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aetimmes

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@NVIDIA. Former employers: Princeton University, Bloomberg, Twitter, SeatGeek.

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Only a small fraction of a typical barrel of oil is allocated to energy generation. The majority goes to transportation/industrial use-cases. The transportation usage can be allayed with sonar energy, but the industrial use-cases cannot.

Datacenters were very automated when RAM was infinite. As the world becomes compute-constrained, the economics may increase the demand for smart hands mixing-and-matching server components to turn two broken servers into one working server.

Running ad blockers for me is a matter of principle. The amount of tracking and telemetry that exists on the Internet is 1. massively invasive from a privacy perspective and 2. massively wasteful from an energy, bandwidth and time perspective.

If you have something worth selling, then sell it.

(disclaimer: I know OP IRL.)

I'm seeing a lot of comments saying "only 2 days? must not have been that bad of a bug". Some thoughts here:

At my current day job, our postmortem template asks "Where did we get lucky?" In this instance, the author definitely got lucky that they were working at Google where 1) there were enough users to generate this Heisenbug consistently and 2) that they had direct access to Chrome devs.

Additionally - the author (and his team) triaged, root caused and remediated a JS compiler bug in 2 days. The sheer amount of complexity involved in trying to narrow down where in the browser code this could all be going wrong is staggering. Consider that the reason it took him "only" two days is because he is very, _very_ good at what he does.

I think the word GP is objecting to isn't "your own" but rather "build".

For people who have taken empty lots and constructed new data centers (ie, the whole building) on them from scratch, the phrase "building a datacenter" involves a nonzero amount of concrete.

OP seems to have built out a data hall - which is still a cool thing in its own right! - but for someone like me who's interested in "baking an apple pie from scratch", the mismatch between the title and the content was slightly disappointing.

Right before the recent Twitter acquisition, the various bits of info that came to the limelight included the "minor detail" that they had more than doubled their headcount and associated expenses, but had not doubled either their revenue or profits.

Every tech company massively inflated their headcount during the leadup to the Twitter acquisition because money was free.

I interviewed at Meta in 2021 and asked an EM what he would do if given a magic wand to fix one problem at the company. His response: "I would instantly hire 10,000 more engineers."

Elon famously did the opposite and now revenue is down 80%.

Read through Understanding Software Dynamics by Richard Sites and work through the example problems in the book.

He discusses exactly what you're describing (L1/2/3 cache hit rates, their performance implications, how compiler optimizations can fool us into thinking we have a good hit rate, etc).

Also take a look into Intel VTune and Processor Tracing to understand how performance counters like Instructions per Cycle are calculated.

GPUs Go Brrr 2 years ago

Even if you're not familiar with the "go brrr" meme (which is the only use of meme-idiom in the article and is used exactly twice), its meaning is easily inferred via context clues from the opening paragraphs.

Good writing is also entertaining and engaging.

cmd.exe is a terminal emulator and PowerShell is a fully-formed scripting language (that Windows desperately needed). This analogy doesn't work the way you think it does.

Ultimately, in the age of massive cloud compute, the constraining resource in an organization is engineering hours, not CPU/memory/bandwidth. And even then, I've yet to encounter a system (outside of massively parallel MPI-based HPC) where saturating network pipes became the bottleneck for a system before CPU/memory utilization.

Microservice architecture means there's lot of data flying around, but it keeps local resource utilization predictable.

I don't understand why you would use tail recursive functions for fibonacci ever and hence its relevance for dynamic programming. It can be solved with a simple equation with one input parameter. Solution left to OP as an exercise.

Nomad is dead in the water.

When you talk to Consul support engineers, they assume you're using kubernetes, and are confused if you tell them you're using Nomad, _a product that their company makes_.

Firefox gets into the adblocker business

This would be an abysmal decision all around. Firefox doesn't have enough market share to command any sort of price for this, and selling ad-blocker access would immediately destroy all trust in Firefox as a product.