alexgartrell

9 ms·

31.
by alexgartrell 4y ago
I think people dramatically overestimate the value of CMU social connections. The value of a CMU Comp Sci degree is that you've proven (to yourself and everyone else) that you can get one. The program is essentially one "weeder&qu
32.
by alexgartrell 4y ago
There are reasons beyond compensation to like a job (fulfillment, relationships, status, etc). If you want to do Google-scale anything, at best you've got 4 other companies to choose from. So you're going to feel hurt if you lose
33.
by alexgartrell 4y ago
FWIW, programs compiled through a modern toolchain can ship their own debug data. For example, the restrict_filesystems program loaded by systemd $ sudo bpftool prog dump xlated id 50 int restrict_filesystems(unsigned long long \*
34.
by alexgartrell 4y ago
eBPF is also a lot more efficient than ptrace
35.
by alexgartrell 4y ago
In this case we're talking about within the Datacenter, and you could conceivably update every network device and system to talk the new thing if you wanted. This is more achievable at a hyperscalar, where there tends to be < 3 dist
36.
by alexgartrell 4y ago
> corporations don't see any "immediate shareholder value", so they sit around happy as pigs in shit with the status quo. This is ridiculous. Hyperscalars see an immediate ROI from efficiency/reliability improvements
37.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
Well you can already do whatever proprietary stuff you want with your own kernels if you're not putting them on devices that you sell to people. In practice, this means that Amazon, Google, etc likely have pretty fancy, totally unshare
38.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
Allocated-but-unavailable is a totally reasonable part of the memory hierarchy. Main Memory => zswap (compressed memory) => swap In this case, the pages may be logically allocated or not -- the assurance is that the data will be the v
39.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
I shared this perspective, but luckily my job is awesome and (in a routine 1:1!) Paul told me why it's less straightforward than I thought: https://paulmck.livejournal.com/62436.html my takeaway was essentially that yo
40.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
Don't you think it's a lot more plausible that extroversion correlates with becoming a manager in the same way that it correlates with wanting to see people in the office? Or that it's simply easier to do the manager job in p
41.
Below: A time travelling resource monitoring tool(developers.facebook.com)
26 points by alexgartrell 5y ago|2 comments
42.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
Admittedly, I got a B in 410 and only managed to TA 213, but I do work in the space now. Yes, it’s hard to do research if you start at “let’s design a kernel from scratch,” but you’d never need to do that. You can just hack Linux or a bsd,
43.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
I don't think it's particularly ambiguous since anything other than Fahrenheit would imply that everyone is dead.
44.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
Big disclaimer: I support these guys but I don't tell them what to do, so these are just my dumb, manager opinions :) I think we're going to continue to see more of this shared-memory message passing style for two reasons: 1. Hard
45.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
We’re working on it :) [1] The interesting problem is that it’s still kind of a developer experience mess. We can get pretty far with libbpf skeleton, libbpf-rs, etc, but I think we’re still waiting on the “killer” framework for this (or so
46.
by alexgartrell 5y ago
I think the Stripe API stuff you did was fine, but you really did your best work as a concepts of mathematics TA.
47.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
The fundamental issue is that crushing the SAT/ACT is more of a reflection of “mom and dad got me good tutoring or prep” than it is intellectual merit. I “weaseled” my way into CMU via athletic admissions (I was an actual athlete, not
48.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I'm not an electrical engineer, but from watching this video [0], there seem to be about a million and a half different mechanisms to prevent sparks from chargers. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMxB7zA-e4Y
49.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I think the reality is that a manager’s job is alignment. Sometimes that is resetting the expectations of the organization, and sometimes that is redirecting the team or team members. Realigning without pissing people off is what leadership
50.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
This already happens, because most (?) people aren’t running vanilla kernels. Many (most?) distros compile their kernels with config options and patches that “make sense to them.” In the most egregious cases, you end up with things like bp
51.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
First, it’s reeaallllyyyy expensive to invest enough in an open source project that you have a reasonable chance of steering it. Second, even if you do the first, the whole thing gets screwed up again when you start trying to introduce vend
52.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I am a huge open source fanboy, but there's nothing magical about open source that makes it secure against nation states.
53.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
It’s common for dealerships to hold several franchises too. So they wouldn’t even necessarily be struggling, just reacting to Cadillac performing worse than Toyota, for example
54.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I wouldn't be doing my job if I failed to mention that both Alexei (eBPF) and Jens (io_uring, block) work at Facebook. Beyond them, we've got a bunch of folks working on the primitives as well as low-level userspace libraries [0]
55.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I was not aware of object capabilities -- TIL. That said, looking at the (apparently) leading implementation, capsicum > Capsicum also introduces capability mode, which disables (with ECAPMODE) all syscalls that access any kind of global
56.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
Can you provide more context on why you feel that's true (or even possible)? For the last few years, I managed the Container Runtime group at Facebook. My experience has been: 1. `if (has_capability(..., X)) { ... }` gets put into code
57.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
It’s less about having enough information and more about having leaders who have established reasonable constraints and incentives. Organizations get into trouble when doing the right thing runs counter to (intentional or accidental) incen
58.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I took and TAed this class. I ended up dipping my toes into the open source waters with some Firefox contributions and completing the rest of the minor program including a set of contributions to Chromium. One thing that was heavily emphasi
59.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
I work with some of the maintainers of bpf, bpftrace, etc. What can we do to make this stuff more accessible?
60.
by alexgartrell 6y ago
Maybe you're talking about non-native containers (i.e. not Linux), but there's no technical merit to the idea that a container by itself could introduce 15x latency on a Linux host for something like a web request, unless someth

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