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duped

9,138 karma · joined April 28, 2021

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duped··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
Classic latency vs throughput problem. 10s of GB/s of disk bandwidth doesn't help when my problem is serialized durable writes.
duped··on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer
For stuff like niche value optimization sure. For practical arithmetic code, nah. Like with this bug, all that changed is that garbage data in gives the user an error that they tried to process garbage data. Adding a new type doesn't make the code better, it just moves the error around. And you really don't want an infix division operator to fail to type check if the right hand side isn't a nonzero type, do you?
duped··on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
> It is unreasonable to expect every instruction to a highly capable, autonomous system to contain a complete enumeration of allowed and disallowed behavior.

This is literally our job as software developers. If this expectation is unreasonable to you then you do not belong anywhere near software development.

duped··on CDs vs. NIMBY
Where in the United States do you see space within existing urban areas that people live/work today, where there is empty space for high density housing, transit, retail, etc, which does not abut or live on top of low density SFH suburbs?

Because I've lived in a few of the largest urban areas and the answer is "nowhere near the jobs."

duped··on Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
> it defines companies as legal persons with all the same rights

It absolutely does not but people keep repeating this on social media

duped··on I'm becoming AI-blind
I don't think statistically driven prediction implies reasoning or intelligence.
duped··on The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
I mean, a lot of us have paid GitHub a lot of money for CI on private repos. And when GitHub themselves encourages the insane behavior of vibe coders and agents instead of just charging or rate limiting access of bots, it's hard to give them sympathy.
duped··on Bun 1.4
Something that frustrates me about that discourse is that people argue about the mere existence of dependencies but all 'supply chain' (1) attacks are issues over when dependencies change. Dynamic systems are harder to reason about than static ones.

(1) scare quotes because I think it's dumb for us software people to call code we picked up on the side of the road part of a 'supply chain' like that means anything.

duped··on Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere
A human being is not capable of being a passive question answering oracle. All humans have free will, intent, and bias in what questions they answer and how they answer it. Again, if your analogy requires me to treat a human being and a machine as equivalent when it comes to manipulating other humans emotions, I have to reject it categorically.

What I'm getting at is that you really need to avoid anthropomorphizing these models. A model can't have an opinion, for example. It's a part of the psychosis I'm talking about.

duped··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
I don't disagree that the loader and the libc should be decoupled, but it's not as simple a split as you're making it out to be.

The reason they're tightly coupled is because there needs to be a bridge between Sys-V ELF ABI and the C runtime, and it makes sense for the implementation of that bridge to use libc itself which means special-casing the bootstrapping of libc during program loading.

glibc isn't unique here btw - musl libc ships its own loader that does the exact same thing as rtld (parse auxv/envp off the stack, relocate itself and load libc, initialize the CRT, then load the rest of the program's SOs in order).

Even if they were fully decoupled it is not unreasonable for software targeting newer versions of an operating system to only run on that version or later. Linux is actually the outlier here where the syscall interface is stable enough to make this a non-obvious problem.

There's a universe where you can load multiple versions of the same libc into the same address space but that isn't ELF, and it's not common. aiui the only reason PE can support e.g. multiple versions of malloc/free in the same executable is due to two level namespaces in symbol relocation tables.

---

edit: another observation is that for a functioning ELF loader you basically need a three stage bootstrap. Stage one parses the stack passed by the kernel and performs self-relocation. You need that to make non-static function calls and read/write global variables. Stage two loads libc and initializes the CRT with stuff like environment variables, aux vector, any dso for syscalls passed by the kernel, etc. That has to coupled because POSIX specifies stupid stuff like "getenv" and "argv" requires the loader to know how to move from the stack passed by the kernel to the memory reserved by the CRT that gets used by the final executable. Finally in stage 3 it can relocate and load shared objects and run any constructor functions pre-main, before jumping to start where the precompiled CRT start (then jump to main goes).

So if you want an ELF loader on Sys-V you probably need to couple the loader to the libc, just for libc to work at all. Unless you want to specify a bunch of behavior and binary layout in the C standard.

None of this is designed by glibc, it's the simplest way to go from exec to main.

duped··on Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere
Any analogy that requires me to treat a machine as I would a conscious human is immediately invalid. The machine is not a person and has no intent or free will, like a human does.
duped··on Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere
I'm saying it's mental illness.
duped··on Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere
I don't think a firm of people whose minds are weak to coercion experiencing shared psychosis caused by their text predictor models is AI "taking over" that firm.
duped··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
Unless you use musl-gcc which is a proper GCC frontend with musl libc sysroot. The compiler is indeed (too) tightly coupled to its sysroot but linux is not special here. If anything interacts with the CRT it needs to know which CRT to use.

I'm not arguing that there aren't problems here, just that I think people have different expectations that are a little extreme. The libc implementation is a core part of the operating system, if you want to target that OS you should target that libc. Some distros (alpine) prefer musl libc, most prefer glibc. And distros really are different operating systems.

duped··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
Why? If you compile your program against an older glibc it will run on newer glibc. glibc is the loader.
duped··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
That's what I'm saying though, glibc-linked binaries are forwards (but not backwards) compatible.
duped··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
The interpreter/loader is glibc and a key part of bootstrapping an executable built against glibc is loading libc itself before continuing on to load the program. Versioning is a problem when distributing binaries linked against a newer glibc to distros that ship an older one. The C compiler doesn't really care as much.
duped··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
> all shared libraries depend on the specific glibc version to load them

Not really, though. glibc uses symbol versions that are forward but not backward compatible. If you got an error that said "this program was built for a newer version of <distro>" would you say the same thing?

Note this is the same (if not worse) on MacOS, and on windows you used to distribute the CRT with your application just to deal with the same problem.

duped··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
I'm curious what the limiting factor is for "years not months" when building these fabs. DRAM is a commodity, there are only threeish major manufacturers, all have huge amounts of capital, multiple nations bend over backwards for new semiconductor production projects, and there seems to be unlimited money going into purchasing these things.

Even when it comes to manufacturing the tooling/testing infrastructure, it's just a question of money aiui.

duped··on Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped.

That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers.

(* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)

duped··on Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.
duped··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?

But that discards my point, which is that you should probably have been prevented from pushing all those to github unless you were paying them for it, but you weren't because the executives running github can't admit that AI is bad for their platform.

duped··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
Microsoft executives have an incentive to pretend that AI is great and scaling it has no problems
duped··on I hate packaging my software for Linux
Rust binaries are not static by default, they _statically link other crates_ by default. Subtle but important distinction.
duped··on License plate reader searches should require a warrant
The police cruiser's primary role is deterrence not investigation or data collection. A better comparison would be stasi informants.
duped··on Bb: The IDE that builds itself
This isn't an IDE, words do mean things
duped··on Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
I mean I get that novice programmers might get tripped up on floating point representation but if you don't know "f32 can't represent 0.1 exactly" then you shouldn't yet be worried about the nuance of relaxing IEEE 754 compliance for the purposes of performance.
duped··on Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
> C/C++ compilers give you a way out of this with the -fast-math

People should really use the individual optimization flags they want (no signed zeros, no trapping math, associative math, reciprocal math) and not -ffast-math because the other optimizations it enables leads to surprising code (for example, isinf and isnan may become noops, which will break production code).

Basically never use an optimization flag that changes the semantics of your code without understanding exactly what that means. I have had to fix this in a number of codebases because someone thought that flag was as innocuous as -O3.

And if you have to enable flush to zero/denormals are zero it should be explicit in your code and scoped.

duped··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
The text of the bill is here: https://ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus/FullText?GAID=18&Doc.... There's about 3.5 pages of text defining this.

The relevant text doesn't call it an "algorithmic feed" for what it's worth. They define an "addictive" feed and it's essentially any kind of personalized recommendation.

> "Addictive feed" means a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met.

duped··on Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud
The medical field is filled with charlatans and quacks. Elizabeth Holmes went to jail because she defrauded the wrong people.
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