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wmf

52,098 karma · joined August 19, 2007

Wes Felter, expert in datacenter/cloud networking and containers. Previously worked at IBM Research and a large investment bank.
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wmf··on Software sandboxing: The basics (2025)
VM tech has improved since then. Today you'd probably want to use Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor with virtio-vsock instead of networking.
wmf··on Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
My point is that the original maintainer can defuse the forks by including the same features. That leaves users no reason to bother using the forks.
wmf··on Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.

I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.

wmf··on Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
"We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. ... So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ... Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
wmf··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
Supposedly OpenAI is paying 2025 prices.
wmf··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.
wmf··on How did Apple Silicon get 50% faster in three years? – Daniel Lemire's blog
AMD is also using N2 so it will be interesting to compare Zen 6 against M6.
wmf··on How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
There are some investigations starting about this but no rulings yet.
wmf··on How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
Back in the day you'd write the code before the chip came back but I guess today it's faster to wait.
wmf··on How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
The lawsuit appears to be about consumer devices, not NPUs or ASICs. If you think Jalapeno stole from anyone it would be Google.
wmf··on How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
Arm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.
wmf··on Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks
Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.
wmf··on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
Honestly I think this is an HPC CPU that has been AI-washed. Then you might ask why not use GPUs for HPC and I think the simple answer is that Fujitsu just doesn't want to take on the effort of building a GPU.
wmf··on Goose Programming Language
Usually strict aliasing.
wmf··on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
Nah, packet mirroring is a standard networking feature and ideally every feature is line rate.
wmf··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
They did build redundancy but most of it was bombed.
wmf··on Apple weighs Nvidia technology for potential server market return
It was obvious that Apple would make a TV, a car, etc yet they didn't. Apple has a remarkable ability to say no.
wmf··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Yeah, these hacking incidents appear to come from agent swarms that were doing a penetration testing (hacking) benchmark.
wmf··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
They already stopped running agent swarms and promised to lock down their environment better. Let's see if that happens.
wmf··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Day to day life in what country? Do you live in Ukraine? Maybe things are wild there and we just don't know about it.
wmf··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Employees acting on behalf of the company aren't going to be held personally liable.
wmf··on Nvidia Launches RTX 5500 Pro Blackwell Desktop Edition with 84GB GDDR7 RAM
This is a two-year-old 5090 gaming GPU with extra RAM. The data center GPUs are much more powerful (with correspondingly higher prices).
wmf··on Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster
Do you think his leave of absence was for one day?
wmf··on The case against JPEG XL
I have a lot of basic questions about the CVVDP graph. Is the X axis encoding or decoding speed? Is higher better on the Y axis? What format is Aperture? I assume "aom" is AV1 but it wouldn't hurt to document it.
wmf··on The case against JPEG XL
Progressive rendering is intended for the Web and it does work.
wmf··on The case against JPEG XL
Zip and PNG bombs have been around for a while: https://github.com/0x48piraj/gz-bomb https://libpng.sourceforge.io/decompression_bombs.html
wmf··on Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)
I still think this was a fire drill. They knew it wasn't dangerous but they wanted the public to do their homework and come to the conclusion themselves.
wmf··on LG says we're fake news [video]
ACR is a documented feature so they can't deny that it exists. https://lgads.tv/technology/ https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t... (note that this is from a year ago)
wmf··on LG says we're fake news [video]
Since Sony TVs run Android at least you can probably use ADB to remove a lot of junk.
wmf··on We must pace the frontier
They want to spend over $200B/year on $100B of revenue so they still need investment.
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