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The Gell-Mann Amnesia Prayer.

You're describing the kind of first principles thinking that gave us the Tesla car door handle. It's Silicon Valley, tech bro, smarter-than-everyone, nothing-to-learn-from-anyone bullshit.

Complex topics are built on history, on those who came before us, on attempts and failures and successes. Ignoring it is garden variety stupid.

jdubon Goodbye Google

Congratulations and commiserations.

Perhaps a good thing to come out of these big companies over-indexing on "AI" is the liberation of creative minds. So many fantastic open source contributors have disappeared into corporate black holes...

jdubon Virtio-nvgpu: Near-native Nvidia GPU access inside a KVM guest

Indirection! The cause of, and solution to, all of computing's problems.

jdubon Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

Most people are not remotely concerned about having "100% control over the experience". They want something reliable and understandable.

Only a relatively small subset of tech enthusiasts want to tweak everything, and there are PLENTY of options for those people.

jdubon Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

Why would I want a "task bar/dock/whatever you call it" taking up space on my screen when I have more interesting things to do and look at?

jdubon GPU World

It was very much both.

jdubon GPU World

Yeah, but I'm not going to write a short story about the Butlerian Jihad's inquisitors chasing down everyone who owns a GPU for this competition.

jdubon GPU World

LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use.

Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

jdubon Separating logic and language

Scary, but cool!

To clarify "cognition outside of language" and "unable to convey"... did it purely affect external communication? Were you able to think "in language"? Do you tend to rely on thinking "in language" (whether inner monologue, describing problems like drafting prose, or otherwise)?

jdubon The Snow/Leavis ‘two cultures’ clash

1998! Almost 30 years later, we're living in a Third Culture world. Look at Tesla door handles, addictive consumption apps, Flock cameras, LLMs... the consequences of elevating the incurious, impatient, and output-obsessed.

jdubon The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

"But your honour, my horseless carriage was not designed to hit children!"

jdubon The turbulent AI era is here

Yes. We can decide not to do bad things. Globally. Occasionally, it takes some time to figure out if something is bad. Especially when there's money to be made. But when we do, we can and have stopped doing them.

jdubon Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others

Those would be squashed into one commit.

Then, when your senior developer is working on a new feature that requires some changes to adapt to a dependency upgrade, some refactoring, some forwards-and-backwards compatible database migrations, you'll appreciate a stack of discrete, clean, working, individually reviewable commits.

jdubon Queryable Executables

Instead of post-processing the binary to add the application (non-SELF) schema, you could run database migrations before servicing requests. Thus, every time you start the process, the app creates and/or upgrades its own schema.

The SELF upgrade (heh, self upgrade) and rollback processes could benefit from some... fancier... footwork.

Your example has a new binary copying old data into it, but then you have to move the new binary to the deployed location. Which means an outage through stop service, data migration, replace file, start service.

What if the upgrade process was more like... write the new SELF data into the old binary, send SIGHUP, and then the service fork+execs itself, while doing haproxy-like zero downtime FD handover?

Replacing the SELF data in the existing file is safe right now, because you can't mmap segments into memory. But if you do end up figuring out some clever BLOB alignment mmap stuff, you could do the SELF upgrade like a data migration! INSERT segments/symbols, fork+exec, and the data migration cleans out the old code. :-D

Updating the SELF schema to allow multiple sets of segments and symbols would allow for this upgrade trick, but could do other fancy things... thin multi-arch binaries where only the code segments differ.

BLOB alignment should also mean more efficient static asset serving and a bunch of other niceties... definitely worthy of investigation.

However -- very strong however -- as fun as this is, I would never, ever, ever allow an internet-facing service binary to be self-writable. :-)

jdubon SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

A system with two seL4 tasks, (1) a flight control system, and (2) a VMM running Linux, uses seL4's formally proven safety properties to meet the timing and separation requirements of the critical flight control system... and run a bunch of less critical stuff on Linux that no one wants to rewrite.

jdubon SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

It's frequently done in research and industry when there's a component that has strict timing and separation requirements, and a bunch of supporting software that doesn't.

Like an autonomous helicopter. Flight control? Very important. A bunch of hardware drivers and services for imaging, navigation, comms... not so much, and not worth the (long term ongoing) effort of replatforming.

jdubon SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

"native seL4/Linux"? seL4 can already host Linux VMs, and there are various methods of running Linux code / binaries without hardware virtualisation.

jdubon Executable Is a SQLite Database

It's a lot of machinery to put into a kernel.

(Even with ELF, a kernel can have a relatively simple parser and loader and leave more challenging work to user space... like relocations, dynamic libraries, etc.)

jdubon We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon

Virtualization.framework isn't particularly limited, for what it is... given they're using Firecracker on Linux, it makes sense to use a similarly high level API on macOS.

(One could add a Hypervisor.framework backend to Firecracker, though I'd be surprised if AWS accepted it.)

jdubon fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.

When a new technique or capability arrives on the tech scene, there's a point in the invention-to-diffusion story when the new thing becomes accessible (e.g. cheap and/or easy) enough for a broader audience of developers to experiment with it... but before anyone's figured out best practices, let alone polished products/projects, or calcified around a market leader.

So you get a Cambrian explosion of weird little projects. Ultimately, one of them will probably become the "market" leader... or at least the market default.

Right now there's a lot of agent harnesses and sandbox projects floating about.

Fun examples from the past: text editors, window managers, IRC clients, blogging engines (first static, then dynamic, then static again), Twitter clients... every programming language community has weird clusters of library/framework duplication in their history...

Sometimes these projects take on a rite of passage flavour... like, as every Jedi builds their own lightsaber, every developer builds their own... blog? That used to be the obvious one. Less so these days.

jdubon How to disable or avoid intrusive AI

Add `udm=14` to the Google search query string... e.g. I changed my browser's default search engine shortcut.

jdubon Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

Buildkite has built a GitHub Actions adapter... a good first step out of the GitHub Actions supply chain attack trap.

jdubon Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

We "agree" to many things that are deeply unfair.

jdubon Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

only if you don't understand the difference between metaphor and analogy

jdubon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

you're describing a pre-20th century guild, not a union

jdubon AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon

always? like amd64 vs itanium?