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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 Bob and Van
I think you misread the post. He's saying that his ignorance was great, and maybe we should go back towards that.

I don't think Tumblr was particularly influential on the neighbors aspect. It never reached that kind of broad base. Twitter did though. Unless you just mean social media broadly?

boulos··on How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
Like you, I dislike the "talker" role for people on IC ladders. I often encourage those people to switch to Director+ roles.

The flip side is people who get and stay too far into the weeds. Solving little problems here and there is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what's actually going on.

But if you get totally bogged down in details, you are probably avoiding your leadership responsibilities. You should be observing the structural or strategic opportunities, and then dragging the org(s) in that direction.

Sometimes you do that by writing some code to prove a point, other times you do it by getting the nearest VP to take something on as a commitment. For me, personally, I find that the style of work waxes and wanes. Sometimes I get almost no code committed in a month :(. Other times, I get to go off and do some work that nobody else would have done.

I prefer the latter, but I respect that my job requires the former. Many of the people who you see spending all their time talking believe that's the most responsible use of their time. They might not personally prefer it!

boulos··on CEO Just Fired 500 People Because He Says Zillow Is More Efficient Without Them
This is one of the meandering arguments in the post. The whole executive team, in fact. But it doesn't compare how much other executives are making, etc.
boulos··on CEO Just Fired 500 People Because He Says Zillow Is More Efficient Without Them
I feel there's something in this article, but the meandering really ruins it. Either way, it's obvious that no earnings call would explain the metrics or decisions behind a layoff. But at 7% this is well within "Eh, we want to try a performance layoff and hope we get a better 7% of new hires".

It is too bad that people aren't more direct about this. But if folks remember Meta/FB's attempt at saying they did performance-based cuts, people ripped into them for labeling all the fired personnel as un-hireable. Earnings calls are heavy lawyered and regulated, so there's no reason to say anything.

boulos··on Ray tracing massive amounts of animated geometry using tetrahedral cages
As aek and dahart said, updating a BVH (refitting) is not expensive. If anything, it's bandwidth limited.

The challenge is minimizing the cost of (selectively) rebuilding.

boulos··on Being Linux Torvalds
I get that he's maybe a bit into LLMs, but your take is pretty unfair. He's said repeatedly that as a non-native English speaker, his writing will come across a bit strangely.

If he'd said: "We all need to learn to be like Linus", would that have changed your take?

It's clear he's very respectful not only of Linus, but of all the people involved as well. He's instead using Linus's transition from full-time writing software to full-time "leading" as the point of his write up. Don't get hung up on the verbiage.

boulos··on Two Case Studies of NaN
0 x inf is also NaN. It's not just division.
boulos··on New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]
But it's not clear that using Sonnet or any other LLM as a "grader" would result in the same improvement. For objective grading, you could be sure that the additional adaptive support is helping. For subjective things like writing style, literature, poetry, you end up with whatever Sonnet thinks is good (and randomly so).

It still could be better for students, but it's not obvious that it would be (or maybe not as strongly?).

boulos··on New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]
Do you have a larger study planned for the Fall? It definitely seems promising.

I'm curious how well you feel this worked because the subject was Statistics (objective grading) versus something more subjective like Civics or Literature.

PS - I'd say this qualifies for Show HN, too!

Do you

boulos··on Can you build a recognizable World Map in under 500 bytes?
And it made a classic optimization: removing New Zealand :).
boulos··on Leanstral 1.5: Proof abundance for all
This is nice work, but I found the bug finding example to be weird:

> One such bug was in the sign function for zigzag decoding of the datrs/varinteger library. On input Std.U64.MAX, the expression (value + 1) overflowed, causing crashes in debug mode and silent corruption in release mode—an edge case that testing and fuzzing would typically miss.

In what way would this boundary condition case be considered something that "testing [...] would typically miss"? It's certainly something that bad tests would miss or not think about, but I find that (a) careful people and (b) ML coding systems are actually really good at "oh, I should test the extreme values". Especially for things that parse user input.

I'm curious if they found other bugs that were more interesting, but found them too hard to explain quickly.

boulos··on Zluda 6 release (run unmodified CUDA applications on non-Nvidia GPUs)
I appreciate the focus on amusement in:

> Some of the newly added features may come as a surprise to those of you who keep a close track of ZLUDA development. Most of them were previously explicitly outside ZLUDA's roadmap. There has been a change of plans. ZLUDA development is no longer commercially funded, so it's back to being my weekend project. This means that the priority is no longer what makes commercial sense, but what I find the most entertaining. That's why the sudden addition of textures, PhysX and better Windows support.

Outside of the time commitment that full-time support would offer, I generally think focusing on amusement is a good life strategy.

boulos··on 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
Yep. Google does this in Finland for the Hamina datacenter: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
boulos··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
529 and not 429?
boulos··on Making a Shading Language for My Offline Renderer
Technically, we did RTSL before Ingo and then Matt did their stuff at Intel. LLVM wasn't particularly usable in 2007, but Austin and I did try it (this isn't in the paper!). A few years later, I did an actual LLVM JIT for OSL, but we didn't have enough coherence for vectorized shading at the time at Sony.

But none of it was surprising. The original RenderMan shading language was "vectorized" and it even used SIMD instructions on modern processors to run the "interpreter loops". That is, a single "color add" in RSL might have looked like:

  for (int i=0; i < grid_points; i++) {
    out_color[i] += foo;
  }
and the inner part there could use vector instructions. That just isn't nearly enough to get useful wins.

The point of ISPC et al. was to give people CUDA-like easy mode for "trust me, just vectorize the whole thing and deal with the masking for me". It goes beyond a hardcoded shading language (easier target!) though didn't reach as far as CUDA with complex structs / C++ capabilities.

boulos··on Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Because it's complex?
boulos··on CODA: Rewriting Transformer Blocks as GEMM-Epilogue Programs
Perhaps you missed work like https://crfm.stanford.edu/2025/05/28/fast-kernels.html ?
boulos··on Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft
That's not the "edge" in the title. It means competitive advantage in this case.
boulos··on The Ferrari of Espresso Machines Is Fueling a Hot Resale Market
How do you like the brikka vs the classic?
boulos··on How to make a fast dynamic language interpreter
How's your experience with Fil-C been? Is it materially useful to you in practice?
boulos··on Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
This used to be true, but GCP forced their hand in January of 2024 with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...

AWS matched a few months later:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!

Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.

boulos··on I just want simple S3
Yeah, but that missing context is super important.

If they want it for local dev work, that's pretty different from wanting a high-performance air gapped object store without rewriting clients.

They seem to know what they're doing (having complained about a methodology problem in MinIO), and yet don't personally want to throw their hat in the ring not maybe pay anyone...

Context matters!

boulos··on I gave every train in New York an instrument
Neat. I wish I could select just a couple lines at once though. I feel like the 1/2/3 plus one of the other lines would make something more appealing.
boulos··on S3 Files
Compared to roll-your-own with S3 or GCS it does :)
boulos··on Designing AI for Disruptive Science
Will do. I wanted mostly to (re)inform the submitter.
boulos··on Designing AI for Disruptive Science
Please don't editorialize titles unless they're clearly clickbait.

"Designing AI for Disruptive Science" is a bit market-ey, but "AI Risks 'Hypernormal' Science" is just a trimmed section heading "Current AI Training Risks Hypernormal Science".

boulos··on Waymo Safety Impact
Our sixth generation sensor suite is intended for winter driving: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... for some nice visuals.
boulos··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
On recent podcasts, Ilya says he's no longer assuming they can jump straight there.
boulos··on MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
Maybe the author isn't aware that Chainguard is going to keep patching MinIO for CVEs:

https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/secure-and-free-minio-c...

You wouldn't get the other changes in this post (e.g., restoring the admin console) but that's a bit orthogonal.

boulos··on Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
> The entire global software industry is worth less than $1 trillion dollars

Are you saying "worth" as a shorthand for something like annual profit? If you sort the 2025 data by earnings, you get pretty large numbers quickly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_technology_com...

That's not how you should measure "worth". In that world, you'd have a P/E ratio of 1. Comparing to a bond, it would be like expecting to get paid the face amount in a single year. Many people are quite happy with 5-10% interest as a risky benchmark, so 10-20 P/E isn't wild. That puts the market cap for tech itself at 10-20T as a reasonable baseline.

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