jeffparsons

5 ms·

31.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago: if [ -z "$(
32.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
A company as big as LinkedIn should have bots continually accessing their site with unique generated passwords etc., and then be searching for those secrets in logging pipelines, bytes on disk, etc. to see where they get leaked. I know much
33.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
> I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy. Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the conten
34.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
I absolutely want to go with RISC-V longer-term, but it seems we're still a few years away from RISC-V boards being a pragmatic choice for the average workstation, unless I've missed some recent development.
35.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
So are there any "basically respectable" motherboard manufacturers? Or is there a similar story about each of the big players? Asking for a friend who is thinking about building a new PC soon.
36.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
> For some reason, libraries are always free. Approximately nobody will buy paid libraries. I suspect this is in no small part because figuring out a licensing (edit: pricing!) model that is both appealing to consumers and sustainable fo
37.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
I've occasionally wondered about the lack of currying in Rust; it feels like something that can be done mechanically at compile time, so why not support it? Perhaps to do it cleanly (without more magical privileged functions in core) w
38.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
I recently discovered "compact approximators", which can be seen as a generalisation of Bloom filters. Instead of telling you "element X is probably in the set", they tell you "a lower bound on the value associated
39.
by jeffparsons 1y ago
I was excited, too. I was also excited when Intel announced Larrabee. That was before I learnt about the many and varied ways in which Intel sabotages itself, and released that Intel's underperformance has little to do with a lack of
40.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
You may be interested in WebAssembly Components: https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/ . Components can't do any IO or interfere with any other components in an application except through interfaces explicitly g
41.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
If a new a Twitter/Bluesky replacement is to promote civil discourse, it will need to _restrict_ reach as a core feature. Which... seems antithetical to a social media platform. But as long as "enragement = engagement" holds
42.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
One way to communicate this is in terms of _schedule risk_, rather than straight-up lost productivity. E.g. for a particularly troublesome design flaw, you might estimate that for any given 4-week project there's a 20% risk of the proj
43.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
Why does that require C++? A quick search showed up plenty of material about "pure C" arena allocators, etc.
44.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
Serious question for whoever actually understands this: what is the legal status of true, peer-to-peer, attack-resistant encrypted messaging in the "western" world? I'm particularly interested in the USA, the UK, Australia, N
45.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time see
46.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
I have this when I'm drifting off to sleep but not quite gone yet. I can effortlessly compose compelling melodies in my head, sometimes even parts for multiple instruments simultaneously, as if I'm simply listening to someone play
47.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
Yes, if you give the Wasm instance access to timers.
48.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
Crime. The answer is crime. (Plus a whole bunch of pretty words to make it sound like they're saving the world.)
49.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
One exciting thing that could still happen in the shorter term (if/when a promising novel "high temperature superconductor" is confirmed) is an explosion of investment into research in the area. So even if it takes decades fo
50.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
At AWS engineering scale they can absolutely figure it out if they have the slightest interest in doing so. I've heard all the excuses — they all suck. Businesses with lawyers and stuff can afford to negotiate with AWS etc. when things
51.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
I like this approach, because it lets everything Just Work without anyone outside of the implementation having to think about it at all, and only incurs meaningful overhead if you're doing something really silly, but crucially still wo
52.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
> I joined Microsoft as a hater of pretty much everything Microsoft. I feel like there's a story there that I'd love to read if you're willing to share (or have already written about it elsewhere).
53.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
Not quite, I think. Some kinds of redundancy are good, and some are bad. Good redundancy tends to reduce mistakes rather than introduce them. E.g. there's lots of redundancy in natural languages, and it helps resolve ambiguity and fill
54.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
> Like LLMs, we confabulate. Thank you for describing LLM behaviour that way. It's a much better description than the more popular but less apt "hallucination".
55.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
I find this surprising, given that my initial response to reading the iouring design was: 1. This is pretty clean and straightforward. 2. This is obviously what we need to decouple a bunch of things without the previous downsides. What has
56.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
I think if Intel was a private company then it would have a better chance of recovery via a collection of focused experiments to overcome their biggest technical deficiencies (compared to their competitors) or to, e.g., figure out a compell
57.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
> Update your software. I don't disagree, but also... I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had l
58.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
It doesn't need to be _perfectly_ auditable to be worthwhile — it just needs to be more auditable than the alternatives available today.
59.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
It's about having a shorter auditable bootstrap process much more than it is about supporting new architectures.
60.
by jeffparsons 2y ago
Haha, thanks. I chose it because: - Here's One (I? You?) Prepared Earlier - Sometimes Hope _is_ a (caching) strategy - And yeah, I really hope I can make this thing work well. I like silly puns. They bring me joy.

More ›