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dpedu

1,428 karma · joined December 31, 2012

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dpedu··on Jellyfish-hit French nuclear plant shuts down three reactors
> Reactor 1 runs at 50% output as a preventative measure, EDF says

> Reactor 5 was already offline for maintenance and reactor 6 remains fully operational, EDF says

> EDF expects quick restart after cleanup as no new jellyfish are arriving, an engineer says

This seems like a graceful degradation, not an outright failure or closure.

dpedu··on Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer
That's pretty interesting, I've never heard of this! I've done something somewhat similar when visiting the Isle of Man.

For the unfamiliar, the Isle of Man hosts a world-renown motorsport race, mainly motorcycles, widely considered the most dangerous and deadly race in the world. Average of 2 to 3 fatalities per year.

It's a rather small and relatively sparsely populated island, but for the weeks of the race, the population absolutely explodes as visitors come from all over the world.

The local government runs a program called Homestay, which encourages residents to rent out their properties or spare rooms, etc, to tourists. And I stayed in one such Homestay. I think I paid 25 pounds a night to stay for about 2 weeks, in the 4th largest town on the island.

It's a great deal, my hosts were amazing, and it's a much better experience than a hotel if you care about learning about the island. I met their entire family and they shared "local knowledge" of interesting spots to check out.

dpedu··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
350x is only about 10-20 years of improvement, using CPU FLOPS as the benchmark.
dpedu··on AI companies are shredding rare books
Digitizing books, even if it means the destruction of the original, means more people end up having access to the knowledge within, and is a good thing. Full stop.
dpedu··on John C. Dvorak has died
Trump is the symptom; the "disease" is whatever causes people to want him running the country over some traditional politician.
dpedu··on The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
What remains of this computer? Diagrams? Code? Anything that would let us take a closer look at how it works?
dpedu··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
I've been re-building my NAS and decided on NFS on top of ZFS. However, my goals are slightly different than the author: I'm using a low-power cpu/motherboard, and I've built 2 distinct systems that can fail over as a form of high availability. I've actually written some custom software to handle the failover and data replication. In my testing, clients see writes block for just a couple second during failover. Would anyone be interested in a writeup about this?
dpedu··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
I'm totally on board with the idea that ORMs create a variety of inefficiencies, pain points, and make it really easy to create bad queries or querying strategies. But I use them anyways because the convenience of mapping a row to a code object makes writing programs feel fast and simple. And if you know how ORMs can cause problems and how to watch out for them, you can still get a lot of mileage out of them.

That being said, what's the closest alternative that satisfies this - "mapping rows to a code object" - that doesn't suffer the same problems as an ORM? A middle ground between an ORM (like SQLAlchemy, for example) and "your rows are returned as a key/value dictionary where the column names are keys" type approach like Python's DB-API's DictCursor or PHP's mysqli_fetch_assoc. Is there a middle ground here?

dpedu··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
Developers having a troubled relationship with documentation isn't new.
dpedu··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
This is an argument for returning to living in caves and hunting mammoths for fear that our modern civilization becomes unavailable for a day or two.
dpedu··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
Both articles use 2017 as the turning point date. TTS is a lot older than that. It's not difficult to find data to fit the desired point if you choose a narrow enough time range. Or location selectivity - both of those are just about the United States.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...

dpedu··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
I don't buy it. Literacy rates have been increasing even after the invention of text to speech.
dpedu··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
https://anthropicisdown.com/
dpedu··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
I don't understand this comment. At worst, we're just back to the baseline - working without AI help.
dpedu··on PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you
And Group Replication
dpedu··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)
Location: USA, East coast

Remote: Yes, only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Linux, Go, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, AI/ML on Kubernetes, AWS (S3, EC2, VPC, EKS, RDS, others), MySQL/Postgres, Redis, Terraform, Jenkins. Site Reliability. Limited exposure to many more such as Kafka, FoundationDB, Cloudflare.

Résumé/CV: Upon request

Email: hncontact@davepedu.com

I've done just about everything Silicon Valley has to offer; working for tiny, unprofitable startups, larger startups pre, post, and through IPO and acquisition, as well as giants with 100,000+ employees.

dpedu··on An Introduction to Meshtastic
The biggest problem with Meshtastic is that discussions about it inevitably get spammed by Meshcore evangelicals.
dpedu··on EFF is leaving X
Their decision to leave X seems mostly centered around engagement numbers. Or at least, that's the reason they led with. And I'm not sure that I believe the numbers they're throwing out.

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly?

I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets.

I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.

dpedu··on I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
How about a piezoelectric buzzer? That's how the firmware on some iPods were first dumped.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050828114013/http://www.ipodli...

dpedu··on Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed
I installed Creative Cloud just last week. No such entry was created in the hosts file on my macOs system.
dpedu··on 48x32, a 1536 LED Game Computer (2023)
I'm amazed at how cheap the LED matrix listed in the parts list is. About a third of a cent per LED, not even counting the rest of the hardware! Wow.
dpedu··on Amazon bugging out for anyone else?
Yep, came here to look. Says "Hello Select your address" in the header instead of my delivery address, and when I click it to set my address, the modal says "Sorry, content is not available."

Also seeing stock / availability display on product pages acting weird - things unavailable that certainly actually are, like dishwasher detergent.

Error 500 when I change my selected address in the checkout flow too.

dpedu··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Nine-dash line?
dpedu··on Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards
Seatbelts don't block me from getting to my destination, even if I don't use them.
dpedu··on Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards
Tangent: is there a future for AI offerings with guardrails? What kind of user wants to pay for a product that occasionally tells you "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"? Why would I pay for a product that doesn't do what I want, despite being capable? I predict that as AI becomes less of a bubble and more of an everyday thing - and thus subject to typical market pressures - offerings with guardrails will struggle to complete with truly unchained models.
dpedu··on Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
Not just the #1 use case, the only use case. Real money is better in every scenario other than crime.
dpedu··on Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?
While not a small host, I thought I would mention what I observed with OVH's VPS offering. I was considering their line of VPSes recently because of how generous the cores/ram quantities were given the price. For example, the smallest offering is 4 cores / 8GB at just over $4 a month.

What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.

dpedu··on Internet Archive's Storage
In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.

Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...

dpedu··on Internet Archive's Storage
I'm surprised no-air-conditioning datacenters aren't more common. It's a huge cost, and people love to complain about related water usage. I recall some Microsoft employees running a similar experiment years ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090219172931/https://blogs.msd...

dpedu··on ICE takes back into custody man released for violation of rights
The promise that was made was to go after the type of people you described - first. Not to stop after them.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrnn8zxdego

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