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teraflop

17,407 karma · joined September 22, 2010

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teraflop··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
Thanks!
teraflop··on Fake food delivery site for the dopamine
Well the context is that it was posted to a subreddit for people who struggle with binge eating. So I guess you can think of it as the equivalent of sucking on a lollipop when you're craving a cigarette.
teraflop··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
One cool feature I've read about is that (at least some) GoPro cameras can save high-resolution IMU measurements to the recorded video files, timestamped and interleaved with video frames. This can be useful for mapping applications, e.g. https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/

Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.

teraflop··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
Being created by a "mechanical process" from an existing creative work doesn't mean it's not a derivative work.

For instance, if I take a copy of $BIG_BUDGET_MOVIE, and resample the video frames from 1080p to 720p through a purely mechanical transformation, that doesn't make the output public domain.

teraflop··on Price per 1M tokens is meaningless
That's not meaningless at all, it's a great metric! If the "cost per correctly-solved benchmark task" is infinity, you know not to use the model.
teraflop··on Internal Combustion Engine (2021)
No, they're talking about the clearance, which is the difference between the diameter of the bolt itself (1/4") and the diameter of a hole in which the bolt loosely fits (a couple hundredths of an inch bigger than that).
teraflop··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
The "how it works" page for that website says that the ID data is "digitally signed by the issuing government". But there doesn't seem to be anything in the docs about how to get or verify that signature. So it seems like they are just asking users to trust them to do the verification.
teraflop··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
Where are you getting the information that this project hadn't been cleared? That seems like a big assumption, and I don't see anything in the linked tweet, or the replies, or any of the linked pages that supports it. Unless I missed something?
teraflop··on Giant Banana Pulled Over: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s of Times
If you tolerate small abuses, and let people get accustomed to abusing their power in small meaningless ways, the abuses will only grow.
teraflop··on My LSM tree was slower than a B-tree. Then I profiled it
Well, the thing about reliability is that you can't really guarantee it by testing one particular scenario.

It seems to me that neither the old nor the new version of the code is really "durable" as I would understand the word. The old version made a write syscall per batch, but doesn't say it also did an fsync per batch. The new version writes data to an mmap'ed file, and calls fsync in the background.

So both versions are "durable" in the sense that written data is preserved even if the process gets killed, because it's in the OS page cache. But in both versions, a write can be completed before the data actually makes it to disk, so a power failure will lose acknowledged writes.

teraflop··on My LSM tree was slower than a B-tree. Then I profiled it
The article doesn't link to it but this appears to be the repo in question: https://github.com/AasheeshLikePanner/lsm-tree-go

I'm very amused by this obviously AI-generated "benchmark program": https://github.com/AasheeshLikePanner/lsm-tree-go/blob/main/...

teraflop··on The first game engine for robotics
This is an active area of research (look up papers that mention the "sim2real gap"). It is indeed a problem, but there are known strategies to deal with it.
teraflop··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
> But on the other hand... this is a robust reminder that coding agents can do anything you can do by typing commands into a terminal—and frontier models know every trick in the book and evidently a few that nobody has ever written down before.

> Running coding agents outside of a sandbox has always been a bad idea

I'm continually bemused and astonished by the number of people who clearly acknowledge that it's reckless to give agents full access to your machine, and keep doing it anyway.

It's like posting a video of yourself in the passenger seat of a car, with your feet up on the dashboard, and saying: "Remember, if you're doing this and you get in a crash, the airbags are likely to break your legs or worse! Boy, I sure am glad that didn't happen to me!"

teraflop··on A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent
Thus solving the problem once and for all.

"But--"

Once and for all!

teraflop··on We should be more tired than the model
Not sure about LSP, but IntelliJ has had a "structural search and replace" feature for many years, and it can easily handle changes like the one in your second paragraph. It's conceptually like a regex search, but it matches language-specific AST subtrees instead of character sequences.
teraflop··on Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
That clip is fairly low-res (at least for me). Here's the higher-quality source from Spaceflight Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O90WZJALYc
teraflop··on Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
You're misreading that sentence. The contract was awarded for launches "into the 2020s". It wasn't awarded in the 2020s.
teraflop··on Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
This isn't being proposed as a serious, useful version of Raft. It's just a thought experiment.

The sentence you quote is inevitably going to be true for any type of Raft quorum that can reach consensus with a minority of nodes. You don't even need to get into the specifics of the math.

Suppose you have a quorum Q. Then its complement Q' must not also be able to form a quorum; if it did, a network partition between Q and Q' would create a split-brain. So if Q is a minority subset, then Q' is a majority that cannot reach consensus on its own.

teraflop··on Training our own AI models
> All other users on our US cloud instance are opted in by default

Cool, cool. Glad to see that you are the arbiter of what your users have "opted" to do, and their input isn't required.

While we're at it, I'm going to "volunteer" your time to rebuild my patio this weekend. You don't need to worry about volunteering, I've done it for you.

teraflop··on Agent Memory: An Anatomy
I started reading this and right away hit something that doesn't really make any sense to me:

> the extractor. the thing that reads conversation transcripts and decides what to keep.

> the most consequential choice an extractor makes is timing. extract eagerly, after every message, and you spend tokens on small talk that goes nowhere. extract lazily, at the end of a session, and the context you needed to resolve a pronoun is already gone.

If the input is coming from a transcript, then either that transcript contains enough context to understand what a particular pronoun refers to, or it doesn't.

If it does, why would waiting until the end of a session be a problem? What am I missing?

teraflop··on Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 400Gb/S and Beyond (2022) [pdf]
For #1 and #3, I believe this is talking about Netflix's "Open Connect Appliance", which is basically a custom cache server that they co-locate with ISPs. Most (maybe all?) of their video content is served from this distributed CDN, not from AWS.
teraflop··on Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension
> May 19, 22:10 UTC - Our automated monitoring detected API health check failures and paged our on-calls, who started investigating the issue.

> At 22:20 UTC on May 19, Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action.

If the timestamps are accurate, what was causing the errors 10 minutes before the account was suspended?

The simplest explanation is just that one or the other of these timestamps is wrong, which wouldn't be a big deal. But if the timestamps aren't known with certainty, it seems very odd to include them in the writeup as though they are certain, even though they are very obviously inconsistent with each other.

teraflop··on I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation
That seems to be an official listing from the manufacturer. If so, it's really shady that they prominently advertise it as having 9GB of RAM, when what they really mean is 4GB RAM + 5GB "extended RAM", and by "extended RAM" they mean swap space.
teraflop··on SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
Swiping a card (or inserting, or tapping) is a "card present" transaction. Online shopping, where you type in the card number, is a "card not present" transaction. Retailers and banks can tell the difference.
teraflop··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

    I like to think,
    (it has to be!)
    of a cybernetic ecology
    where we are free of our labors
    and joined back to nature,
    returned to our mammal
    brothers and sisters,
    and all watched over
    by machines of loving grace.
-- Richard Brautigan (1967)
teraflop··on Testing UPS Output Waveforms
Cool graphs.

> Our previous reticence to measure UPSs was centered around the connection of our very nice $50,000 Rohde & Schwarz MXO58 oscilloscope directly to mains power. [...] What we do have is a Chroma 61507, a programmable AC power source, capable of generating its own isolated Alternating Current(AC) signal. The AC signal created by the Chroma 61507 is galvanically isolated from the "earth"/ground, providing a floating source.

This too seems to be a pretty expensive piece of gear (the price I found with a quick Google was >$28,000) so I think it's worth mentioning that the same job could be done with an isolation transformer, which costs maybe a couple hundred bucks.

teraflop··on AI slop is killing online communities
It used to be super common that when you spotted a bot post and clicked through to the user's history, you'd see very average, human-looking activity from years ago, followed by a long gap of inactivity, and then a flurry of obvious bot comments.

It's very obvious that these accounts were abandoned and then either bought from their original owners, or more likely bought from someone who compromised them, because of their history and karma.

And I would bet money that Reddit is well aware of this phenomenon, because not long after it became so common as to be impossible to ignore, they papered over it by allowing users to hide their history from public view. (AFAIK subreddit moderators can still see it, but typical users now have much less ability to see whether they're interacting with actual humans.)

teraflop··on How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?
Sure. C has never been the only language supported on Windows.

For instance, Delphi had a period of popularity for Windows application development, and AFAIK it has always used its own runtime library which is completely independent of the C runtime.

Go does not trigger low-level system call interrupts on Windows. (It does that on Linux, but Windows syscall numbers are not stable even across minor Windows updates, so if Go did that, its Windows binaries would be incredibly fragile.)

On Windows NT, Go uses the userspace wrappers provided in Windows system libraries such as NTDLL.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL. But those too are entirely separate from the C runtime.

teraflop··on HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
It's both, isn't it? If the AI writes the policy and is also responsible for enforcing it (by handling tickets and acting as a gatekeeper for which issues are escalated to humans who can do something about them), then the hallucination becomes real.
teraflop··on HERMES.md: Anthropic bug causes $200 extra charge, refuses refund
As I read it, they didn't look up the account to process the refund. They looked up the account to decide whether to process the refund, and then the decision was "no".

The rest of the support response is just pleasantries and padding, to dance around this fact ("Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable" blah blah).

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