squirrellous

6 ms·

61.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
It was pretty clear to me after interacting with the first popular ChatGPT version around end of 2022 that all knowledge jobs will be replaced sooner or later. I don’t think coding is somehow special. What we have right now is an intermedia
62.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
If you believe juniors are already not safe, it’s only a question of time before seniors are in the same position. First they came for the socialists, etc etc.
63.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
I’m sure this has crossed someone’s mind but why isn’t this called zlibc? :-)
64.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
If you are at a place where that’s true, cherish it. It won’t always be true.
65.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
Another somewhat known case of a spinlock is in trading, where for latency purposes the OS scheduler is essentially bypassed by core isolation and thread pinning, so there’s nothing better for the CPU to do than spinning.
66.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
Not a direct answer to your question, but I’m recently trying to adopt the mindset of letting Claude “prove” to me with very high confidence that what they did works. The bar for this would be much higher than what I’d require for a human e
67.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
> But I will never call into a library I don't fully understand while holding a mutex again. Fool me once. Nice sentiment and an admirable goal. Not really actionable in practice. Even if we disregard all userspace libraries out the
68.
by squirrellous 8mo ago
Anecdotal perspective. I’m usually ok with others copying my code since code feels less personal (for lack of a better word). The other day I found a prompt for internal AI that copied my technical arguments in prose verbatim without attrib
69.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Whether it is significant is highly specific to the domain. I think protobuf has accumulated enough problems that every large scale application will eventually run into a footgun or two. Almost all of them have to do with the generated type
70.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
I’m aware what TCP_CORK does. I’m not seeing how it helps the situation in the post. Ah, maybe you are saying it doesn’t help the situation in the post. That’s what I misunderstood.
71.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Can you explain how TCP_CORK helps here? The chaff packets are spaced 20ms apart and sent per socket, so I don’t see how TCP_CORK could help unless it coalesced across 20ms intervals? But coalescing is clearly not an option for the intended
72.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
It depends on the language and codebase. For something very dynamic like Python it may be the case that grepping finds real references to a symbol that won’t be found by a language server. Also language servers may not work with cross-langu
73.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
I work with an amazing QA team right now. They are good programmers that don’t mind doing lots of grunt work, understand the goal of the software deeply, collaborates extremely well with other teams, and are just all around great people. I
74.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Does anyone knowledgeable know whether it’s possible to drastically reduce the overhead of reading from procfs? IIUC everything in it is in-memory, so there’s no real reason reading some data should take the order of 10us.
75.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
This is my go to article every time I think about using file locking to solve a problem. Also, OFD locks are great if you target Linux only these days.
76.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
For some reason Opus 4.5 is blowing up recently after having been released for weeks. I guess because holidays are over? Active agent users should have discovered this for a while.
77.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
I don’t have much evidence but feel like fsync has overshot its significance. It’s really important in databases and that’s fine, but a lot of software can handle (very occasional) kernel / hardware crashes by e.g. restoring data from
78.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Thanks. These are actually achievable with a custom protocol buffer implementation, but I agree at that point one may as well create a new format. FWIW the other use case I was expecting is something like database queries where you’d select
79.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Would you mind sharing what problems motivated Lite? Curious what are the typical use cases for selective reading / in place modification of serialized data. My understanding is that for cases that really want all of the fields, the ze
80.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Second this. Once I setup GitHub actions with Hugo (there’s one readily available), I rarely build the blog locally anymore. New article drafts become GH pull requests, and once ready they get merged and published. This also works on mobile
81.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
One reason to use shared memory mmap is to ensure that even if your process crashes, the memory stays intact. Another is to communicate between different processes.
82.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Not sure how much value there is in beating Swisstables in very particular cases like this. For specialized cases, one can beat Swisstables by more margin and less effort by using more memory and decreasing load factor, thereby decreasing c
83.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this. I never quite understood the sentiment of treating money-related tech as somehow more critical than others. The effects of large SaaS services failing and the bank failing can be quite similar - bus
84.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
Apologies. Please feel free to delete it. That was not the intention.
85.
by squirrellous 9mo ago
[flagged]
86.
by squirrellous 10mo ago
I feel this is easier if you treat day jobs almost as a side hustle and have significant hobbies and life elsewhere. It’s more difficult if your career heavily overlaps with what you love doing (e.g. software), except the career comes with
87.
by squirrellous 10mo ago
Google is a somewhat widely known place where promo is a huge problem, but the problem isn’t particular to Google. Generally companies will require you to repeatedly “prove” you are worth the additional compensation before agreeing to it. T
88.
by squirrellous 10mo ago
IIRC the author has a good track record with programming languages.
89.
by squirrellous 10mo ago
I wish Google would open source their gtl library. Similar utilities exist elsewhere but not in the same consistent quality and well-integrated package. I particularly like the “what to do for flat profiles” ad “protobuf tips” sections. Sim
90.
by squirrellous 10mo ago
Honest question. Why is a Rust rewrite of coreutils getting traction? Nobody thought it’s a good idea to rewrite coreutils with Go, Java, Python, C++, etc etc. It can’t just be memory safety.

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