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boulos

13,551 karma · joined May 15, 2013

If you're trying to reach me about GCE (or Google Cloud generally) my username at Google is the same as this one.
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boulos··on Jolie, the service-oriented programming language
At the very least, I assume .+ at the start is a better choice.

The RFC says:

     addr-spec   =  local-part "@" domain        ; global address
     atom        =  1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>
     word        =  atom / quoted-string
so I think the bit in front of the @ has to be non-empty.
boulos··on Why you should not apply to YC
> If you already have a network and a decent platform to communicate with people, as well as the motivation to go at it for yourself, you're giving up a huge chunk of the company for a pittance.

But that's literally the point. You suddenly get a huge network that would help you get through the early stages.

It's certainly true that many founders would find better terms elsewhere. However, it's also true that most companies fail. So negotiating better terms usually doesn't matter nearly as much as making the company more successful. (The same rationale applies to employee equity grants)

Like you said, for people with no connections, whether just out of school or not, it's valuable.

boulos··on How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
Example: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/ease_of_doing_business/e-bus...
boulos··on The Bulgarian Computer's Global Reach: On Victor Petrov's "Balkan Cyberia"
This is also directly available from MIT Press as Open Access: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5598/Balkan-Cyberi...
boulos··on Daniel Kahneman has died
That isn't what that blog post is saying.

It's saying that the author's invented metric may indicate that the studies within each chapter may not replicate. No actual replication studies were done to produce the table in that post.

boulos··on Grok
How about "weights available" as similar to the "source available" moniker?
boulos··on The return of the frame pointers
JIT'ed code is sadly poorly supported, but LLVM has had great hooks for noting each method that is produced and its address. So you can build a simple mixed-mode unwinder, pretty easily, but mostly in process.

I think Intel's DNN things dump their info out to some common file that perf can read instead, but because the *kernels* themselves reuse rbp throughout oneDNN, it's totally useless.

Finally, can any JVM folks explain this claim about DWARF info from the article:

> Doesn't exist for JIT'd runtimes like the Java JVM

that just sounds surprising to me. Is it off by default or literally not available? (Google searches have mostly pointed to people wanting to include the JNI/C side of a JVM stack, like https://github.com/async-profiler/async-profiler/issues/215).

boulos··on SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud
I'm not sure which external or internal product you're talking about, but there are no networks involved for Local SSD on GCE: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd

Are you referring to PD-SSD? Internal storage usage?

boulos··on Making my bookshelves clickable
It took me a while to realize digital twin got autocorrected to digital town here :).
boulos··on The Ukraine war is ultimately about Poland
Queen Elizabeth II oversaw a lot of the final decline of the British Empire and Commonwealth. She seemed okay with it.
boulos··on Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
I'm still (poorly) maintaining it!
boulos··on Why Postgres RDS didn't work for us
Eh, c6a is also an AMD Rome which has worse memory bandwidth at the tails and weaker per thread performance than Cascadelake (c5). I don't understand anything about this particular benchmark, but I wouldn't compare them simply as "older vs newer".
boulos··on Why Postgres RDS didn't work for us
Do you have a version using the same instance type? Seems weird to mix them.
boulos··on Oxxcu, converting CO₂ into fuels, chemicals and plastics
You could imagine sanctions on Brazilian beef. Either a blanket ban or something targeted at particular producers. I doubt it would happen, but that's a different plan.
boulos··on Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas_... via https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-ge... disagrees with you even in the last decade. And the future seems mostly solar:

> This report also analyzes prospective generation capacity in four categories — under construction, permitted, application pending, and proposed. More than 466,000 MW of new generation capacity is under development in the United States — a 13% increase over 2022. Sixty-one percent of capacity most likely to come online, permitted plants and plants that are under construction, are in solar.

China's growth in power capacity is non-trivially due to increasing demand. If the US or Europe or wherever suddenly wanted to build XXX GW per year, they could (modulo bureaucracy, which is very real).

boulos··on Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
It's unfortunate that no math is ever done in these stories.

If you take the "350,000" H100s that Facebook wants by EOY, each of those can do 700W, which gives you almost 250 MW for just the GPUs. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that a single large power plant is measured in Gigawatts. All of Google's data centers combined are O(10 GW) which are matched with renewable power offsets [1].

Importantly, the world installed >500 Gigawatts of renewable energy in 2023 [2], mostly driven by PV Solar in China. The amount of potential solar and wind and other renewable-ish (hydro) outstrips even a 10x'ing of a lot of these numbers. But even for a single site, dams like Three Gorges are >20 GW.

There are real efficiency and scale challenges in doing AI in a single, large site. But existing power generation systems deliver plenty of power.

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2023-e...

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2023/executive-summar...

boulos··on US home sales see worst year since 1995
Most of the world lacks this product. In the UK, for example, I think the most popular product is what we'd call a 2/1 ARM!
boulos··on What's that touchscreen in my room?
I made a simple bash alias for this:

  mknote () {
   emacs -nw $HOME/notes/`date "+%Y-%m-%d-"`${1}.txt
  }
so that I can do:

  $ mknote FooTopic
and start recording things.

I also have enote:

  enote () {
   local newest=$(ls -Ft $HOME/notes/\*.txt | grep "$1" | head -n 1) 
   emacs -nw $newest
  }
to go back and edit them by name.
boulos··on Netflix never used its $1M algorithm (2012)
Movies yes, but often a single episode of a show is say $2. That means if you watch a season in a month, you're up to $16-20 pretty quickly with 8-10 episodes.
boulos··on LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
I like the term parsley code!

I do suspect though that both the hashing and 6-bit weight examples are just extremely rare in the corpus. It wasn't confused about loops, or hashing generally, but just didn't do as well as antirez would have liked. The description of the 6-bit to "why don't I just cast this to 8-bits" thing is definitely a problem. And worse, it's a problem a more junior engineer might not understand. But I suspect that a model trained on a corpus with lots more bit manipulation would have been fine, as it wasn't complex.

Clearly we just need a fine tuned one :).

boulos··on LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
I really like the argument about misinformation vs testing. I'm not totally sold on "you can just see it", but I do think something like TDD could suddenly be really productive in this world.

I've found autocomplete via these systems to be improving rapidly. For some work, it's already a big boost, and it's close to a difference in kind from the original IntelliSense. Amusingly though, I primarily write in an editor without any autocomplete, so I don't experience this often. But I do, precisely for the throwaway code and lower-value changes.

Finally, it's not clear to me that the distinction is between systems programming and scripting. My sense is that Chat GPT and similar are (a) heavily influenced by the large corpus of Python, so it's better at it than C and (b) the examples here involved more clever bit manipulation than most software engineers ever interact with.

boulos··on Read the Chronicles of Narnia in Publication Order (2018)
Let's call it "production order" then. Firefly was famously broadcast out of order.
boulos··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
> I believe Waymo has had issues where several AVs occupied the same street after an event and blocked traffic because they couldn't decide what to do - they were waiting on each other to behave like a human.

You're thinking of some of the Cruise incidents like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kyAX28dapps .

> And a minor but still important caveat is that SF and Phoenix have modern linear grids

San Francisco has some amusing areas as well. If you look around the streets near Buena Vista park or even Twin Peaks, you'll see plenty of funky curves, six way "intersections" and so on. Lots of two-ways that are only lane wide.

Like the older parts of Boston and Cambridge, it's a holdover from the days of horses and the geography. That's where the paths were, people built houses, and now you've got to deal with it :).

boulos··on 7.1M miles, 3 minor injuries: Waymo's safety data looks good
I linked to it in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722356 .
boulos··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Sorry if I was unclear, that's what we did in NYC and are doing again in Buffalo. The blog post is actually from the previous Bellevue announcement.

Edit to add this link to some footage: https://twitter.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1489318507342807041

boulos··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Winter and snow is hard for a lot of reasons. But we did some testing with safety drivers in NYC last year and will be in Buffalo this year: https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1721629316625093035 (and others historically).
boulos··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
See my top-level comment: same locations, adjusting for surface streets only, etc.
boulos··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team.

The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...

[2] https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...

boulos··on Researchers uncover on/off switch for breast cancer metastasis in mice
It seems to be a typo. The credits at the bottom state:

> Additional co-authors are from the University of California, San Francisco, and Arc.

boulos··on Text Editor Data Structures: Rethinking Undo
I'm not sure if it was recorded, but I think Don Knuth's Christmas lecture last week was on a related topic. It's a follow-up to his 2018 lecture:

https://online.stanford.edu/donald-e-knuth-lectures

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