arconis987

next time, have the LLM alternate between these two steps:

- Do some work - Critique the work

it will converge better

would like to see work like this, but for datasets in the hundreds of TB or single-digit PB

but i definitely agree about this point

Cluster fatigue is real

imo, the concept of “extremely ephemeral query workers” is under-explored

stateless, maintenance-free, burstable fleets of query workers is what I would like to see more of in the future.

it’s how we do it, and it gives us full-text search on multi-hundred terabyte data sets in S3, where queries finish in a handful of seconds. our approach: https://docs.scanner.dev/scanner/what-and-why/how-it-works/h...

anyone else doing ephemeral query workers fleets?

I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip.

Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.

Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.

Is it just me, or is the language in the essay strangely hard to parse?

But insofar as it is the passing on of second-hand knowledge about being, it is itself a form of imposture that reproduces and impersonates without meaning or sense and therefore enacts imposture in the act of naming itself as well as in the manner that it imitates an act of passing on knowledge of an existing disease or syndrome.

The essay doesn’t actually have a lot to say, but that fact is hidden by convoluted language.

Maybe the author is trying to give the reader impostor syndrome?

I think this is why people believe 10x developers exist. They are just developers who actually work a full work day consistently.

The NYT vs. SSC episode reminds me of a conflict in Mormonism, the religion I was raised in. A Mormon named John Dehlin criticized the church, and Mormon apologists published a hit piece about him, taking quotations out of context and claiming he was not a true believer. The apologists ended up experiencing a lot of backlash, and their organization, FARMS, had to close down.

The NYT piece on SSC felt like a religious crusade to reveal a blasphemer, taking quotations out of context and making weird, tenuous connections to other known blasphemers.

Count me as another data point. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and it has not affected my social or professional life in any noticeable way. I was worried I would lose access to my Oculus purchases, but I did not.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was reading my ads profile summary in Facebook settings. It claimed I was in “Established Adult Family Life with Children” or something similar. This was revolting. I was disturbed that Facebook seemed to know I was expecting a baby. I realized that Facebook was extracting far more value than it was giving, so I deleted my account.

Figma is written in C++, compiled to WebAssembly. Probably the most advanced web-based design tool in the world.

I think they have like 4-5M users, and a $2B valuation.

https://madewithwebassembly.com/showcase/figma/

This is my go-to implementation, but I make one little tweak. It’s very unlikely that you will overflow a long, but you can you guarantee that you’ll avoid overflow like this:

mid = min + (max - min) / 2;

We went through a brutal battle with Postgres bloat recently. Indexes were composed of 80% bloat, 20% useful data after years of heavy write activity. Vacuuming indexes was getting slower and slower, bringing us precariously close to transaction ID wraparound outages.

Glad that pg_repack exists, which is an extension that can be used to elegantly rebuild your indexes from scratch.

Looking forward to zheap! (Which should obviate the need for index rebuilding)

This is fantastic! Love the parallel vacuum feature, which should help my team’s sanity with a write-heavy workload.

Does anyone know when the zheap storage system will be released? This system will apparently obviate the need for vacuums all together since old row version information will be kept in an undo log instead of in the heap. This will be a game changer for us.

The 50% tax that pg dislikes for startup founders is basically what I experienced during our startup’s liquidity event. I imagine that a fairly large number liquidity events are the same.

The acquirer paid us out in cash, which meant we were taxed at the highest marginal federal income tax rate of 37%. California taxed 10%, making the total 47%.

I only kept a little more than half of the upside, but it was still life changing.

I had to pay the taxes immediately. In pg’s example, the wealth tax would require payment over 6 decades, which is easier.

The wealth tax seems fine to me.

Agreed. Seems like a bit too much self-aggrandizement. This sort of lofty rhetoric is fine if you have developed a COVID vaccine, but perhaps not if you’ve made a useful tool for system analysis. The teams that built Linux, Redis, Postgres, etc. were realistic and concrete about their value propositions and did not make any pronouncements like, “we’re changing the world.” Seems more honest.

Happy middle: subscribe to one or two high quality sources of news (eg. NYT, WSJ). Less clickbait overload than something like Google News or Facebook, and you get acquainted with the journalists’ styles, beliefs, and perspectives over time. Slower paced.

I’m very curious about spiritual confirmations of truth. What was your spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon like? How do you know that the spiritual experience came from an external source and was not just generated by your brain?

[Edit: Asking because I wonder often about the provenance my own spiritual experiences. I’m currently leaning toward “generated by the brain,” but I would love to be wrong about that.]

If you’re interested in crypto currencies, I know that Coinzoom, based in Holladay, is looking for mobile developers.

Might seem stupid, but I found the following thought experiment interesting. Discovered it on Reddit.

The OP was working in the finance sector surrounded by people whose values conflicted with his.

He wrote something like this:

If you are in an environment surrounded by people with whom you disagree, pretend that you are a Federation officer in an exchange program serving on a Ferengi vessel. Most of the crew’s values will bother you, but you’re not there to correct Ferengi culture. You’re there to learn whatever there is to learn from them and contribute in a positive way to the running of the ship. Being combative won’t change the Ferengi, but your positive example might update some views.

I’m so grateful to have worked with older colleagues who did not care about using the framework du jour. Influenced by their experience, we made some unorthodox tech choices as a web startup, including the choice to use C++ and Lisp-like languages heavily, and it worked out beautifully. From them, I learned that it is more important to ship simple, fast code than to contort your system to use the latest tech fads when it doesn’t make sense.

The generational index idea was exactly what I needed for a search index project I’ve been working on. Makes it much easier to safely insert and delete from a memory arena.

Also, fascinating that Rust’s borrow checker sort of encourages you over time to adopt an entity component system architecture instead of a naive OO architecture.

According to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, younger people have emancipative views at a higher rate than older generations. They tend to support their LGBT friends and family, same sex marriage, gender and race pay equality, immigration, and other ideas that are meant to increase the freedoms of marginalized groups. Not all religions oppose these things, but the organizations that most fervently oppose these things today often do so for religious reasons.

This may be one explanation for why religious adherence is diminishing among younger people.

I suspect it’s better with most Christian religions, but when I left Mormonism, I felt a huge burden lifted.

It is difficult to be obedient to every last commandment in Mormonism. I would feel guilty for a multitude of small things, like forgetting to read religious texts one day, forgetting to visit my assigned home teaching family one month, simply thinking of a swear word, drinking soda with caffeine, and many other insignificant foibles. I also felt tormented by the fact that my conscience did not align with what I was told God thought was right, particularly regarding the treatment of LGBT people in Mormonism.

I became an agnostic secular humanist. My mind no longer considers my prior thought patterns healthy, and I practice mindfulness meditation to stop unnecessarily negative self-talk.

Now that I don’t have to be perfect, I can be good.

Someone please correct me, but here's my best explanation.

When you first connect to the Bitcoin network, how do you find out what the true blockchain is? You connect to other nodes and ask them. They may tell you anything. However, it's easy to verify whether a blockchain given in a response is valid. That is, it's easy to tell if a given blockchain is following all of the rules.

But what if you receive a few valid blockchains that are different from one another? Which one is the true blockchain for the world?

You simply choose the longest blockchain that you hear about.

Why the longest? It's the one that has had the most computing power focused on it. Anyone can compute a very small, self-serving, malicious blockchain of a few blocks. But to compute the longest blockchain in the world requires vast computing resources. The longest blockchain is supposed to be uncontrollable by any single party or network of colluders because it is supposed to be too hard to acquire the majority of the computing resources in the world.

Unfortunately, it looks like someone did just this and controlled >51% of all computing resources in the world dedicated to Bitcoin Gold. If you have enough resources, you can generate the longest blockchain in the world, add a self-serving transaction, get some goods or service in return, then recompute a new longest chain in the world where that transaction is no longer there. Everyone by default accepts the longest blockchain because it's supposed to be the most safe, but they are wrong.

A similar problem was in Google Code Jam 2009 :)

https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/188266/dashboard

Have you tried Sciter? https://sciter.com/

It's a lightweight HTML and CSS renderer for native desktop apps. Used heavily in the anti-virus industry. Not open-source, unfortunately.

It was from a video where Don Knuth recreated one of his first lectures.

https://youtu.be/jmcSzzN1gkc

At one point around 20 or 30 minutes in, he says something like, “We’re going to start easy and slow and then work harder later on.” He exhaustively writes out a large number of different combinations of possible runtimes of an algorithm. It seems quite tedious, but eventually some cool results emerge related to Sterling Numbers :)

At first, I thought it was somewhat annoying that the lecture was methodically going through so many examples. Since then, I’ve realized that methodically going through small sub-problems patiently is often the way you eventually get to a giant leap.

This approach is immensely helpful to me as well. Started practicing problem slicing after watching a lecture from Don Knuth. He started by writing down a problem and underlining it. He then solved small bits of it and worked through many examples that seemed almost trivial. Eventually, some amazing results began to emerge after the many trivial examples were worked through. Impressed on me the power of breaking a large problem down into small, simple parts and working through them one at a time. I think problem slicing is one of the only ways to actually solve some kinds of big problems.

I wonder what kinds of communities will replace religious communities.

I worry that people may tie their identities to political tribes more and more.

What communities provide a healthy sense of identity and belonging that are not religious or political?

Thrash metal, like Metallica or Anthrax. Nothing too dark though.

This is bizarre, but a simple algorithm works for me. Whenever I am exhausted and don't feel up to tackling another task, or whenever I'm afraid to approach a daunting project, I remember the inspiring words of my high school baseball coach. He'd say this partially in jest but partially seriously:

"Hey! Stop being a lazy piece of ...!"

When I tell myself that a task has world-class difficulty, and that accomplishing it would be an amazing feat, the task becomes highly daunting, and I procrastinate more. However, when I tell myself that the task should be done as a matter of course but that I'm being too stupidly lazy to accomplish it, the task becomes less daunting, and I procrastinate less. Expectations of normalcy change.

A similar effect occurs when you join a world class team and suddenly learn that they're doing ten tasks in a day that you once considered remarkable to finish in a week. Expectations of normalcy change, and big tasks seem far less daunting, so you procrastinate less.

You are absolutely correct. There is no official Mormon policy of shunning. The teachings from the leaders of the church on this matter are very generous and admirable and tend to be along the lines of something like, "reach out in love."

I guess what I was referring to is a kind of informal shunning where close friends or family suddenly cut off contact with you when they learn you have left the church. It would be nice if more people followed the loving teachings from leaders. Many continue to maintain loving relationships, but others want nothing more to do with you, even after years of friendship.

I take responsibility for this relationship shifting to some degree. Sometimes I wish I had never told anyone I had left the church so my friends and family would assume I was still part of the tribe. It's not easy to hide it though since various small hints can give it away, like being seen with a coffee or without your temple garment undershirt. It's difficult.