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letzten Monatdiscuss

> If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.

Uh, that is exactly what a derivative work is. You literally specify that Hamlet is an input to your work. I believe you're conflating derivative with transformative. You're certainly creating a transformative derivation of Hamlet, but you are by definition creating a derivative work by training a Markov chain on the text of Hamlet.

The obvious follow up here is whether an LLM is creating transformative derivations or not. A lot of folks argue that yes, an LLM spitting out statistically sampled code that matches existing code is not transformative and is (or might be) infringing the terms of the license it was released under. Others argue that there's not an exact copy of the original source in the LLM's weights so by definition it must be a transformative work. I think it's a pretty obvious "somewhere in the middle" that is gonna make a bunch of lawyers a whole lot of money.

Personally, I don't care one way or the other. I'm one of the folks that thinks software shouldn't be copyright-able in the first place.

letztes Jahrdiscuss

I’m gonna give this a very charitable read by saying that while I find the ways that the treatment of burn victims was advanced by abhorrent means, we as a society have still benefited from those means.

> So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created.

I am trying to be very specific here. I assume no untoward motivations from the parent commenter. I am not intending to cast aspersions. Whoever wrote this, I feel no ill will for you and this is not meant as a personal slight.

And I will be very clear, this statement as written could probably be defended because of the “by how it was created” clause.

However, “So once the model is created there isn’t a good reason to encumber it” is so… fucking I don’t even know, because what the actual fuck?

I apologize for the profanity, I really do. But, really? Are you fucking kidding me?

These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail.

I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. That’s all I think happened here. But holy fuck, please pause and consider things a bit.

letztes Jahrdiscuss

So there's a bit of a misunderstanding here in the chain of blog posts that I can clear up. First, from this article:

  That’s the question I’ve been mulling over for days, because
  I don’t see how this action can make any particular guarantees
  about durability, at least not in any portable way.

This part is super easy to clear up. CouchDB in no way relies on an fsync after open for any guarantee on durability. As shown in [1], CouchDB has been running an fsync on file open since extremely early in its development. However, I can easily see how just reading the Neighbourhoodie article would lead here.

The missing context is that CouchDB primarily fsync's after open because when an empty database is created, we write a header to disk. The very early implementation in [1] just didn't limit this to only cases where we write the header and that general behavior has never been changed (though the implementation is a bit different today, the effect is the same).

Also, in hindsight, I believe this claim in the Neighbourhoodie is probably too strong:

  However, CouchDB is not susceptible to the sad path.

I didn't read the article super closely the first time since I'd been through the background discussions on the finer details, but today I'd probably hedge that a bit with language along the lines of:

  However, CouchDB is *probably* not susceptible to the sad
  path. While we can't guarantee it can't happen due to how
  various I/O operations are (not) specified, we're doing as much
  as we can to prevent it. Also, don't forget that your storage
  device might be lying about fsync anyway.

The underlying logic around that requires considering the original blog post in this chain [3]. That article posits a pathological error condition where we write something, crash, restart, issue read from a dirty page cache, and then hard crashing the entire machine. In this case, the database returned a read that was never committed.

As the author of this (as in this thread) article notes:

  Using OpenZFS as an example (hey, it’s what I know), fsync()
  always flushes anything outstanding for the underlying object,
  regardless of where the writes came from.

AFAIK, this is the norm and, I assume, the reason that the NULL BITMAP article [3] suggests the fsync on open. In CouchDB land, we just went back and said, "Oh nice, we already do that for other reasons anyway." Unfortunately the "we already do it for other reasons" aspect didn't really come through. So in the end, while none of the behavior on fsync-on-open is guaranteed in anyway shape or form, it's not impossible that it's saved our bacon a non-zero number of times. Just because its not guaranteed, its common that filesystems will in fact perform those flushes regardless of which file descriptor is used.

Also, to make sure that we're not missing the field for the cornstalks, I want to point out that the double fsync commit protocol used by CouchDB is probably 99.some-more-nines responsible for CouchDB's durability guarantees. However, that's not 100%, so when we find weird edge cases like in [3] we try and make sure that we're as correct as can be. For instance, here's the response to fsync-gate [4].

[1] https://github.com/apache/couchdb/blob/956c11b35487fb8ffcf70...

[2] https://neighbourhood.ie/blog/2025/02/26/how-couchdb-prevent...

[3] https://buttondown.com/jaffray/archive/null-bitmap-builds-a-...

[4] https://github.com/apache/couchdb/commit/3505281559513e29224...

letztes Jahrdiscuss

I'm no rustc expert, but from what little I know it seems like disabling panics for a crate would be an obvious first step. You make a great point though. Turning that into a compiler assertion of "this function will never panic" would also be useful.

letztes Jahrdiscuss

What caught my eye in the article was the desire to have something that doesn't panic with a release profile, while allowing for panics in dev profiles. Based on other comments I think the general "allow use of std, but don't panic" seems like something that could be useful purely on the "Wait, why doesn't that exist?" reactions.

letztes Jahrdiscuss

Does anyone know if there's an obvious reason that adding a `no_panic` crate attribute wouldn't be feasible? It certainly seems like an "obvious" thing to add so I'm hesitant to take the obvious nerd snipe bait.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Absolutely correct! Had the bird strike not occurred, there wouldn’t have been a crash. Had things with the go around been handled properly, there would have been no crash.

Etc etc. The fact that a wall was 50m out of compliance or whatever it ends up being will be a footnote at best in the review of this crash.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

There’s a few more than three.

https://leanpub.com/cppinitbook

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/8nn4fw/for...

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

That’ll just depend on whatever code was deployed to the cluster. For the clusters I used to operate, the answer would be absolutely all nodes talk to all nodes all the time.

I personally never operated anything above roughly 250 nodes, but that limit was mostly due to following the OP’s advice about paying attention to the configuration of each node in the cluster. In my case, fewer nodes with fancier and larger raid arrays ended up being a better scaling strategy.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

> If you actually have 1000 nodes worth of work, the heartbeats are not at all a big deal.

I think you’re missing the fact that the heart beats will be combined with existing packets. Hence the quoted bit. If you’ve got 1000 nodes, they should be doing something with that network such that an extra 50 bytes (or so) every 30s would not be an issue.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Most likely those are just the states where they already have a tax presence. For whatever reason they happen to currently employ folks in those states so adding employees is easy. Adding new states means getting lawyers and CPA type folks involved which is a hurdle to hiring in larger organizations.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

A wild tangent but reading “heritable metabolizing” really hit me on the “are viruses alive” question.

I’ve been around enough biotech to have considered the differences between plasmids and viruses versus archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. I’ve always considered “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”. As in, “life” is progeny resemble their parent(s)? Or “heritable change”.

“Heritable metabolizing” quite nicely captures that difference between the levels of single molecule “life” and singular/multicellular “life”.

Apologies for the random aside, it was just one of those random “I have a vague idea of why mitochondria are important, but I don’t see them as fundamental” parts of my “What is life?” definition being refined.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Sometimes science doesn’t have to be precise to demonstrate a result.

Consider trying to measure feedback from a microphone and speaker. You don’t have to be an expert to know that there’s a quick change in system behavior when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

This matches my experience. I spent a decade operating Erlang clusters and using hot code upgrades is a superpower for debugging a whole class of hard to track bugs. Although, without the tracking for cluster state it can be its own footgun when a hotpatch gets unpatched during a code deploy.

As for relups, I once tried starting a project to make them easier but eventually decided that the number of bazookas pointed at each and every toe made them basically a non-starter for anything that isn’t trivial. And if its trivial it was already covered by the nl (network load, send a local module to all nodes in the cluster and hot load it) style tooling.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

> Introductory summary: The current scientific consensus is that the placebo effect is a real healing effect operating through belief and suggestion.

I have no idea what the rest of the article says because this single sentence is so bat shit insane on so many levels.

The placebo effect is not “real healing”, it’s “our study is unable to show a statistically relevant result from our treatment”.

I’m not big on LLMs personally, so I won’t make any specific claims on what they can do. But from what I’ve read, I’d doubt they’d correct that mistake.

On the flip side, I would trust an LLM to tell me whether it should have been “batshit”, “bat-shit”, or “bat shit”.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

[flagged]

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I made it through a few paragraphs before noping out because of how terrible this article is. Your comment made me go actually look to see what they could possibly be arguing against CICO. Turns out it’s nothing because this author has no idea how science or biology works.

We can all argue about what makes a calorie “good” or “bad” but CICO is basic thermodynamics. A calorie is a unit of energy. If a cell doesn’t have enough energy, it dies.

Sorry for mildly ranting at idiocy on the internet via your comment, sodality2.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

You can make a video, but odds are it won’t be good or get traction. I think you’re better off with a book. Books can remain indexed and accumulate readers for centuries, whereas most videos are forgotten/ignored. I’ve read plenty of books from decades ago that still get lots of comments and discussion.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” — Edsger Dijkstra

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Also, for anyone not completely familiar with Erlang's terminology, the translation of "per process garbage collection" to Go would be "per goroutine garbage collection". As mentioned in a sibling comment, this allows Erlang style garbage collection to avoid pausing the entire operating system process when running garbage collectin.