stackghost

Ah damn, I fell for it

> SamA

Not sure about the rest but you should be skeptical about anything that serial grifter says.

This is the guy so out of touch he thought it was a good look to post about how having LLMs summarize your children’s lives to you in a podcast was a “cool idea”.

He’s the reason Ilya and the other top talent left OpenAI.

He lied brazenly about the capabilities of GPT 5.

Anyways, They call him Scam Altman for a reason.

Years and years ago I wrote a PWA for my wife and I to sync lists (packing lists, groceries, TODOs etc) cross-device. It's been running in a docker container and only goes down when the server reboots for kernel upgrades. That's at least five 9s of reliability. It has 2 users.

Is that "Serious Software"?

Diplomacy can be really, really, fun but you absolutely have to play it with the right crowd. It's an acquired taste because you spend a huge chunk of the game telling bald-faced lies and talking out both sides of your mouth. Some people are good at not taking things personally, or having hurt feelings after the game has ended.

Other people, not so much.

Fun "easter egg" if you actually punch in the konami code (Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A) on a keyboard.

>DHH has only written web software and knows nothing about serious software development.

I don't particularly like DHH either but web software is definitely serious. Shopify (which you seem to have confused with Spotify) runs on Rails. So does GitHub.

Those are both huge platforms handling a ton of traffic. If GitHub isn't "serious software" then what is?

“Taint analysis” is certainly evocative.

>If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.

I mean, yes and no. Merely selecting the targets is not really an advantage in and of itself. I'm sure Iran could select hundreds of targets in the 48 States at the drop of a hat, but they don't have the air power to hit those targets so the air tasking cycle breaks down.

The air tasking cycle upon which modern NATO air campaigns are predicated and carried out is a cyclical 6-step process:

1. objectives not yet met/effects required

2. target development/selection to deliver those effects/meet those objectives

3. weaponeering, allocation, prioritization (can a hellfire launched from a drone do this or do we need something more specialized?)

4. actually write and issue the air tasking orders that cause air sorties to be flown

5. execution of said ATOs

6. assessment; GOTO 1

Normally this is a 72-hour cycle and your ops centre would be running 3+ of these cycles in overlapping fashion so that every 12-24 hours you have one loop reaching the top. AI appears to be in heavy use in the target development step, but there are diminishing returns for speed here. At some point there's just no added benefit for choosing more targets because aircraft can only transit to/from the area so fast. Also the other loops are still running and you're potentially developing targets without knowledge of effects being delivered by the other ATO loops so you're now wasting effort. In other words it's not like a computer where more hertz is better; you might get better results by simply waiting for one of the other cycle's kinetic results that will better inform your own target development stage.

Jeff Goldblum with a thinkpad, maybe

I don’t particularly care for MacOS but Apple’s hardware is generally best in class, particularly for battery life, touchpad, and other laptop specifics.

What if I told you that marine biology is a large and rigorous field that is not fully encapsulated by TFA?

They exhibit behaviours that seem to defy alternative explanations, though I doubt anyone could say for certain whether they do or don’t

Kudos to the author for not being so bitter and jaded, like me, and reporting this thinking some change might come.

I have mostly resigned myself to watching in unsurprised disgust as tech companies (aided by oodles of HN users who work there!) ruin everything they touch with legal impunity.

I realized long after the edit window expired that autocorrect changed it to “thus”.

> the design goal is not to maximise interactions

The design (not sure about its goal) maximizes incentive for medium-complexity ideas being expressed in comments with at most a handful of replies.

The “comments on a submission with ranking based on votes” model is fundamentally unsuited for in-depth, thoughtful discussions. Everything we write in this comment section will be mostly forgotten by tomorrow because there is no notification system for when someone replies to your comments.

Zero people are going back through old submissions more than a day or two old and looking for insightful comments to reply to.

> However, only some vowels

Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?

“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass

“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.

I wonder if there is a library to decipher brood war replay files. Perhaps an agent could learn by watching.

>Why wouldn't a person build that into the heart of something important?

Because it's inexpensive and not designed to be tamper-resistant. If preventing this type of thing is your goal there are chips out there designed to break irrepairably if tampered with.

Sure, but if you’re defending against a nation state actor hopefully you aren’t expecting a raspberry pi to keep you secure.

> The attack requires physical access, destructive preparation, and approximately $250,000 of laboratory equipment.

Not super practical, but neat attack

It’s my understanding that this subsystem that failed only allocates codes but I could be wrong there.

It doesn’t make sense to have other non-code allocation things competing for queue space with code allocations.

Very interesting. I spent a large part of my career in aerospace and never considered this failure mode before. It makes me wonder: how long is the pathological code allocation time? A few seconds, at most? We're talking about flight identification codes that are normally assigned upon takeoff and change at most a handful of times during a flight.

I assume the "manual request" is an aircraft squawking 7700 or similar, but why does the system need to interrupt an in-flight allocation in the first place? Any controllers here have insight?

One would think it would be sufficient to do something single threaded like

    if(!highPriorityQueue.empty() {
        highPriortyQueue.processOne();
    } else if(!lowPriorityQueue.empty()) {
        lowPriorityQueue.processOne();
    }

or whatever, but they're not and I'm curious why.

The vast majority of professional developers are not in a position where they can just swap out allocators willy-nilly. They take what they get, and write the code they're assigned to write on the platform the CTO or their product lead or whoever has decided upon.

Okay but do you think the hordes of JavaScript developers at FANG can just change the browser’s allocator?

The number of programmers who are in positions to care about jemalloc vs other malloc is minuscule

In the Before Times, the vast majority of software was written in garbage collected language where a working knowledge of the relative merits of C memory allocators is not useful or particularly relevant.

Why would the scads of people writing JavaScript, Java, python, go, rails, etc need to be aware of jemalloc?

Writing an allocator is simple, you’re correct, but writing an allocator that doesn’t suck is not simple.

Why?

Can't vouch for that but I can vouch for `Dreyer's English` as both hilarious (if you're the sort of person who relishes finding le mot juste, like me) and excellent as a style guide.

There are two visually similar sails. Some are rotating tubes that generate lift via the Magnus effect and even though they create low pressure zones, those are not “suction sails”, strictly speaking.

A suction sail is a more or less conventional airfoil that houses an axial compressor to basically suck in air which causes the boundary layer to stay attached which generates lift via the same mechanisms as an aircraft wing.

From a distance and to a casual observer they’re pretty similar.

TFA is the aerospace equivalent of rolling your own crypto. Outsiders often don’t know what they don’t know, resulting in fatally-naive “solutions” to the problems.