pjdesno

15 ms·

151.
by pjdesno 2y ago
No, it doesn't. Not only are 10-100x changes disruptive, but the players who don't adopt them quickly are going to be the ones who continue to buy huge amounts of hardware to pursue old approaches, and it's hard for incumbent
152.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Man, I saw a presentation on Iridium when I was at Motorola in the early 90s, maybe 92? Not a marketing presentation - one where an engineer was talking, and had done their own slides. What I recall is that it was at a time when Internet fo
153.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Nah, it's mostly just buffering :-) Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality. Generations of Bell Labs and Bellcore engineers would rather have resigned than be
154.
by pjdesno 2y ago
The description of DeepSeek reminds me of my experience in networking in the late 80s - early 90s. Back then a really big motivator for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and fiber-to-the-home was the promise of video on demand, which was a h
155.
by pjdesno 2y ago
In a lot of fields, p=0.05 is good enough to publish. p=0.0001 means it's really f*ing unlikely that the difference in means is due to random chance.
156.
by pjdesno 2y ago
"Getting windows source code under NDA" doesn't necessarily mean "can do research on it". If you can't publish it, it's not research. If the source code is under NDA, then Microsoft gets the final say abou
157.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Although the conference this was presented at is platform-agnostic, the author is an expert on Linux, and the motivation for the talk is Linux-specific. (Dropbox dropping support for non-ext4 file systems) The post supports its points with
158.
by pjdesno 2y ago
You've got more experience there than me, and I've only seen the plans for a single center. I'll point out that some of the key thermal and power stuff in those plans you saw may have come from the hyperscalers themselves - o
159.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Issues in building your own physical data center (based on a 15MW location some people I know built): 1 - thermal. To get your PUE down below say 1.2 you need to do things like hot aisle containment or better yet water cooling - the hotter
160.
by pjdesno 2y ago
For older kids and adults, put the seat down to the point where they can push it on the ground, and preferably have them ride it on grass. They can push the bike for a while, then start pedaling once they get the hang of balancing. It doesn
161.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account. The eBay search
162.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Roughly similar craziness: Disk drives mechanically position heads less than 1nm above the platter, with horizontal accuracy of significantly less than the 50nm track width, at a retail price of a few hundred $$ or less. 30 years ago I thin
163.
by pjdesno 2y ago
It seems like the common thread here is that the thefts were of cryptocurrency, rather than real assets in a financial system with safeguards. You can still get robbed of those assets, but it leaves a far stronger paper trail to catch the p
164.
by pjdesno 2y ago
"death sentence": about 5 million households in the US do not have checking accounts. Although it's a great inconvenience, and in many cases may be an injustice, it doesn't seem incompatible with life. Note that a "
165.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Look at the mortgage and credit card markets. Most lenders don't discriminate via pricing - they accept or deny individual applications. The market discriminates via pricing, as higher-cost providers are willing to loan to customers
166.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Not included in the article: Boolean algebra, invented by an English philosopher in the 1840s, and applied to a new context almost 100 years later in what may be the most influential MS thesis of all time, Claude Shannon's "Symbol
167.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Not mentioned in this is the issue of memory scaling. DRAM price per GB has been roughly flat for well over a decade - consumer prices hit $4/GB in 2011, and have fluctuated around there ever since - most of the drop in real cost since
168.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I've used GNU Emacs since the mid 80s. It was good in its day, but I think there may be better alternatives nowadays. I can't be sure, though, because using Emacs as an expert is definitely better than using those other systems as
169.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Vaguely related anecdote: 30 years ago or so I worked at a tiny networking company where several coworkers came from a small company (call it C) that made AppleTalk routers. They recounted being puzzled that their competitor (company S) had
170.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Interrupt noise can be eliminated by eliminating the interrupts themselves using user-space drivers like SPDK and DPDK for storage and networking, but (a) that would require a massive change in application architecture, and (b) it wouldn&#x
171.
by pjdesno 2y ago
My suspicion is that io_uring itself mitigates syscall overhead but doesn't do anything to change interrupts. You could probably do things at the OS level to change interrupt behavior in a way that would mitigate this attack significan
172.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Doesn't this close the incoming connection, rather than allowing another pending accept to receive it?
173.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Since io_uring has similar semantics to just about every hardware device ever (e.g. NVMe submission and completion queues), are there any implications of this for Rust in the kernel? Or in SPDK and other user-level I/O frameworks? Note
174.
by pjdesno 2y ago
During an internship in 1986 I wrote C code for a machine with 10-bit bytes, the BBN C/70. It was a horrible experience, and the existence of the machine in the first place was due to a cosmic accident of the negative kind.
175.
by pjdesno 2y ago
It would be interesting to compare the Python sortedcontainers algorithm - I've been using a C++ version of it that works quite well. Note also that nodes in B-trees (and other splitting-based data structures) have a mean load factor m
176.
by pjdesno 2y ago
A properly lock-free architecture is a spin-lock :-)
177.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Just wondering - why is it that a bunch of tech bros who would think nothing of spending $2-300 on some fancy-ass keyboard because it’s incrementally more comfortable to their fingertips than a $15 one from Microcenter think that a person d
178.
by pjdesno 2y ago
I ride a lot, and am happy to ride cheap bikes, but I probably wouldn't ride a $200 Amazon or Walmart bike for rides longer than 30-40 miles without swapping the saddle, which would add anywhere from $40 to $150.
179.
by pjdesno 2y ago
IIRC one of the early Tokomak projects was instrumental in development of the titanium bicycle frame industry - I think the folks at Merlin Metalworks (later bought by Litespeed) learned to weld the stuff working for a fusion project at MIT
180.
by pjdesno 2y ago
Something missing here in the discussion of object storage and databases is any mention of the declining importance of the file system. From the 70s through the 90s or 00s everything was file system-based, and it was just assumed that the b

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