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smadge

1,716 karma · joined July 21, 2013

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smadge··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
I found it interesting that the bettors who threatened the journalist accused him of being motivated to manipulate the market. The journalist was motivated to report honestly, the bettors were the one trying to manipulate the market by changing the reporting.
smadge··on The Isolation Trap: Erlang
The prequel “Message Passing Is Shared Mutable State” makes the claim that highly scrutinized go codebases had just as many message passing bugs (using go channels) as shared memory bugs. But then this article claims the Erlang community has a record of higher quality and reliability largely through discipline and convention.
smadge··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
At another BigCo I am familiar with any external communications must go through a special review to make sure no secrets are being leaked, or exposes the company to legal or PR issues (for example the OP).
smadge··on Godot veteran says 'AI slop' pull requests have become overwhelming
It raises an interesting point. Code review is as much about educating the author of the code as much as ensuring the quality of the code. Why invest time providing feedback to a brick wall? LLMs aren’t going to “learn” from your feedback.
smadge··on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.

Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.

If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).

If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).

People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.

smadge··on The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers
The Russia reference doesn’t seem forced since the explanation for increased abandonments is attempts to skirt sanctions against Russian.
smadge··on How when AWS was down, we were not
I think a lot of web services talk about reliability in terms of uptime (e.g. down for less than 5 minutes a year) but in reality operate on failure ratios (less than 0.001% of request to our service fail).
smadge··on URLs are state containers
One might even say that hyperlinks are the engine of application state.
smadge··on Mamdani says he would phase out NYC gifted program for early grades
Can you share more about education in the USSR? My impression is that for all its faults, education is one area where the USSR excelled, with very high standards and outcomes.
smadge··on Indices, not Pointers
The distinction in the article really is between calling malloc for every added node in your data structure (“pointer”) or using the pre-allocated memory in the next element of an array (“index”).
smadge··on Citybound: City building game, microscopic models to vividly simulate organism
Treatment plant is optional.
smadge··on Researchers map where solar energy delivers the biggest climate payoff
California has the opportunity to be a beacon in North America for environmental and climate action e.g. by expanding solar production, finishing the CAHSR, and other projects like expanding and electrifying mass transit and commuter rail networks, but they are their own worst enemy.
smadge··on The "personal computer" model scales better than the "terminal" model
A telnet terminal isn’t a terminal by this logic because the text isn’t rendered on the server. A telnet server sends data to your device and your device renders it.
smadge··on National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility
I believe you are interpreting “business need” as “commercial need” when I think it’s more like “what is your business here?” Purely anecdotal, but when I visited Moffett Federal Airfield to visit the aviation history museum there I asked the security guard at the gate checking my ID if I could ride my bike around the base afterwards. He said I needed a business purpose to being on the base and that visiting the museum was a business purpose but biking around aimlessly wasn’t.
smadge··on First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor
It’s like the symbiotic relationship between humans and livestock.
smadge··on U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
What knowledge are you trying to impart with this fact?

Do CSB recommendations inform policy? Do CSB recommendations get implemented? Do CSB recommendations when implemented increase safety?

smadge··on GOP omnibus bill would sell off USPS's EVs
3 republicans are quoted in the article defending the proposal. Is there a better argument that the article didn’t quote?
smadge··on Benzene at 200
Maybe the target audience doesn’t need to be reminded, but benzene is really toxic and dangerous and it’s odd the article doesn’t mention that.
smadge··on An Interactive Guide to Rate Limiting
I have experience with token bucket and leaky bucket (or at least a variation where a request leaves the bucket when the server is done processing it) to prevent overload of backend servers. I switched from token bucket to leaky bucket. Token bucket is “the server can serve X requests per second,” while leaky bucket is the “the server can process N requests concurrently.” I found the direct limit on concurrency much more responsive to overload and better controlled delay from contention of shared resources. This kind of makes sense because imagine if your server goes from processing 10 QPS to 5 QPS. If the server has a 10 QPS token bucket limit it keeps accepting requests and the request queue and response time goes to infinity.
smadge··on IRS Direct File
What percentage of tax filers have a single W-2, maybe a 1099, and take the standard deduction? If I had to guess, 80%.
smadge··on The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland
I am curious what other factors were at play in those battles. It seems like first, Libya had no air support as western allies grounded Libya’s Air Force, second Libya did not have the logistics necessary to deploy their tanks so far from home, and third Libyan morale and training was low.
smadge··on The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland
Is that really the wrong decision for a technologically advanced and industrialized nation like Australia, though? If you can logistically afford to field an M1 Abrams you are going to win against an opponent who can’t field a similar tank, even if they can afford more of them. Additionally I imagine there are other benefits such as integrating with allies who use the same tank.
smadge··on 1,145 pull requests per day
> CL

Googler identified.

smadge··on 1,145 pull requests per day
One letter increments wouldn’t work because each commit has to leave the program correct. For example committing the first f of a for loop would leave the code with a syntax error. But you often should break up changes into as small as possible commits that leave the code correct. E.g. make one commit that refactors the code (no change in program output), then another change which implements the change in program behavior that motivated the refactor. This generally makes commits easier to review, less likely to contain defects, and easier to attribute bugs and roll back.
smadge··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
The light is already by necessity hooked up to the wheel for power and adding a switch and wires to the brakes adds another point of failure making the system less reliable, makes installation more difficult because you have to wire up to the hub generator and the brakes, and more expensive because more components.
smadge··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
That would be more difficult, expensive, and unreliable. The light is powered by the rotation of the wheel so it already has a reliable braking signal.
smadge··on How to Average in Prolog (2017)
*factorial function
smadge··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
Yeah, I have the Busch & Müller Toplight [1]. "The Toplight Line Brake Plus senses when the bike slows under braking and glows brighter. It does this by monitoring the AC frequency from the hub. During braking, the AC frequency slows quickly, and then makes the LEDs pulse or flicker, hopefully getting the attention of that fool in the jacked up SUV behind you."

[1] https://www.rivbike.com/products/dyno-rack-light?srsltid=Afm...

smadge··on How to Average in Prolog (2017)
It reminds me of a satirical post called “Evolution of a Haskell Programmer” in which a nice simple implementation of the Fibonacci function becomes more and more convoluted, abstract, and academic [1].

[1] https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

smadge··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
If you have a hub generator system, they sell rear lights with controllers which detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation and start pulsing when you decelerate.
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