- stuxnet79 parentNot sure why this is being downvoted. It is very much true in my opinion, especially so for the big coastal metro areas.
- No it's provided as part of the Android OS. Very simple and intuitive to use and has been for the past 10 years since I started using it. The only thing that was annoying initially was that you couldn't pass through the WiFi that your phone is connected to but I think that was corrected in later versions of Android. For a time I was using one of my older Pixel phones as a WiFi extender to improve signal in my home's basement. Worked like a charm. I'm honestly surprised this isn't available on iOS.
- The founder Brad Katsuyama talks about his background and motivation for starting the company here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hoqFpDjVs
It might add a bit of color to this conversation.
- Zeal might be what you are looking for - https://zealdocs.org/
- Maybe I have it wrong but the very essence of "engineering" is managing the constraints of (1) providing an acceptable solution to a problem (2) within some fixed parameters of time and cost.
The code may look "bad" in a vacuum but if it yielded a successful outcome then the engineer was able to achieve his/her goal for the business.
The stories shared in this article are exactly what you'd expect from big tech. These are some of the most successful firms in the history of capitalism. As an engineer you are just grist in the mill. If you want to reliably produce "good" code then IMO become an artist. And no ... working at a research facility or non-profit wont save you.
- My understanding based on my readings of the previous post is there are no hardware level checks. SSDs need to be power cycled every so often and the integrity of the filesystem needs to be checked via something akin to zfs scrub. This should bs done on a monthly basis at minimum.
If you are paranoid about your data and not relying on filesystem level checks from ZFS or Btrfs you should ptobably avoid SSDs for long term storage.
- Serious question, now that there is evidence that Pixel phones are corrupting the actual jpegs what is the best way to safely store smartphone photos now? I usually back them up to an external drive every 6 months or so but wondering if someone has a better process for this.
I mean it's nice that photos are immediately uploaded to the cloud once they are taken but I read that Google Photos does not do 1:1 backups. Apparently the cloud photos are compressed & are worse quality
- Concur on this. I always thought that Debezium only supported MySQL binlog since that is the world I operate in. I did not know that it was also an option for Postgres CDC via the WAL. Now that I know, I would recommend defaulting to it.
Even with Debezium I have run into myriad issues. It blows my mind that someone would want to roll their own logic to set up replicas. IMHO this post should be advertised more as a fun intellectual exercise.
- As a recent Linux to MacOS convert, I have been eyeing Time Machine as a simple backup solution. From reading the comments here it sounds like this is a far-fetched idealistic goal which is disappointing.
This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?
Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.
Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.
Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.
Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?
- It seems like the ecosystem around these tools has matured quite rapidly. I am somewhat familiar with Open WebUI, however, the last time I played around with it, I got the sense that it was merely a front-end to Ollama, the llm command line tool & it didn't have any capabilities outside of that.
I got spooked when the Ollama team started monetizing so I ended up doing more research into llama.cpp and realized it could do everything I wanted including serve up a web front end. Once I discovered this I sort of lost interest in Open WebUI.
I'll have to revisit all these tools again to see what's possible in the current moment.
> My sense is that you need ~1gb of RAM for every 1b paramters, so 32gb should in theory work here. I think macs also get a performance boost over other hardware due to unified memory.
This is a handy heuristic to work with, and the links you sent will keep me busy for the next little while. Thanks!
- Any resources you can share for these experimental builds? This is something I was looking into setting up at some point. I'd love to take a look at examples in the wild to gauge if it's worth my time / money.
An aside, if we ever reach a point where it's possible to run an OSS 20b model at reasonable inference on a Macbook Pro type of form factor, then the future is definitely here!
- > Fun fact, a raspberry pi does not have a built in Real Time Clock with its own battery, so it relies on network clocks to keep the time.
> Another fun fact, the network module of the pi is actually connected to the USB bus, so there's some overhead as well as a throughput limitation.
> Fun fact, the Pi does not have a power button, relying on software to shut down cleanly. If you lose access to the machine, it's not possible to avoid corrupted states on the disk.
With all these caveats in mind, a raspberry pi seems to be an incredibly poor choice for distributed computing
- > Is there some line photographers are crossing by taking two photos of separate scenes and joining them together in software to create a picture like the people sitting on the log in front of the mountains?
This has been a concern people have had for years. You might benefit from reading Susan Sontag's essay On Photography - https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Sontag-Susan-Photography.p...
My take, as soon as you pick up a camera to capture a scene you are telling a story and incorporating your own bias. For this reason, once I learned how cameras worked and dabbled in photography as an amateur it really transformed how I consume media. You could have the same subject and scene but tell a completely different story depending on the decisions you make as a photographer.
- > On good tests, your score doesn't change much with practice, so the system is less vulnerable to Goodharting and people don't waste/spend a bunch of time gaming it
This framing of the problem is deeply troubling to me. A good test is one that evaluates candidates on the tasks that they will do at the workplace and preferably connects those tasks to positive business outcomes.
If a candidate's performance improves with practice, then so what? The only thing we should care about is that the interview performance reflects well on how the candidate will do within the company.
Skill is not a univariate quantity that doesn't change with time. Also it's susceptible to other confounding variables which negatively impact performance. It doesn't matter if you hire the smartest devs. If the social environment and quality of management is poor, then the work performance will be poor as well.
- > That said, I do think it's got the brightest future of any coin besides BTC for the very reason.
Brightest future in terms of what? Traction? Market cap? This is what I thought 7 years ago, and I beefed up my XMR position as a result. Meanwhile, Bitcoin an objectively inferior technology, has 25x since then.
- > 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.
Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.
But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.