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fnord123

4,679 karma · joined February 25, 2007

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fnord123··on My 25-year engineering career retrospective
Previous common advice was 8 hours sleep. The graphs show that 5-6 is about as risky as 7 hours and 4 hours is as risky as 9 hours. Given this info it seems that 4-6 hours is not the a huge risk factor.
fnord123··on The UX of UUIDs
Ok wow this blog post was really illuminating. Thanks for pushing back on my preconceived idea that UUIDv7 is the 'official' version of ULID

https://blog.daveallie.com/ulid-primary-keys

fnord123··on The UX of UUIDs
Ulid should wholly be deprecated now that uuidv7 is available.
fnord123··on Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing
It's false. People will not go into suspend mode when not walking; they still burn calories. A very large person would burn about 130 calories walking a mile. i.e. one large latte. And most people who are this large are not at risk of a caloric deficit by burning an extra 130 calories.
fnord123··on Automatic class sorting with Prettier (2022)
> While allowed due to backward compatibility to XHTML, they have never been specified, do nothing, and browsers ignore them so it is pointless to put them there.

What do you mean by "never been specified"? They are in the spec: https://www.w3.org/html/wg/spec/syntax.html#start-tags

> Then, if the element is one of the void elements, or if the element is a foreign element, then there may be a single U+002F SOLIDUS character (/). This character has no effect on void elements, but on foreign elements it marks the start tag as self-closing.

fnord123··on Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant
The thread is about Google Assistant, not Alexa, Sonos, or Siri.

Regardless, do you think over 50% of households use the voice commands to the extent we call it "pervasive"?

fnord123··on Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant
You think over 100% of people use Google Assistant on their Android smartphone?
fnord123··on Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant
> A product that has become pervasive in most households in America

You think Google home has over 50% penetration?

fnord123··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
I looked into PR and you're correct. That's at least better than expectations.
fnord123··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Printing hello world does not show the cost / benefit of a tracing jit that needs to be warmed up over thousands of iterations. And counter example: it takes maven 0.788s to realize I don't have a pom.xml in my PWD and fail a build. It takes meson 0.163s.
fnord123··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
> Why does it matter?

Because you need to have an idea of how many machines you need. And you need an idea of whether 'it will take as long as it takes' or if there's an issue in your code.

Sometimes Java decides to JIT using aes instructions. Sometimes it doesn't. Even if you run the same benchmark suite twice in a row it just does its own thing and gives wildly different results.

My learning was that one shouldn't depend on JIT performance and prefer using JNI libraries if you want consistency. Hence my comment being negative on JIT.

fnord123··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
> it will finally shift the mentality regarding "C/C++/Fortran libs are Python"

But pjmlp, I use Python because it's a wrapper for C/C++/Fortran libs. - Chocolate Giddyup

fnord123··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
This could be headed for another dead end imo.

Context: I use python for data processing and webdev. When doing data processing, Python is merely glue for libraries in compiled languages. When doing webdev, I mostly use python itself.

First, any numbers regarding benchmarks need to be treated with contempt. JITs are unbenchmarkable. No matter what you do, someone says you do it wrong. Warmed up the JIT? You did it wrong. Didn't warm up the JIT? You did it wrong. Warmed up and didn't warm up the JIT? Wrong.

You lose predictable performance characteristics due to the above. It's difficult to describe the importance of this to the people who look at Python as glue for their compiled code.

Next, on the face of it, it doesn't look like it will compose well with subinterpreters. If each subinterpreter does it's own tracing, it's going to be harder to hit the 10k watermark of jitting hot code.

This uses LLVM's JIT which is particularly slow and heavy (16MB added to the binary size) last time I tried to use it. So this limits Python attractiveness in being an embedded language.

While this remains experimental - and hence strictly optional, packaging this in distributions that use gcc would now apparently need llvm tools installed to build python. Expect feedback from distribution packagers.

Idea for improvement: when I do data processing, I'm using python to glue bits of C, Rust, and other compiled languages so this is not very useful. When I'm doing webdev, it could be useful - and I am deploying using Docker. So why not make this AOT so I can add it to a docker build step and get all the benefit without the complications of tracing jits.

fnord123··on Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?
But sowbug has 10 dollar wireless charging pads all over his house. How can we use a cable?
fnord123··on New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy
> Is there a version of Hanlons Razor but instead of incompetence, it’s money?

Cui bono.

fnord123··on Rethinking the Luddites
I'm not a historian but I think luddites need to be seen in the context of the history of trade unions. Unions at the time existed but didn't have the power they developed in the 1900s. So extra legal means seemed to be all that was available to them; while nowadays people can work more effectively inside the law.
fnord123··on Rethinking the Luddites
Are you aware that the Writer's Guild of America were striking for 4 months against AI doing their jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_...

There are also many law suits against AI works:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/books/authors-openai-laws...

You really require that they resort to physical violence when they know fully that data in one DC will be backed up elsewhere so it will have no effect. From my pov, they are using the violence of the legal system to stop/slow AI.

fnord123··on The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing
Holy crap how big is your home office that turning in a light is an side quest?
fnord123··on Memory-efficient enum arrays in Zig
Maybe I'm just dumb but isn't the endgame of vec of enums going to be an ECS?
fnord123··on The boiling frog of digital freedom
The Brexit leave campaign literally broke campaigning laws.

Sibling post said it best: if you think you're immune to the trillion dollar brainwashing industry then you're fooling yourself.

fnord123··on The boiling frog of digital freedom
There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't!

Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities.

>The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change.

The real offline life where people can be punished in the US for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse) (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's acceptable).

>and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours.

This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and no change. Or the million people who marched against the Invasion of Iraq.

fnord123··on Germany Is Losing Its Mojo. Finding It Again Won’t Be Easy
The end of coal is not pre-mature.
fnord123··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
Uninstalling is moving the icon to the top of the screen and letting it go over "uninstall" and freeing hundreds of MB. Deactivate is buried in settings -> apps -> YouTube -> deactivate -> confirm.

Otherwise the same once it's done.

fnord123··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
They made it addictive and it's not possible to uninstall on Android. You can only deactivate the application.
fnord123··on Candle: Torch Replacement in Rust
I agree that managing python development environments is a pain in the ass. I'm completely with you there.

But I'm curious what the nature of a black upgrade being forced on you. Like a manager or stakeholder had an edict stating everyone must upgrade to 23.x?

fnord123··on Every phone should be able to run personal websites
Why the heck would I want to open a port to accept http connections to the wild wild web on my phone? Servers are constantly being probed and I can't imagine I'd want to manage a firewall from my phone. Then there's data plans... Oy vey!
fnord123··on Candle: Torch Replacement in Rust
>we had an upgrade of Black forced on us in order to satisfy Poetry which then reformatted all of our Python code.

Unlikely. If you are using pre-commit to run black then the version being used lives outside your venv and hence not subject to dependencies you are using. Poetry should also be outside your venv.

fnord123··on Google Search Is Dying (2022)
I haven't used Google in ages. Do they convert stupid recipes using volume for flour to use mass?
fnord123··on Google Search Is Dying (2022)
Google allowing the blacklisting of sites with lots of ads on them and using google analytics?

They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.

fnord123··on A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
This is curious reading since my Intel MacBook speakers crackled all the time as it grounded through me.
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