of the photographer matters, and it expresses art.

The low vs. high debate is old as time, with sculptors looking down on painters, with painters looking down on photographers.

The camera is a canvas and the photographer paints with what they put in front of the lens and when they close the shutter. Street photography takes it an extra step further and removes a ton of control over what you're photographing and leaves you creating art out of what is happening before you.

bigdubs··on Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated
Then it's going to be weaponized to launder money and be made illegal eventually.
bigdubs··on Practical HTTP Header Smuggling: Sneaking Past Reverse Proxies to Attack AWS
This was mentioned in go's net/http by this CL: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/17980/ it's an interesting point that the spec allows this.
bigdubs··on Generics enabled by default in Go tip
a couple high profile projects (k8s) needed generics, there are limited use cases outlined in the planning docs that detail the holes in the language they're filling, it wasn't just squeaky wheels.
bigdubs··on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally
It follows because you may be taking off from private land but you're operating in federal airspace (all airspace is federal in the US)
bigdubs··on Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed
Keyboard wpm is about double; ~37-44wpm is P50. Still not super fast though.
bigdubs··on Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?
A lot of that has to do with coatings modern lenses use to correct for chromatic aberration, but also how they minimize loss of contrast from light bouncing around inside the lens.

It really is incredible how much a lens affects the final image.

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