I just think about this letter to the Atherton (median sold home price: $7.6M) Mayor and City Council:
===
Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!
I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen
<address>
4 Properties on <street>
===
Everyone economic freedom and deregulation, until it means more people living near them.
You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.
That has never been thought by anyone but computer scientists who never looked at a biology textbook.
To begin approximating what a lone spherical synapse would actually do you'd need to solve 2^n coupled second order differential equations where n is the number of ions used.
That is before you throw in things like neuro transmitters and the physical volume of a cell. Simulating a single neuron accurately is beyond any super computer today. The question is how inaccurately can we simulate one and still get meaningful answers.
It's annoying for sure. I deal with abuse at a large scale.
I'd recommend:
- Rate-limit everything, absolutely everything. Set sane limits.
- Rate-limit POST requests harder. Preferably dynamically based on geoip.
- Rate-limit login and comment POST requests even harder. Ban IPs that exceed the amount.
- Require TLS. Drop TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1. Bots certainly break.
- Require SNI. Do not reply without SNI (nginx has 444 return code for that). Ban IP's on first hit that connect without. There's no legitimate use and you'll also disappear from places like Shodan.
- If you can, require HTTP/2.0. Bots break.
- Ban IP's listed on StopForumSpam, ban destination e-mail addresses listed there. If possible also contribute back to SFS and AbuseIPDB.
- Collect JA3 hashes, figure out malicious ones, ban IPs that use those hashes. This blocks a lot of shit trivially because targeting tools instead of behaviour is accurate.
With all credit due to Google's excellent and under-appreciated paper Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt [1], I submit that Big Data is the high interest home equity line of credit of business operations debt.
It's not that big data tools aren't useful. It's that, when you just start amassing huge piles of data without a clear up-front plan for how it will be used, and assume that a whole bunch of people who have never heard of sampling bias or multiple comparisons bias or Coase's Law [2] can figure out what to do with it later, you're setting yourself up for a Bad Time.
1: https://research.google/pubs/pub43146/
2: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."
Argument is there are certain modes of free speech that are unstable. They create social harmonics that empower populists who tear down the liberal order and destroy the rights that brought them to power (and could now threaten to topple them).
Classical case for this, with respect to democracy (not free speech), is Athens.
I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster"
Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.
2015: "We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years."
2016: "I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year."
2018: "I think probably by end of next year (2019) self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person."
2019: "We need to be at 99.9999..% We need to be extremely reliable. When do we think it is safe for FSD, probably towards the end of this year then its up to the regulators when they will decide to approve that."
2019: "I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year."
2020: "I am extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. But I think at least some jurisdictions are going to allow full self-driving next year."
CoPilot is helpless if it needs to do more than just regurgitate someone else's code.
The training of these models on GitHub, so they regurgitate licensed code without attribution, is the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Perhaps not according to the letter of the law, but surely according to the spirit.
In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
"It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.
And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us.
Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed.
Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike.
Atomization and alienation have taken root.
The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
We're heading to the failure of multiple systems, including food production and power, due to climate change and the increasing frequency of disastrous weather systems.
"Greed is good" has been a value promulgated by the elites for a few generations now.
Things are getting more expensive faster than wage growth, especially basics and things needed for economic upward mobility (housing, education, healthcare, etc).
Identity politics and wedge issues are dividing people who otherwise have similar interests.
Modern life is anxiety and depression inducing, creating a rise in interpersonal conflict.
Our government is no longer accountable to the people or representative of them in any real way unless you're in the top quintile of wealth/income (and that is generous).
All of these things, and many more, are ripping apart the social contract. People no longer feel invested in the wellbeing of the places in which they reside or the governmental and societal systems they are a part of. Instead, they merely endure them with resentment. This won't end well.
Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 mm. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 mm. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 mm. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 mm. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 mm. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 mm. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
> The Nordic model comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices common to the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden).[1] This includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining[2] based on the economic foundations of social corporatism,[3][4] with a high percentage of the workforce unionized and a sizable percentage of the population employed by the public sector (roughly 30% of the work force in areas such as healthcare, education, and government).[5] Although it was developed in the 1930s under the leadership of social democrats,[6] the Nordic model began to gain attention after World War II.
> As of 2020, all of the Nordic countries rank highly on the inequality-adjusted HDI and the Global Peace Index as well as being ranked in the top 10 on the World Happiness Report.[12]
If you mean something closer to communism, then I agree with you, but I think socialism is wider than that.
> Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Zuckerberg tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22]
Try lowering the random_page_cost value; this is the performance cost query planner uses for random reads, which is usually too high if you're using an SSD where random reads are cheap (on disks it's expensive). Just setting it to 1 works well in my case.
This solves many "it does a slow seq scan even though there's an index"-cases.
I don't have any one complete book that I can recommend, and I don't even really have a great reading list for this. But I'll make an attempt to share what I think is useful as a starting point.
1. Systems Operations is first and foremost about understanding systems, in all of their complexity, which means understanding the internals of your OS primarily.
2. Performance and networking, in particular, are super important areas to focus on understanding when it comes to learning the topic to help with software development.
3. A lot of it is about understanding concepts in abstract and being able to extrapolate to other situations and apply these concepts, so there's actually quite a lot of useful information that can be learned on one OS and still applied to another OS (or on one game engine and applied to another, et al).
Here's a few books I think are worth reading, not in any particular order of prevalence, but loosely categorized
Part 2: https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-2-7th/dp/01354... (I had the pleasure of being taught from this book by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon at a previous employer, was an amazing class and these books are incredible resources even applied outside of Windows, we used 5th edition, I linked 7th, which has the 2nd part pending publication).
The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/books/perfbook.htm (no longer available from Amazon, but is available direct from publisher. This is basically the one book you should read about creating and structuring benchmarks or performance tests)
I guess that's a "reading list", but this is just a small part of what you need to know to excel in systems operations.
I would say for the typical software developer writing web applications, the most important thing to know is how databases work and how networking works, since these are going to be the primary items affecting your application performance. But there's obviously topics not included in this list that are also worth understanding, such as browser/DOM internals, how caching and CDNs work, and web-specific optimizations that can be achievable with HTTP/2 or QUIC.
For the average software developer writing desktop applications, I'd say make sure you /really/ understand OS internals... at the base everything you do on a computer system is based on what the OS provides to you. Even though you are abstracted (possibly many layers) away from this, being able to peel back the layers and understand what's /really/ happening is essential to writing high-quality application code that is performant and secure, as well as making you a champ at debugging issues.
If you're trying to get into systems operations as a field, this is just a brush over the top surface and there's a lot deeper diving required.
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World”
My working definition of stupidity is making poor predictions that lead to self-harm. The more stupid the predictions, the more extreme the self-harm.
I'm not sure trying to improvise a way through a novel kind of conflict counts as stupid so much as untrained. Maybe there was someone in WWI saying "This is obviously wrong and won't work - we should do this other thing instead."
Maybe there wasn't. At this distance it's hard to tell.
We tend to call someone stupid when the quality of the predictions is worse than some population median, and the self-harm seems both unsurprising and trivially avoidable.
Stupidity is only loosely related to IQ. Low IQ people don't have the horsepower to make good models, so they're often blindsided by challenges. But high IQ people can have bad beliefs and poor models. Without self-correction and a reality-testing loop they're just as likely to believe wrong and dangerous things.
One of the most toxic things that happens in politics is re-framing a problem away from rational competence towards emotive and narrative non-logic. If you can succeed in this, you can make people stupid. Emotion and narrative, especially ego-gratifying and tribal narratives, are reliably unrealistic models that lead to poor predictions.
Chemical engineers learned long ago that a process that works in the laboratory cannot be implemented in a factory in only one step. An intermediate step called the pilot plant is necessary to give experience in scaling quantities up and in operating in nonprotective environments. For example, a laboratory process for desalting water will be tested in a pilot plant of 10,000 gallon/day capacity before being used for a 2,000,000 gallon/day community water system.
Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built.
In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done.[2] Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Seen this way, the answer is much clearer. Delivering that throwaway to customers buys time, but it does so only at the cost of agony for the user, distraction for the builders while they do the redesign, and a bad reputation for the product that the best redesign will find hard to live down.
time, scope, quality, cost. pick 3, the 4th will be a function of the 3 parameters you picked. So you need to understand what's important.
If you're building a Mars lander, time is everything because if you miss your launch window, you need to wait 18 months for the next one. Most of us are doing something else.
Sounds like a case of Goodhart's law,
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
I've been the 'fixer' in so many situations and I have a tactic for this. I ask them for the following things:
- a ticket to track the work
- that they get approval from my manager to drop all of the work that I am currently doing and affect other peoples timelines
- that they document the problem and how they want it fixed
- that they get approval for the extra hours required
You'd be amazed at how many "critical" issues disappear when you ask for these things. I personally think it is only critical because someone wants to dump the problem on you so that they can go home to their families.
Programming is like riding a bike. It takes time to get on the bike, to get momentum going. Interruptions are like someone hitting you with a stick while you ride.
Getting hit, falling off, and climbing back on the bike takes a lot of effort, and you have to rebuild your momentum each time it happens. The more times you're knocked off in a day, the more tired you get of climbing back on.
Rebuilding the momentum when programming can take 30 minutes or so. Then you just get whacked with another stick.
> Good and accurate estimation is not just a dev function. It requires buy in and input from the entire business stack.
And in my experience, when people don't want to buy in to doing the whole process up front but they still demand some kind of commitment, the easy way to handle it is:
"We can commit to a date and we'll finish whatever we finish by then, or we can commit to a scope and it will take as long as it takes. But we won't commit to a date and a scope unless we spend the up front time to first figure out every detail of what we need to build."
Stating it like that usually makes people realize how ridiculous it is to commit to something, but you don't know what, but you'll still do it by a certain date. And it makes them feel like you're being willing to work with them/gives them some decision making power.
New House: $25,200.00
Average Income: $10,622.00 per year
New Car: $3,560.00
Average Rent: $150.00 per month
Tuition to Harvard University: $2,600.00 per year
Movie Ticket: $1.50 each
Gasoline: 40¢ per gallon
United States Postage Stamp: 8¢ each
Whether due to currency debasement, globalization, or overpopulation, the disparity in cost of living between the two eras is staggering.
> 500 loads and dependent stores, at minimum, in the best case hitting L1 cache, which is 3 cycles. So you are talking about 1500 cycles
This is absolutely not how modern CPUs work, and I think you misunderstood where the dependencies are. All the load/store pairs are independent from each other, which means they can be executed in parallel. Which means that this code is throughput limited. Modern CPUs tend to have at least 2 load/store ports, so we're talking a throughout of one copy per cycle, or 500 cycles for the entire operation (plus warm-up time).
Furthermore, this is a pure memmove in many cases, which means a real memmove implementation that has been optimised using vector instructions can be used. Now you're talking about moving 32 bytes per cycle, or 4 array entries if they're pointer-sized, which brings us down to 125 cycles plus warm-up. Which is on the order of a miss to memory...
===
Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen<address>
4 Properties on <street>
===
Everyone economic freedom and deregulation, until it means more people living near them.
(From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...)