cletus

12 ms·

31.
by cletus 2y ago
At Google, I worked on a pure JS Speedtest. At the time, Ookla was still Flash-based so wouldn't work on Chromebooks. That was a problem for installers to verify an installation. I learned a lot about how TCP (I realize QUIC is UDP) re
32.
by cletus 2y ago
I view JS as necessary because of the Web but honestly I don't like doing Python for anything serious because it's a dynamic language and I don't want to write unit tests for spelling mistakes. I realize it's the tool of
33.
by cletus 2y ago
To paraphase [1]: > Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use micro-services.” Now they have two problems. As soon as I read this example where there's users and orders microservices, you've alre
34.
by cletus 2y ago
I live by this principle: If it takes you more than 30 seconds to test a change, you're going to have a huge productivity drain. That means writing a test should be easy and running it should be fast (including any compilation steps).
35.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm not sure what substance you could mine on an asteroid that could possibly be economical. The first obvious assumption is would have to be launched from space and return to space because the cost of getting a payload from Earth to L
36.
by cletus 2y ago
It's hard to believe it's been roughly two decades since the Athlon/Opteron almost killed Intel, which would've been the last time AMD did so well in server market share. The short version of this story is that Intel lic
37.
by cletus 2y ago
All technical problems are organizational problems. Put another way: any technical problem is a symptom of an organizational problem. Even at Google, which has some truly amazing homegrown technical infrastructure, you see what I called Pro
38.
by cletus 2y ago
I fully support the OSM effort. Interestingly, through OSM and even Apple Maps you see just how difficult it is to build a mapping dataset. One story I heard was that the Chinese government intentionally makes its published maps inaccurate
39.
by cletus 2y ago
Story time: many years ago, user testing of search ranking worked with a process called "side by sides". This where for a certain group of people they would compare search results in production with an experiment and they would se
40.
by cletus 2y ago
We forget that there was at least a decade of several "Google killers" a year [1]. It's a graveyeard. That was 2009 too. The volume slowed down but people are still trying (and failing) [2]. Microsoft has of course tried but
41.
by cletus 2y ago
Google started when the tech sector considered the search problem "solved". You had the likes of Altavista, Yahoo and AskJeeves. There was some variety (eg Yahoo's directory) but no one thought search was going to be a big bu
42.
by cletus 2y ago
I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's m
43.
by cletus 2y ago
It's disappointing that PHP still gets hate in 2024. PHP of 2024 isn't the PHP of 2004. As someone with a bunch of experience in Java, C, C++, Python, PHP, Hack, Javascript and a handful of others, PHP is (IMHO) almost a perfect l
44.
by cletus 2y ago
Most of my work at Facebook was using Hack. Nullness is a key part of Hack's stype system [1] and this solves so many BS errors. That's not to say you couldn't get a null where you weren't expecting one, particularly bec
45.
by cletus 2y ago
Ngl, I saw the title and thought it was going to be about the overheard of the JVM. The common view of how hard it is to move large stones doesn't match reality. There are many examples (eg [1][2]) of what one man can do without any he
46.
by cletus 2y ago
Here are some useful graphs showing how electricty demand varies by region, month and time of day [1]. As expected, California peaks in July because there's more demand for cooling than heating. But what's a little surprising is t
47.
by cletus 2y ago
Just browsing the Quickwit documentation it seems like the general architecture here is to write JSON logs but stores them compressed. Is this just something like gzip compression? 20% compressed size does seem to align to ballpark estimate
48.
by cletus 2y ago
Can't that same argument be applied to subscriptions? Just because there is shady shit that doesn't mean it's not a better system? Adobe gating new camera RAW formats behind paying for an upgrade was a real problem. You buy t
49.
by cletus 2y ago
I was so hopeful when subscriptions became a thing because it could technically solve one of the big problems with desktop software: updates. Selling a version of software that you "own" creates a perverse incentive: charge as muc
50.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm reading the tea leaves here. I have no direct knowledge of the situation. I'm retelling a story that seems (at least to me) to be consistent with what little information is here. There's plenty you can criticize Google on
51.
by cletus 2y ago
I might be able to shed some light on this (disclaimer: Xoogler). I worked for a time on Google's internal videoconferencing platform, called GVC. This was in 2010-2011 at a time when a lot of the company's VC equipment was propri
52.
by cletus 2y ago
In the future two companies will be heavily studied in business school for how badly they blew their technical lead and proficiency to the point that it may be the daeth of them. Those companies are Boeing and Intel. I would posit in both c
53.
by cletus 2y ago
I just want to add something about how sensitive LIGO is. The gravity waves it is detecting are equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri with a variation the width of a human hair. Anyway, these techniques are aimed
54.
by cletus 2y ago
> do you think Google would depend on third party software for anything as core as the RPC system? I don't believe Google has (had?) any objections to using open source or open sourcing things but you have to remember two things: 1.
55.
by cletus 2y ago
Story time: the whole development of protobuf was... a mess. It was developed and used internally at Google long before it was ever open sourced. Protobuf was designed first and foremost for C++. This makes sense. All of Google's core
56.
by cletus 2y ago
So I have a couple of thoughts on this. For context, I'm a big fan of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Julian Assange is... more interesting. Imagine you're a journalist and someone hands you a shoebox full of SD cards with cla
57.
by cletus 2y ago
It's really difficult to predict and has to be managed well by the company. But a big one is when a model gets discontinued because at that point no more will be made so supply is fixed. So the current generation of professional (ie st
58.
by cletus 2y ago
I don't know anything about the secondary market for Hermes bags but it seems like it's pretty healthy. But watches from certain brands (and certain models) can be sold immediately for a profit. For example, a Rolex steel Daytona
59.
by cletus 2y ago
I find these systems fascinating. Hermes does make high-quality bags but really where they shine is in marketing. You see a similar thing play out in the mechanical watch world. Rolex is the master of marketing. They make a good product, ma
60.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm aware of this proposal and it's really just as impractical. More detail [1]. [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-treks-warp-d...

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