throwaway894345

I'm not sure I agree (or maybe I misunderstand--I assume you're saying "the tool needs to be standard"?), but people use non-standard tools in C all the time. Every build tool or package management solution in C is non-standard. Every memory analyzer or static analysis solution is non-standard.

I think the real impediment isn't related to garbage collection, but it's just ecosystem inertia and industry knowledge inertia--the same forces that inhibit Rust adoption or C++ adoption or Ada adoption. Does that seem reasonable, or am I misunderstanding? What do you think?

Of course not, but an easy checkbox, a best practice AWS or terraform guide and someone doing AWS certified X associate makes it easier to happen without anyone ever really discussing it.

I'm defending your employer or their mindset, I'm just disagreeing with your claim that this follows from the parent's cost analysis claims. It _seems_ like your organization's problems are precisely because they _weren't_ doing the kind of cost analysis that the parent advocated. In other words, nothing in the parent's comment advocated for blindly following some Terraform guide. It feels unfair to the parent to suggest that their mindset caused your organization problems when it seems like your organization's problems were caused by _not having_ the parent's mindset.

GPGPU? General Purpose GPU? If embarrassingly parallel CPU algorithms weren't offloaded to the GPU previously, why would the A100/H100 price drop make a difference? We had cheap GPU in the past and we still left plenty of performance on the table with CPU programs because they were easier to build.

Is the idea that previously maintaining GPU programs was expensive whereas now AI makes it cheap? If so, I could buy that line of reasoning.

Maybe relatedly, I expect (hope) the hardware manufacturers will ramp up supply in the meanwhile which would also put downward pressure on GPUs. Right now though this hardware crunch is making me sad, not even because of GPUs but also because of general memory / disk.

At $dayjob we have the same mentality and as a result have a load of managed read replicas that are never used for anything (not reporting, not read only queries, not backups because $cloud handles it) that cost every month.

Obviously "let RDS manage your database" doesn't require egregious read replicas. The decision to use read replicas or not is completely orthogonal to whether you use RDS to manage them.

malloc and free are part of the C standard library. I don’t see the point in picking nits between language features you don’t have to use and standard library functions that you don’t have to use.

C's most famous issue is that it doesn't have a dynamic memory management concept at all. You can implement manual memory management on top of C, like you can in any language, but it is not a core feature. If C had manual memory management then it could be reasoned about, which would avoid many of the pitfalls associated with memory management being bolted on top

It seems like you’re conflating dynamic and manual memory management? Or maybe you are using these terms in a way I’m unfamiliar with. C definitely has manual memory management via malloc and free. It can be reasoned about, but doing so correctly is very difficult (this is what Rust’s ownership system formalizes, after all). I don’t think this is controversial?

If you are targeting a small microcontroller where you don't want dynamic allocation then things can get a bit weird having language features that need to be disabled or having to rely on outside processes (code review, linters, etc.) to control use.

C has dynamic memory (again, malloc and free) and thus it is in the same boat as other languages that have to take care to avoid using dynamic memory when writing embedded code (a decade and a half ago I was an embedded engineer using C and C++).

As long as it’s crystal clear from the source code, or I have a tool that tells me which line of mine is responsible for the allocation.

The tool is the escape analyzer, but I don’t think anyone has made it ergonomic yet.

Although it turned out in the end that C++ developers actually wanted to use C++.

Survivorship bias. You're only looking at the people who remained C++ developers. A bit like a politician bragging that they have 100% approval rating among their supporters even as their supporter count dwindles.

Go already runs on microcontrollers, but _just like C_, care must be taken to avoid using features that are not compatible with microcontrollers (such as dynamic memory).

I believe everyone agrees that a "better C" has to have manual memory management.

This seems completely wrong. Manual memory management is perhaps C's most famous issue. I'm sure _someone_ thinks manual memory management is a feature rather than a bug, but I don't think there's any broad consensus about this at all.

Moreover, Go gives you a lot of levers to control your allocations, and with some care (probably less care than writing correct C code) you can avoid allocating at all (this is how Go's own runtime works).

I agree, though as a side note I'm very curious to see how models will begin steering _our_ language. If you have popular models repeating "load-bearing" to every developer, eventually I imagine developers (especially junior developers who may not know that it's a Claudism) will begin to repeat it.

I've been using Go regularly since 2012. Worker pools are completely valid and idiomatic in Go. Not sure how you read that quote and concluded "toy".

Agreed, and more than that, those siloes are governed by democratic processes. Of course, democracy doesn't preclude abuse but it's a lot better than private governance.

lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal

I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.

Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"

The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"

Maybe if you're in a war that actually threatens your country. In the US, the Republican Party wages wars (such as the Iran War) pretty exclusively to facilitate borrowing public money and dumping it into the pockets of the rich. What looks like waste to the taxpayer is a feature to Republicans and their paymasters (including Israel, in the case of the Iran War).

Most "we need distributed coordination" turns out to be "we need one writer and a lock," which a single Postgres hands you for free

1. This article is about Cloudflare developing for their own internal control plane--I'm fairly certain their requirements preclude a single Postgres

2. Even if you're not Cloudflare, you may not want to be limited by the availability of a single Postgres instance.

The parent's claim was that Cloudflare is _implementing_ QuePaxa, not developing it, for whatever it's worth.

Yeah, for real. etcd is one of the biggest limitations to Kubernetes in my opinion. I would love to have a region-agnostic Kubernetes cluster.

“Guys, he’s obviously just trolling—he would never actually do that, it would be insane!”

-MAGA Right before Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, militarily occupy US cities, annul various amendments, start the Iran War, etc.

As an American, it helps that the US is actively self-sabotaging.

While I applaud the strides the EU is taking to decouple militarily, it's still a long ways away from replacing the security umbrella provided by the US military. The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure (although NATO provides a lot of interoperability between European militaries). It's no knock on Europe's efforts--it's just that the dependency on US military was almost a century in the making--it's not going to be undone overnight. But Europe is moving in the right direction--I just hope Europe stays the course and continues to take it seriously.

IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.

I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.

I’ve been saying this for 20 years. I care much less if the game is visually stunning than if the core game is fun. It could be a paintball themed FPS for all I care as long as the core mechanics are fun and the story is engaging, I care very little. Also, good graphics don’t have to be hardware intensive—not everything needs to seem photorealistic.

They didn't say that.

The entire premise of the conversation is that other languages allow us to write idiomatic code and get good performance, and the parent's position was that Java requires "competent developers". So yes, the parent did say that, however...

There's no such thing as a programming language that guarantees excellent performance regardless of programming competence.

No one made any claim remotely like this. This is a very obvious straw man argument. What was argued was that you can get decent performance from other languages without additional competence beyond idiomatic code.

Java being slow is most often a pebcak scenario

Am I the only one who thinks "pebkac" is a self-own? If you're blaming your users for the tool, it feels like maybe your tool is just hard to use properly. I have no doubt that there are big, fast, low latency Java systems out there, but why does it take so much extra effort to build these systems in Java compared with other languages? Maybe it would be better to have competent developers focus their attention beyond managing Java's shortcomings?

I'm not even hating on Java here--I actually like the JVM quite a bit, but blaming users feels like an implicit admission.

What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.

I mean, the reason mobile data is part of the OS is because the antenna is hardware that must be shared across processes. Chat completions is just a network call like anything else—it’s already available to every app; they don’t need to pay separately (they can use the same account), they just pass their API key over the network to the completions server. What am I missing?

Somehow I feel it’s probably less satisfying if your contribution pays for a couple hours of developer time compared with the annual salary for an entire team. It’s probably more satisfying to be able to move the needle than not.

Jesus dude, I don’t want to wade through thousands of shitty companies to find the companies worth applying to.