It would obviously be beneficial to go from super expensive to free (Postgres). But no one does - why? Because sql is just a veneer over otherwise two completely different things.
2,105 karma · joined September 25, 2022
Good programmers might have made things that “performed well”, and had “few bugs”, without this step, but it was not robust to changes over time. If we end up in a place where every project has solid automated verification, perhaps things get better overall.
Genteel bees.
Yes. We are this generations highly skilled artisans, facing our own industrial revolution.
Just as the skilled textile workers and weavers of early 19’th century Britain were correct when they argued this new automated product was vastly inferior, it matters not at all. And just as they were also correct, that the government of the day was doing nothing to protect the lives and livelihoods of those who had spent decades mastering a difficult set of professional skills (the middle class of the day), the government of this day will also do nothing.
And it doesn’t end with “IT”; anything that can be turned into a factory process with our new “thinking engines” will be. Perhaps we can do better in society this time around. I am not hopeful.
“The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”
If you are in the US, pray that you are never weak.
I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files).
I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.
??? I’ve worked in this software game for over 20 years. I’m yet to experience this “no need to worry about the globe”. I think you have the fallacy of thinking local experience is general experience.
There is a very large amount of b2b software out there that is serving multi-nationals of all types. Perhaps it is surprising, but there’s a large number of software solutions that aren’t that big, but still have customers in all the 4 corners.
He constructs “true” complex numbers, generalises them over finite and unbounded fields, and demonstrates how they somewhat naturally arise from 2x2 matrices in linear algebra.
However, Sneakers was also released at around the same time, and that really captured my imagination and had a real lasting impact on my life. Hackers was fun, but Sneakers was aspirational.
How are you doing this via your phone?
Right. The lingo for this is “cascading alarms”, and there are various mechanisms to suppress consequential alarms if you design well. If an “upstream” alarm results in further alarms/events downstream; these should be suppressed (still recorded, just not alarms), until the root alarm cause is resolved.
I thought this was well understood in the industry, but perhaps not.
In general, operator UX (HMI, human machine interface), is a an area that’s well researched and more or less standardised in recent times (ISA101). Abnormal Situation Management (ASM), Situational Awareness, automatic alarm suppression for “consequential alarms”, High Performance Graphics (basically everything grey except the stuff that matters). If your Engineers do a good job; the operators can do a good job.
Removing all interlocks sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me. Interlocks are there to prevent the mis-click pouring molten steel on peoples heads. If you have a nice boring standardized ASM HMI, operators can’t “hide behind them”. Every operation is the same.
What this means for the user is your personal device is rather invasively managed. If you want Linux, your distro choice may be heavily restricted. What you can do with that personal device might be restricted (all the EDR monitoring), and you’ll probably take a performance and reliability hit. Not better than just a second laptop for most people.
I am arguing that all such people, whether developers or ops or ux designers or product managers; need to engage in this learning as they collaborate. This doesn’t mean that we want the DevPM as a resultant title, just that Siloing these different groups will lead to perverse outcomes.
Dev and ops have been traditionally siloed. DevOps was a silly attempt to address it.
I don’t think this is the right take. “Silo’s” is an ill-defined term, but let’s look at a couple of the negative aspects. “Lack of communication”, and “Lack of shared understanding” (or different models of the world). I’m going to use a different industry example, as I think it helps think about the problem more abstractly.
In the world of biomedical engineering, the types of products you are making require the expertise of two very different groups of people. Engineers and Doctors. A member of either of these groups have an in-group language, and there is an inherent power differential between them. Doctors are more “important” than engineers. But to get anything made, you need the expertise of both.
One way to handle this is to keep the engineers and doctors separate and to communicate primarily via documents. The doctor will attempt to detail exactly how a certain component should work. The engineer will attempt to detail the constraints and request clarifications.
The problem with this approach is that the engineer cannot speak “doctorese” nor can the doctor speak “engineerese”; and the consequence is a model in each person’s head that differs significantly from the other. There is no shared model; and the real world product suffers as a result.
The alternative is to attempt to “break the silos”; force the engineers and doctors to sit with each other, learn each other’s language, and build a shared mental model of what is being created. This creates a far better product; one that is much closer to the “physical reality” it must inhabit.
The same is true across all kinds of business groups. If different groups of people are required to collaborate, in order to do something, those people are well served by learning each other’s languages and building a shared mental model. That’s what breaking silos is about. It is not “everyone is the same”, it’s “breaking down the communication barriers”.
I’ve watched this guys stuff for years, and was excited about this making it to the front page. Very disappointing.
The “read the data out with a super expensive microscope” remained. Is there any way to defeat that attack I wonder? I suppose the hsm model of “destructive tamper detection” is one way.
I don’t exactly understand this setup. What’s the vm tech?
There are plenty of apps that do exactly this. Sublime was the best of them that I know.
Notepad was great for the opposite reason. It is ephemeral. I can use it as a scratch pad for passwords and what not, with the comfortable knowledge that it’s all cleared away next reboot.
You can bring classic notepad back, it’s still there, so that’s what I do.
Everything is still harder to get set up right on Linux, but it stays right. I’ve also found the LLM’s dramatically shorten the time required to configure things I don’t have experience with.
MS have abandoned their power users, and the power users (some of them at least), are abandoning MS. I keep Windows around in a VM for work purposes; never had a better setup! I’m in complete control of my PC again.
I don’t think so, I think it is solved in the general sense. However what Spanner does is unique, and it does use synchronised clocks in order to do it.
However, Spanner does not solve the inter-continental acid database with high write throughput. So I don’t see it as ground breaking. CRDT’s are interesting, I’ve followed your work for a long time, but too constrained to solve this general problem I think.
My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!