papaver-somnamb

Bravo! If only Clojure(Script) did this. There is a real need to reduce the size of compiled JS delivered to the browser and eliminate legacy dependency on goog.

After reading their newspaper (their label, not mine) for years, I've come away with three revelations: A) More than gaining insight and staying abreast of events, what I was really purchasing was the /feeling/ of being in-the-know. B) Whenever I met with "certain" people, they were likely to also read The Economist which turned out to be another, tremendously handy means of anchoring conversation. C) The trade balance tables on the inside back page were always interesting, sometimes jaw-dropping.

I feel this is closer, but still not equitable. More people owning less, but what about the vision that holds the ship together and leads the org to the goal? In the case of SpaceX, it's Elon and to a lesser extent Gwynn by way of osmosis that hold the light aloft. We force division of wealth, then what about the leadership and direction? SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and much more damn the torpedoes no one can stop me.

Billionaires are characterized as such due to their net wealth. They don't actually have that amount in cash silently rotting in bank accounts.

What wealthy people, and people more generally, do have is ownership of assets and debts, where the grand sum >= +1B$. Case in point, Elon owns significant portions of valuable companies.

Patent nonsense such as

> So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money.

belies a gross misunderstanding of these valuations. No, Elon is not sitting on whatever money. He might only have 1Ks or 10Ks splashed throughout several accounts. If he is mid-transaction, then that figure may come into play, but only briefly. Some billionaires, sure, they may actually have cash of that magnitude on hand ready for deployment. For plenty of even more down-to-earth wealthy folk, even 2K burns a hole in their pocket because they haven't found where to invest it yet.

And so what is Elon and others like him supposed to do? Divest his "money" to the general population in search of equal outcome (and not equal opportunity)?

We need a few people to rise to pinnacles, this is one effective path to creation of markets. Allowing them to concentrate such power and wealth unchecked, though, is a great mistake. And that's on us, the people.

10GbE adoption feels different from the successful string of standard speeds that came prior, since the market congealed around one standards family per Ethernet speed circa say 100Base-TX. We've heard stories as horrific as RJ45 assemblies heating up to a degree such that thermoplastic would flow.

Was some threshold crossed where 10Gbit over CAT6-whatever cabling is crossing physics thresholds? Or perhaps 10Gbit was brought to market when tech supporting copper connections wasn't yet mature enough?

I recall someone (name escapes me at the moment) defining WW3 as ignition in 5 flashpoints between belligerent groupings: - Eastern Africa esp. Sudan, which we all nearly universally ignore - Israel Iran - Russia and a neighbor which we know today is Ukraine - Pakistan Afghanistan India - China Taiwan Plus Plus

Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC: Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation. Case in point: North Korea developed nukes without being invaded, and now that they have nukes, other countries are watching and seeing that NK won't be invaded. What lesson do those other countries draw? And what of a world in which many potential belligerents hold nukes? Hiroshima weeps.

I'd like to add an important attribute here: The revolution will be live-streamed, more-or-less. And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons. I predict this fact will not distress many people, such is the state of humanity.

So to the 7 or so decades of stability we and our ancestors enjoyed, here's looking at you, going down me. But Brettonwoods serves the present the least of any time since its creation. Case in point, w.r.t. eastern Africa, the geopolitical bounds of those ~4 countries seems likely meld to a degree. If we are indeed heading into WW3, I expect the world map to be redrawn afterwards, and the only lessons learned is how to win better in future.

And if we are, while disgruntled old geriatrics go at each others throats via their youthful proxies, I greatly prefer the nukes rust in peace.

Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.' Aspiration, you gotta take care man, it just might kill ya.

Tony Seba around 10 years ago predicted (among many other things) that ~2024 the cost of generating a unit of electricity onsite with PV will cost less than merely delivering the same unit of electricity over transmission infrastructure, not even considering the cost of generating that unit.

Nowadays he is diving into what he terms the phase change disruptions where he explores and thinks out the ramifications of these disruptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9McWXZA5wc

Oh looky looky some of my fondly-remembered UIs: Platinum circa Macintosh OS 8. MacOS X lickables refined circa 10.3, 10.4.

I also fondly recall OpenLook on SunOS/Slowlaris and NeXTStep/OpenStep UIs and peak Microsoft Windows right on 2000 before the playskool never-ever-mix-orange-and-green Winblows XP. IRIX and plenty of Motif-esque joy on SGI.

UI elements were almost always distinct, understandable, consistent. If I was to actuate a standard UI control, I always knew exactly what I expected to happen before, and it happened exactly as I expected after.

Making them customized, themable, replaceable, more cool, well, that's what we have today, kind of in exchange I suppose..

Perhaps narrow your role and allow someone else to be responsible & accountable for driving the business side of things?

Take an honest assessment of how you can meaningfully contribute and concentrate on that, and pass the reins over to someone else who specializes in handling reins. Where are you best? Pushing forward on a long-held vision, planting a flag in the ground and rallying everyone to it, while ignoring petty concerns like a positive balance sheet? Great! Delegate that latter one to someone who specializes in it and then cooperate & thrive with them.

On the other hand, the plastic industry needs reform. Only about 1/3 of plastic produced is recycled in practice, and even then only once. Hardly the recyclable miracle that the plastic lobby has been messaging on since at least the 1990s. And what is the industry's response? Increased production YOY! Want truly recyclable materials, in practice? Glass. Steel, and some other metals. Fibers, like paper, to an extent.

That being said, I see a need for "base-load" plastic. Plastic is useful and we may forever need it, until at least something better comes along. Particular in key single-use applications like health services.

There was an interesting debate where Chomsky took a position on intelligence being rooted in symbolic reasoning and Asimov asserted a statistical foundation (ah, that was not intentional ;).

LLM designs to date are purely statistical models. A pile, a morass of floating point numbers and their weighted relationships, along with the software and hardware that animates them and the user input and output that makes them valuable to us. An index of the data fed into them, different from a Lucene or SQL DB index made from compsci algorithms & data structure primitives. Recognizable to Azimov's definition.

And these LLMs feature no symbolic reasoning whatsoever within their computational substrate. What they do feature is a simple recursive model: Given the input so far, what is the next token? And they are thus enabled after training on huge amounts of input material. No inherent reasoning capabilities, no primordial ability to apply logic, or even infer basic axioms of logic, reasoning, thought. And therefore unrecognizable to Chomsky's definition.

So our LLMs are a mere parlor trick. A one-trick pony. But the trick they do is oh-so vastly complicated, and very appealing to us, of practical application and real value. It harkens back to the question: What is the nature of intelligence? And how to define it?

And I say this while thinking of the marked contrast of apparent intelligence between an LLM and say a 2-year age child.

At risk of high-jacking this thread, some Merchants of Record (i.e. Paddle) require biometric authentication of company majority owners, which I find too invasive. Are there any Merchants of Record that don't?

Sure, they handle taxation amongst many other conveniences. But despite their assertions of security and safety, we identified dumps for sale on the darknet of such biometric DB data exfiltrated from (continuing the Paddle example) Onfido. It left a sour note in our mouths and a lingering feeling of distrust, especially after we were recently the target of a spearfishing campaign using data obviously sourced from such auth providers.

Yes cultural fitness reasons. Everything off the top of my head (drawing from experience) are exactly that. Two quick examples: Conflicts of character between them and their uppers along the report line. Being tossed aside for failure due to reasons out of their control.

But the staff member is still damn good at something, and is in need of a different venue to shine.

This shedding activity is referred to as the child's playing-card game "baba-nuki" (Old Maid). You are drawing a card from the other company's hand but don't know what card it is because they aren't showing you the face side. There is an emotional element to it (as with nearly everything else here) but also, maybe most importantly, Japanese society is quite fluid this way, it's one of the country's strengths. Everybody can understand if it is explained to them.

On the point of Japanese companies shedding staff .. There is a friendly, win-win way to move skilled staff out of your company, but my impression is it's not widely known nor often occur.

When a company finds that a particular staff member "isn't a good fit for the company" they will add this person to an informal list that is traded through back-channels with other companies. At some future time such personnel might be directly approached by headhunters on behalf of inquiring companies. Of course the current employer overlooks the poaching activity, they want the member gone. The only clue the office gets is one day out of the blue that member shows up to work wearing full interview attire, and might soon after announce that they are moving on.

For the managerial tier and above, they frequently socialize and will have a sense of when it is time to move on, in accordance with societal expectations. Given that the managerial profession comprises a relatively smaller group in Japan, they can expect to land their next gig soon enough.

As for the rest, I've heard of plenty of tactics used to induce (eventual) voluntary departure, "black" or otherwise. I don't advocate for them myself, but the culture, market, and law is what it is..

The primary intended use case of this in contrast to say Extensible Data Notation (EDN) seems to be for faster machine processing. The necessitating of prefixing datums with their lengths (Pascal string style) alone is the clue. So an advantage here is it is much easier to place a hard bound on memory and CPU for reading this format, and confers security properties like systemically reduced possibility of buffer overflows. Good for hard real-time, for example guidance systems that do all allocation only at startup.

Beyond lists and string atoms (or whatever the actual list is), this format also makes an affordance for custom types, but as TFA points out, you still have to roll your own other / higher order data types. Data types that you almost definitely have on hand. Now we are talking about needing to do additional processing on the decoded output, just to interpret common data structures like associative arrays and sets. And as a machine-first serialization format, if you are interchanging with other people or with yourself in the future, sure hope you have full agreement on those custom types.

So what do you do: Add libs? Roll your own? Well, competing alternatives already offer that complete picture as mature, battle-tested solutions. So I'm inclined to view Canonical S-Expressions merely as a way-point on our path of technological evolution, worthy of fleeting, mild curiosity.

For a quintessential CP/M experience, run it on an S-100 -based system [0] with either an Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 CPU and some expansion cards that complete the system. Probably at least light I/O (incl. keyboard), disk storage, and graphics.

A tremendously great thing about these systems is that within a mere few years, 1 person can learn and understand the system in its totality, everything from basic electronics, circuit boards, power supply, through digital logic and components, OS and system, and up to user apps. There was a vibrant community of people making and contributing to these ecosystems, with complete systems, individual cards, upgrades and improvements, software, magazines, trade shows, and meets. Today we can recognize that as a nascent incarnation of the FOSS / commercial spectrum.

To me, it says something beautiful about the human spirit and condition. And how we are inexorably destined as a technological species. Perhaps all life capable of it is. OK I'm off to re-watch The Expanse now.

[0] http://cpmarchives.classiccmp.org/cpm/mirrors/www.s100comput...

That stippled background, and particularly with the X mouse cursor, brings back memories of long waits for X to start. New software updates were always exciting because they promised newer, more interesting graphics that showcased the capabilities of the hardware. Cooler icons! Motif! New ideas! And new hardware updates were even more exciting because they were expensive to get a hold of and highly anticipated. Faster drawing speed! Better resolution! Higher color depths! You could tell on a human scale how much faster the new hardware was and where your money went.

On the topic of X nostalgia, the monospace font used in TFA appears to be Go Mono, developed for golang. To me, it is heavily evocative of the console font on Sun Microsystems SPARC gear. Brings back another flood of memories.

> figuring out if people I just met were (1) right for the role, (2) work well with me, (3) I work well with them.

I recommend figuring out if: (1) they are good at doing what they'll be responsible for, (2) they enjoy doing it, and (3) if you can live with each other.

(1) You want to know that they will succeed in whatever you delegate to them. (2) Can they persist over the long term, seeing their tasks to completion and success? (3) Especially with a lower headcount, it's similar to a second marriage, and you might end up spending time with them more than the professed love of your life. Can you overcome conflicts?

> If I’m starting a company today, I’m simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1.

I'm coming round to the same opinion. A better-than-good ops person can have one of the largest influences on success. If we view success as parts preparedness, execution, and luck, they provided an outsized boost to all 3.

EDIT: Clarified the benefits of the ops person.

The judge said "it appears this case ends with me here in Saipan.” As this is in the context of the US case, I read that as precluding any further legal action from the USA. Also that as a condition of his plea bargain is indefinitely barred from entering the US. His flight from the UK to Saipan and onward home was not permitted to be on commercial flights; there is an active fundraiser to foot his 500K$ transport bill. So what conditions are waiting for him in his native Australia, and how free will he be to move?

Not directly on topic, but: Didn't use to be so interested in (or, allow my attention to be diverted to?) early human history and anthropology, until on recommendation I watched a movie "Man from Earth" [0]. Talk about baking your noodle: The story of someone claiming to be over 10K years of age, intimated to a group of academic peers that draw on their respective domain knowledge to assess the claim. Draws a fascinating, engrossing, not implausible yarn. Ya gotta wonder .. What would it have been like? Exactly how did we climb out of the muck?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=man+from+earth Viewable at no charge on Youtube!

> It just took 25 years to finally happen.

This is the Systems Thinking concept of systems delay, the time lapse between cause and effect, of an action and its downstream effects. Someone applying this cognitive skill, when informed of material changes like that fact that Boeing usurped some of the FAA's oversight, merged with with MD with its colorful history, etc., is bound to come to think of the effects of such changes and when their effects may start manifesting downstream, especially externally. In the case of Boeing, that means the safety of their aircraft.

When it comes to orgs that make essential contributions to society such as in commercial passenger aviation, I strongly prefer thorough and effective oversight by a competent and impartial body of that org's inner workings and output. Boeing had earlier established a strong reputation for safety and engineering competence. I have no problem with profits; that is what motivates capitalists in the system we have today, but I do have a problem with risking the lives and welfare of the uninformed public. With recent events, we learned the situation changed to foxes guarding the hen house.

Trust but verify indeed. That Boeing was able to so rampantly cut quality in the pursuit of revenues under the cloak of their sterling reputation seems in part to be a condemnation of greater society.

That is what oversight is supposed to be for, the delegation of trust so that we need not overwhelm ourselves in general life.

Once upon a time, I went on a spontaneous solo trek along a trail I stumbled upon, after crossing a large, modern bridge on foot. Lan Tau maybe. It was beautiful. The hills were remarkably fragrant, and I wondered if that's a contributing factor in how HK got it's name ("Fragrant Harbor"). Saw a collection of no-longer-tended graves in the traditional womb shape. And along the ridges with views on both sides, I could really get a sense of lay and scale of HK. It was so enjoyable that I even forgot my exhaustion until I was solidly back in the built environment.

That evening, when I returned and shared my excitement, I received a dressing-down for walking on the trails alone; explanation being people that have entered HK without permission or those fleeing within HK from like the law tend to hide out in the hills, and they are known to sometimes attack out of desperation or suspicion. To this day I'm still not certain about it, what was their reasoning rooted in..

This is where we learned that! Ceph does it, because separate components are responsible for each of underlying storage, S3 API, and FS API. We tripped on the Seaweed FS and the Garage FS indicia, where "FS" in these contexts typically means File System. But, neither SeaweedFS nor GarageFS is a File System at all; with grace and lenience they could be mildly regarded as Filing Systems, but the reality is that they are actually object stores. SeaweedOS? SeaweedS3?

JuiceFS isn't standalone, it requires separate backing storage for each of data [0] and metadata. So for example, JuiceFS would target SeaweedFS or GarageFS as its data store. JuiceFS can also target the local file system, but .. SDS use cases typically care about things like redundancy and availability of the data itself, things that JuiceFS happily delegates. JuiceFS itself can be distributed, but that's merely the control place as I understand it.

[0] https://juicefs.com/docs/community/reference/how_to_set_up_o...

Tried and rejected SeaweedFS due to Postgres failing to even initialize itself on a POSIX FS volume mounted over SeaweedFS' CSI driver. And that's too bad, because SeaweedFS was otherwise working well!

What we need and haven't identified yet is an SDS system that provides both fully-compliant POSIX FS and S3 volumes, is FOSS, a production story where individuals can do all tasks competently/quickly/effectively (management, monitoring, disaster recovery incl. erasure coding and tooling), and CSI drivers that work with Nomad.

This rules out Ceph and friends. GarageFS, also mentioned in this thread, is S3 only. We went through everything applicable on the K8S drivers list https://kubernetes-csi.github.io/docs/drivers.html except for Minio, because it claimed it needed a backing store anyways (like Ceph) although just a few days ago I encountered Minio being used standalone.

While I'm on this topic, I noticed that the CSI drivers (SeaweedFS and SDS's in general) use tremendous resources when effecting mounts, instantiating nearly a whole OS (OCI image w/ functional userland) just to mount over what appears to be NFS or something.

Progress that is highly welcome, to be sure. But what about Trust?

In a world of continuous data breaches, exfiltrations, malicious Three-Letter Agencies, incompetent and decades-behind-the-curve legislators, trust is a paramount factor. Trust that a given communication system's first allegiance is to the interlocutors(A), trust that my data won't be subjected to surveillance capitalism, trust that it won't be stripped mined for reflecting advertising right back at me for useless shit I don't want, trust that I can speak my mind without needing to continuously look over my shoulder with one eye pealed for powercenter goons sicked on me by partisan logic.

If you want me to trust your system, show me the complete source code, show me the disinterested third-party security reviews, show me what can happen at the ends, show me that it's not compromised by secrecy laws, along the full chain of custody.

A problem for our age, one step at a time ..

A) See? Even this assumption is a cardinal mistake!

Edit: Trust, but verify. Trust needs to be earned.

And not a single :require or outside library. Also, this pinball demo CLJS code seems to be being compiled directly within the browser. Want!

Let's go further. Imagine, a Clojure that directly produces WASM, without JS, without Google Closure. A Clojure that can target the browser and bring in NPM modules with alacrity, like shadow-cljs does today. This approximates the most forward-looking path for Clojure on web technologies I can think of at the moment.

Borkdude appears to have boundless energy. Just maybe, in the Clojure community, Borkdude is what comes after Chuck Norris memes. Does Borkdude ever sleep?

Thanks neonsunset -- so there is this relativistic argument to be made in favor of Rust.

Previously, I'd been involved in writing up samples of a CLI tool in each of Golang, Ruby, Haskell, C++, Python, Java, Clojure. From there we would select one language ecosystem to marry ourselves to and move forward. Every single one left us wanting in terms of either team capability/emotional levels, language expressiveness, distribution, speed, tooling, package management, etc. And I learned here that Rust seems to have each of these down pat to satisfactory degrees.

Next time I'm faced with birthing yet another CLI tool, I thinks I'm gonna try Rust first.

Thanks hobofan, this is the kind of insight I am looking for. Your input hit the spot!

| I click on their profile to check how old their account is. Invariably it's 2016 or later. Which means they never saw the cycles of Ruby, JS and Go promotion.

Provided that was the account they've been using since they started on HN ;)

What I find most impressive about Rust is the marketing.

It's not the language itself. It's not the safety and other attributes. And it certainly can't be the adoption (currently low % according to StackOverflow [0]).

It's how hyped Rust is. It's how effusive every blurb and sound bite seems to be. Glowing articles frequently make the front page of HN. Famous for penetration into Linux kernel development. What is this mechanism? Who is behind it? Is this veritable storm of hitting me on the head with Rust-this-Rust-that coordinated behind the scenes by some powerful entity? A hyperactive grassroots cheerleader squad? Does it infect C/C++ programmers who've dared to sample it once, turning them into noisy advocates, a la addictive drugs or parasitic fungi? Is Rust merely the It-Thing at the moment that people are mimetically/socially driven to latch onto?

We didn't see this with Lua, Ruby (that was mainly RoR anyways), Python, Swift, C#, certainly not newer-spec C and C++, or any of the others, even Java back in the day.

I don't know Rust, maybe it's deserving of the adulation. But I gotta say, the Rust marketing machine is one of the most superlative campaigns in IT I've ever seen.

[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022#most-popular-technologi...

Footnote: Some folk seem to be taking offense at my question where none is offered. I'm not for or against Rust, merely ambivalent & curious. Seen many of these waves come through, Rust is definitely the current wave, and the biggest so far! That is something I wish to learn from.