kentonv

9 ms·

151.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (w
152.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Or put another way: If Simon's users choose to self-host the open source version of his service, they are probably using it to run their own code, and so the sandbox security matters less, and workerd may be fine. The sandbox only matt
153.
by kentonv 10mo ago
> the whole point of WebAssembly is to solve this one problem. For Wasm to be a secure sandbox, you have to assume a bug-free compiler/interpreter, which, alas, none of them really are. It's a somewhat easier problem than bui
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by kentonv 10mo ago
To add some color to "workerd is not a hardened sandbox": workerd does not include any sandboxing layers other than V8 itself. If someone has a V8 zero-day exploit, they can break out of the sandbox. But putting aside zero-day exp
155.
by kentonv 10mo ago
> There is a big "WARNING: This is a beta. Work in progress" Ughhhh that is because nobody ever looks at the readme so it hasn't been updated basically since workerd was originally released. Sorry. I should really fix that
156.
by kentonv 10mo ago
I keep hearing people assert this but I've been using nvidia drivers on Linux for 25 years and aside from the pain of getting them installed, they have always just worked with no issues at all. Whereas every time I install Debian fresh
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by kentonv 10mo ago
I am not familiar with Arch, so my advice might be wrong for Arch. But I have a lot of experience on Debian and Ubuntu trying to use the packages that handle the nvidia driver installation for you. It works OK. But one day on a lark I tried
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by kentonv 10mo ago
In my most recent attempt to use AMD, my problems were: 1. I needed to install a bleeding-edge kernel version in order to get support for the very new AMD card I had purchased, which was a bit of a pain on Debian. (With NVidia, the latest d
159.
by kentonv 10mo ago
From what I read, SteamOS isn't really intended to run on any device other than official Steam devices. In particular I read that it doesn't support nvidia GPUs at all, since all official Steam devices are AMD. Also, I have a pret
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by kentonv 10mo ago
The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you acci
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by kentonv 10mo ago
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.
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by kentonv 10mo ago
Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.
163.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Everyone says this but it is not my experience at all. Every time I try AMD cards I run into weird problems. The Nvidia drivers are a pain to install and tend to break randomly on kernel updates, but once built properly they always just wor
164.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people). I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level,
165.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things
166.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Steam supports Debian well. I download the nvidia drivers directly from nvidia. Their installer script is actually pretty decent and then I don't have to worry about whether the distro packages are up-to-date.
167.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.
168.
by kentonv 10mo ago
These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people. Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video dr
169.
by kentonv 10mo ago
I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't
170.
by kentonv 10mo ago
Cloudflare Workers often rolls out V8 security patches to production before Chrome itself does. That's different from beta vs. stable channel. When there is a security patch, generally all branches receive the patch at about the same
171.
by kentonv 10mo ago
I patched the free() implementation itself, not the code that calls free(). I did, of course, test it, and anyway we now run into the "freed memory" pattern regularly when debugging (yes including optimized builds), so it's d
172.
by kentonv 10mo ago
A few years back I patched the memory allocator used by the Cloudflare Workers runtime to overwrite all memory with a static byte pattern on free, so that uninitialized allocations contain nothing interesting. We expected this to hurt perfo
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by kentonv 10mo ago
> In Java, Python, JavaScript, and C# an exception thrown from a finally block overwrites the original exception, and the original exception is lost. Pet peeve of mine: all these languages got it wrong. (And C++ got it extra-wrong.) The
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by kentonv 10mo ago
FWIW, the limit these days is 10MB (after compression). https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/ That said, thank you for fighting library bloat! Small libraries tend to perform better (not
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by kentonv 10mo ago
They say swap is highly highly recommended even if you have plenty of memory. I don't care, I disable it anyway. Have been doing so for decades. Never caused a problem.
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by kentonv 10mo ago
When your system is out of memory, you do not want to return an error to the next process that allocates memory. That might be an important process, it might have nothing to do with the reason the system is out of memory, and it might not b
177.
by kentonv 10mo ago
> - There's actual standard logic for remotely-existing objects vs. just RPC Cap'n Proto is an object-capability system that very much has a uniform representation of remote objects. Object references are first-class types. You
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by kentonv 10mo ago
Out of curiosity, like what?
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by kentonv 11mo ago
You can run your wasm app in a DO, same as you run it in a Worker.
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by kentonv 11mo ago
Transactions are supported in Durable Objects. In fact, with DO you are interacting with the SQLite database locally and synchronously, so transactions are essentially free with no possibility of conflicts and no worry about blocking other

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