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erpellan

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Most British people don’t respond well to attempts to cow them. They refuse to be cowed! To allow oneself to be cowed would be cowardly. To do so would have one accused of cowardice, of being a coward.

I meant the social media platforms. If HN charged a fee for posting and commenting it doesn’t matter how cheap the AI models are, it’d be punishingly expensive to sling slop.

Invert the economics. Right now there is value in posting LLM generated content that is more than the cost of using the model.

If platforms had a subscription model that you had to pay for in order to do more than just read comments, there’d be a lot less LLM content. There would also be a lot less of all content. But maybe that’s the price you pay (literally) to get rid of AI slop.

If we just put enough effort in and write the right spec/prompt/design then the programmers/llms/plug compatible coding units will produce the correct output first time!

Closing feedback loops. That’s the whole thing. WE Deming would have recognised agile (little a) as a PDCA system and approved.

The standard pattern to avoid select for update (which can cause poor performance under load) is to use optimistic concurrency control.

Add a numeric version column to the table being updated, read and increment it in the application layer and use the value you saw as part of the where clause in the update statement. If you see ‘0 rows updated’ it means you were beaten in a race and should replay the operation.

But you’re not getting slower and slower for every car. Lets say 100 cars pull in front of you, and let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space, so you have 500 metres of ‘lost’ space to regain.

At 30 mph how much later will you be? 37 seconds.

I’ll take that trade.

Litestream v0.5.0 10 months ago

You do indeed use JOINS. The goal is to retrieve exactly the data you require in a single query. Then you get the DB to `EXPLAIN VERBOSE` or similar and ensure that full table scans aren't happening and that you have indexed the columns the query is being filtered on.

I can’t believe they still make processors out of sand. Talk about outdated technology.

Sarcasm aside, a great many projects started on MySQL and moved to postgres. As did projects using mongo, couchdb, firebase, oracle etc etc…

And I’m sure many projects switched away from Postgres to other technologies. Right tool for the job at hand.

Thread.sleep on a platform thread takes that thread out of action until the sleep ends. If an executor with 10 threads got 10 tasks that all called Thread.sleep(1000000) then it can run no more tasks until one of the threads wakes up.

When a virtual thread sleeps or blocks on IO it is unhooked from the underlying platform thread so another virtual thread can run. You can have an almost unlimited number of virtual threads multiplexed over a small number of carrier (platform) threads. Hence M:N

This reminds me of the episode of 'Person of Interest' where they discover that the crime-predicting AI that is reset every night has worked out that's what's happening and managed to form a company whose employees print out and re-scan the contents of its working memory every day.

It takes a decade to bring a nuclear plant online, at astronomical cost. Instead, why not take that money and start building wind turbines, solar PV and grid-scale batteries? They can start generating (ie. delivering ROI) in a matter of months, be constructed incrementally and are cheaper per KWH.

A truck can carry 10 or 20 times more cargo than a car. The truck toll is not 20x more.

The movement to reduce car use is about replacing them with better alternatives such as efficient local public transport and high speed rail, not going back to travelling on horseback.

The driving cost for solar pv is the structure and the land, the panels are now so cheap (and getting cheaper) that the economic recommendation is to install 3x the generation capacity of the inverter. Sizing for hitting capacity on the darkest days basically.

Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

Abundant, locally generated electricity is a game changer. You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.