The key thing is Postgres does handle enomem well and does a nice rollback rather than crashing the server and entering crash recovery. It’s one of the few programs that does. Exceptions for the exception.
Even a revised heuristic that only spots large, individual allocations is not going to do the job.
Oom score adjust also doesn’t do the job: because the only interesting workload is Postgres, if a backend does a page fault that needs memory, who dies? Another sibling Postgres, almost certainly. Then postmaster does crash recovery, which most would rather avoid. High performance databases with distant checkpoints can take a while to come back up.
I enjoyed my work with Scheme, having received my instruction in the early 2000s. I'm not a functional language or lisp language advocate in any way, and I don't even dislike Python for professional work, but I do regret that it is not taught anymore: Python's management of scopes is not as good for the instruction.
Fun fact about silver, besides its heavy industrial footprint, which you mentioned: the supply is dominated by Mexico. There have been some, uh, erratic words about Mexico from the people in the position to affect trade policy and foreign policy.
For those of you with this handy technology, the mobile phone, in the United States: you have an IPv6 address without NAT. Some of you even exist on a network using 464XLAT to tunnel IPv4 in IPV6, because it's a pure IPV6 network (T-Mobile). These mobile phone providers do not let the gazillion consumer smartphones act as servers for obvious reasons.
This is all to underscore the author's point: NAT may necessitate stateful tracking, but firewalls without translation has been deployed at massive scale for one of the most numerous types of device in existence.
the main area I'd like to see some departure from beads is to use markdown files (or something) to be able to see the issue context/comments better in a diff generated by git.
The other area I'd like to see some software engineering thinking that's more open ended is on regression testing: ways of storing or referencing old versions of texts to see if the agent can complete old transformations properly even with a context change that patches up a weakness in a transformation that is desirable. This is tricky as it interacts with something essential in software engineering, the ability to run test suites and responding to the outcome. I don't think we know yet when to apply what fidelity of testing, e.g. one-shot on snippets versus a more realistic test based on git worktrees.
This is not something you'd want for every context, but a lot of my effort is spent building up prompt fragments to normalize and clean up the code coming out of a model that did some ad-hoc work that meets the test coverage bar, which constrains it decently into having achieved "something." Kind of like a prototype. But often, a lot of ungratifying massaging is required to even cover the annoying but not dangerous tics of the LLM, to bring clarity to where it wrote, well, very bad and unprincipled code...as it does sometimes.
that's one reason I am less worried about him than some, although, I don't want to say that only to have something bad happen to him, that is, a form of complacency. Just because (say) Boltzmann and Cantor had useful insights along the way didn't mean people shouldn't have been looking to support them.
I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight while getting something useful, and enough trace data to make further improvements.
Steve has gone "a bit" loopy, in a (so far) self aware manner, but he has some kind of insight into the software engineering process, I think. Yet, I predict beads will break under the weight of no-supervision eventually if he keeps churning it, but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals. He did, to his credit, kill off several generations of project before this one in a similar category.
That's a lot of financial devices painted with a broad brush, and I think the charge that so may central banks are knuckled under with fiscal dominance is simply not sustainable. The ones that are, we tend to hear about.
Because there's a lot one could write about each of: equities, real estate, gold, silver, platinum (which have very different industrial exposures), and bitcoin, which have many price drivers.
So let's try something more parsimonious: what do you make of people, institutions, etc that bid on short and even long-dated sovereign debt around the globe, and come up the collective discovered price of, say...3.5%, annualized, for maturity in a month? https://www.treasurydirect.gov/auctions/announcements-data-r...
You don't even need to trust CPI alone when looking in history, where things have evened out a bit: we have historical short-term bond yield data, even the yield curve: people bidding on short periods with the safest debtor expecting changes in nominal value.
Not to suggest CPI is redundant, there's a reason why central bankers read it after all. For one, it's the most timely data they have. But it's impossible to nudge it year after year -- accumulative error -- without it become obviously decoupled from other data, including the long-term bond market data. It just so happens commodities are the wrong yardstick.
It's not very convincing, though: there's a huge runup in gold prices (as is often the case) between 2023 and the present, and a long do-nothing period before that (also often the case). The major consumers of gold are about: 50% jewelry, 10% industrial, 20% central banks, a large run-up from about 10% in the 2010s.
I like to think about the inherent contradictions of goldbugs going long on central bank portfolio policy: they both tend to distrust the central bank but in a way the central bank activities partially endorse their habits, and are the source of recent appreciation and thus accusations of "hidden" inflation. But central banks operate in an anarchic world system where they need something even independent of reserves held in other sovereign currencies, I presume most gold bugs are holding ETFs in an existing financial system (which is non-orthogonal: if you assume a financial system, why not avail yourself of the superior alternatives?) or have it in a safe in their house which has some other obvious problems.
I hold no gold, if I want hydraulic and non-volatile inflation compensation, it's quite simple: short-dated sovereign debt, aka the humble money market fund, which can be seen as the lower-fee version of the checking account. Nobody likes being a sucker, holding debt for below the time value of money, including changes in nominal value. It has immense price discovery pressure, and it finds its level nicely. If I were to hold gold, I would need some viable theory about how much I should hold to be de-correlated from other assets to be worthwhile. Maybe if I was exposed to jewelry costs and wanted to hedge them.
Public Sans seems like a good candidate for a new "web safe" font. Perhaps one new web safe font per twenty five years is not too much. From there, it can percolate to the word processor and pdfs, and finally: government standard for government workers who just want to open their word processor and get to work, where sourcing even a free font to meet standard is just a snag to annoy.
No chance they're going to take risks to share that hardware with anyone given what it does.
The scaled down version of El Capitan is used for non-classified workloads, some of which are proprietary, like drug simulation. It is called Tuolumne. Not long ago, it was nevertheless still a top ten supercomputer.
Like OP, I also don't see why a government supercomputer does it better than hyperscalers, coreweave, neoclouds, et al, who have put in a ton of capital as even compared to government. For loads where institutional continuity is extremely important, like weather -- and maybe one day, a public LLM model or three -- maybe. But we're not there yet, and there's so much competition in LLM infrastructure that it's quite likely some of these entrants will be bag holders, not a world of juicy margins at all...rather, playing chicken with negative gross margins.
that also popped out at me: binding that many parameters is cursed. You really gotta use COPY (in most cases).
I'll give you a real cursed Postgres one: prepared statement names are silently truncated to NAMEDATALEN-1. NAMEDATALEN is 64. This goes back to 2001...or rather, that's when NAMEDATALEN was increased in size from 32. The truncation behavior itself is older still. It's something ORMs need to know about it -- few humans are preparing statement names of sixty-plus characters.
I think it's pretty funny because, for example, Katalin Karikó was thought to be working in some backwater, on this "mRNA" thing, that could barely get published before COVID...and, the original LLM/transformer people were well qualified but not pulling quarter billion dollars kicking around trying to improve machine translation of languages, a time-honored AI endeavor going back to the 1950s. The came upon something with outstanding empirical properties.
For whatever reason, remuneration seems more concentrated than fundamentals. I don't begrudge those involved their good luck, though: I've had more than my fair share of good luck in my life, it wouldn't be me with the standing to complain.
One of the things I think about sometimes, a specific example rather than a rebuttal to Carmack.
The Electron Application is somewhere between tolerated and reviled by consumers, often on grounds of performance, but it's probably the single innovation that made using my Linux laptop in the workplace tractable. And it is genuinely useful to, for example, drop into a MS Teams meeting without installing.
So, everyone laments that nothing is as tightly coded as Winamp anymore, without remembering the first three characters.
Seems like an exponential backoff rule would do the job: I'm sure crashes happen for all sorts of reasons, some of which are bugs in the bot, even on non-adversarial input.
Building and owning an institution that finances, racks, services, networks, and disposes of servers, both takes time and increases the commitment level. Hetzner is month to month, with a fixed overhead for fresh leasing of servers: the set-up fee.
This is a lot to administer when also building a software institution, and a business. It was not certain at the outset, for example, that the GitHub Actions Runner product would be as popular as it became. In its earliest form, it was partially an engineering test for our virtual machines, and we went around asking friendly contacts that we knew would report abnormalities to use it. There's another universe where it only went as far as an engineering test, and our utilization and revenue pattern (that is, utility to other people) is different.
Even a revised heuristic that only spots large, individual allocations is not going to do the job.
Oom score adjust also doesn’t do the job: because the only interesting workload is Postgres, if a backend does a page fault that needs memory, who dies? Another sibling Postgres, almost certainly. Then postmaster does crash recovery, which most would rather avoid. High performance databases with distant checkpoints can take a while to come back up.