kentonv

Also FWIW I've had success with argon2 in workers via wasm.

Sorry, this is a bug.

It dates back to when Workers only supported 50ms CPU time limits. Back then 100k iterations was enough to exceed the 50ms budget.

Now that the limit is 5 minutes this is pretty silly, but since PBKDF2 is considered obsolete and not often used in new code, I guess fixing it never really came up.

I would accept a PR to increase the constant to 1M, or higher with a good argument (but most recommendations I see for iteration count are <1M). Constant defined here:

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/src/workerd/...

Note that I'm not claiming to have $10M, that was a hypothetical number for the purpose of the question.

That said, sure, I have certainly entertained the idea of retiring and working on open source, particularly on days when work is frustrating or overwhelming.

But if the goal is "recreate Sandstorm", I do believe my current work on Cloudflare OS[0] is much more likely to succeed at that than anything I could reasonably accomplish independently.

More broadly, at the moment it feels like my position at Cloudflare puts me in the middle of something really important. There isn't anywhere else where I would have more influence over the AI revolution.

[0] https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572

This is reporting an opinion held by outside observers as if it is a leaked internal secret.

It's a perfectly valid opinion but not any kind of secret.

We actually do.

I forwarded this to the right person, and it sounds like it's being worked on. Thanks!

Doh, too late to edit the typo.

Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.

And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.

A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.

I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.

I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.

WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.

It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22...

And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.

(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)

I'll take that as a "no".

Dario has been writing long-winded essays like this since long before AI existed. I strongly doubt he's the type of person to delegate it to AI now.

"Pacing the frontier" sounds like something that was carefully wordsmithed in committee, to avoid terms like "slow-down" or "pause" that sound much more negative. They probably did ask an LLM to generate a list of options, because why wouldn't you? But the rest of the writing is almost certainly just Dario.

Is your "point" actionable? Are you recommending any change of behavior or policy?

But that's such a waste! 5 whole people taken out of the economy, no longer producing value, just going around consuming resources in retirement. How is that any better than me spending to build a nice house that facilitates my family's comfort and my friends' enjoyment of getting together to play games?

If you had ten million dollars, what would you spend it on?

Yeah I just think it's fun to tell the story.

No good reason, I'm just not familiar with power rails, nor was my contractor.

Sorry.

LLMs will tell you whatever you want to hear. You subtly direct them with the way you ask the question, and then they give you the answer you want. That's basically what they're trained to do. So of course they always give you the answer you want -- but you can't just go around telling people to ask an LLM to back up your argument, as other people will get a difference answer.

I never use AI to write!

But also I wrote this in 2024, which was before I used AI to do anything.

This may be hard to remember but in 2005 (when I joined Google), everyone pretty much universally loved them and thought they were making the world better. I left in 2013, in part because the company was gradually turning into something different.

I just feel like, the whole point of travelling is to experience different environments. Isn't it more fun to stay in a different fancy hotel every time, than to be in your same old yacht you've been in many times before?

I'm also confused about people who own many vacation houses. Why not just rent a different fancy house each time? Less expensive, less trouble, more variety, you can experience more places...

FWIW, the 4070 was $600 at the time. You could indeed build a great gaming machine around a 4070 at much lower cost, but a few things inflated the price for me:

* I included the fairly nice 4k monitors ($750) in the price.

* The motherboards were stupidly expensive ($450) since I wanted something with 10G networking onboard, to support the netboot setup.

* The super-long fiber optic HDMI and USB cables are on the order of $150 each (and each computer needs one of each).

* Rackmount gear, which is stupidly expensive when purchased retail. (Datacenters obviously don't buy this stuff retail, so it's a weird market.)

* I think I included the networking gear and some other not-per-machine stuff in the figure. My spreadsheet from the time shows $3,067.64 per machine before tax.

(I am not trying to make any particular point here, just providing data for those who are curious.)

Hmmmmm.....

Just kidding. Gotta say I never understood the appeal of yachts. What does a yacht give you that a fancy house doesn't? It's on the water? So what? It's not like it goes fast enough to be a worthwhile form of transportation...

I do totally get private jets. They are fancy, but also get you somewhere. LAN party jet? That'd be a cool way to pass a long flight. Hey guys let's LAN party to Tokyo!

(I do not expect I'll ever have private jet money. Please don't eat me.)

All the long cables are Monoprice.com "slim run" fiber optic cables.

The HDMI pretty much just works. Even at 8k resolution. Note that last I checked, Monoprice's DisplayPort cables (as opposed to HDMI) only supported an older standard and they don't handle 8k. Most of my monitors are 4k though, and the DisplayPort cables work fine for that.

USB can be finicky. Sometimes certain devices, or plugging and unplugging devices too much, can "crash" the USB cable, requiring a "reboot" by unplugging it and plugging it back in, from the computer end. But if you're just using a keyboard and mouse through it it's basically fine.

You can get ultra-long HDMI and USB extenders that use fiber optic cables.

Monoprice.com in particular sells these under their "slimrun" line -- that's what I used in the house.

They are often technically not spec-compliant but work just fine in practice.

Oh, we figured this out, maybe I should update the page.

It turns out at installation time the installer set all the fans on "high", and I left them that way stupidly thinking: "Well, I like circulation, and the power meters show the fans aren't actually using much power, so I'll just leave it like that."

Changing them all to "auto" fixed the problem.

It turns out that while the fans themselves weren't using a ton of power, their activity caused the heat pumps feeding them to work harder. In retrospect it seems not that surprising and I feel pretty dumb about it.

(And yes there are a lot of windows but they are not south-facing and they are all tinted in a way that blocks most of the sun's energy.)

My dad was able to pay for me to attend the University of Minnesota.

More importantly though was that my parents fed my childhood fascination with computers, making sure I had the opportunity to learn to code early (a volunteer at my school taught me BASIC at age 8; my parents bought me a PC so I could continue experimenting) and then they gave me a lot of free time to spend building things and learning. After I graduated my mom let me spend a couple more years in her basement just working on open source software projects. These are certainly privileges that wouldn't be possible if my dad didn't have comfortable income.

I got into Google by applying on the web site and showing them my projects.

If you read it in context, I am making a comparison between computers and cabinetry, and noting how absurd it is that the technological marvel that is a computer costs a similar amount of money to the cabinet holding it, which is just some wood and hinges. One would almost expect the computer to cost millions of dollars, but instead it costs thousands.

Maybe "cheap" was a poor choice of word for this. Sorry.

Views on wealth haven't changed.

The reactions to my first (much smaller) house in 2011 were very similar.

Oh hello! This is my house! Thanks for posting!

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977

Unfortunately this new thread was posted while I was asleep, and so I haven't been online to answer questions as the thread developed. Whereas in the previous thread I participated from the start.

Pro tip to anyone whose stuff gets posted on HN: It is a completely different place when the author is present.

If you're present, then the people who are inclined to post cheap criticisms shy away, and the people who want to ask questions and learn show up.

(Aside from the house, I've had my work at Cloudflare posted many times, and seen this pattern in those posts.)

It's because this latest thread was posted while I was asleep. :/

HN is a massively nicer place if the author is present to interact. The people who are inclined to criticize don't want to do it to people's face, and the people who want to act questions are more eager if someone is there to answer.

It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing.

Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.

Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.

Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?

Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.