leapis · HackerTrans

5 months agodiscuss

Decades of speculative science fiction, thought experiments, and discourse led to this. It’s gratifying to see that we’ve garnered enough concern, a major AI lab risking this to reign in the potential of runaway AI disasters. Hopefully we see other labs follow.

leapis

7 months agodiscuss

Is there a point at which library maintainer feedback would meaningfully influence a by-default JVM change?

I keep a large production Java codebase and its deployments up-to-date. Short of upstreaming fixes to every major dependency, the only feasible way to continue upgrading JDK/JVM versions has often been to carry explicit exceptions to new defaults.

JPMS is a good example: --add-opens still remains valuable today for important infra like Hadoop, Spark, and Netty. If other, even more core projects (e.g. Arrow) hadn't modernized, the exceptions would be even more prolific.

If libraries so heavily depended upon like Mockito are unable to offer a viable alternative in response to JEP 451, my reaction would be to re-enable dynamic agent attachment rather than re-architect many years of test suites. I can't speak for others, but if this reaction holds broadly it would seem to defeat the point of by-default changes.

leapis

2 years agodiscuss

> Why on earth would you bet your money on some random tool you don't even understand? ... I built a tool for people who knew what harmonic patterns were.

The tool is for drawing "technical analysis indicators", one of the most convoluted ways to ascribe meaning to a random process and something that will only ever be true in the self-fulfilling sense. I don't think it's a surprise that some users are willing to blindly trust the tool, when all users of it are blindly trusting concepts that are built on sand.

Although I'm sure the author is burnt out from the experience now, I'd be interested in hearing how their next side project venture goes- is the experience more enjoyable when you're dealing with a user base that self-selects differently? Or do all users suck equally, just in different ways?

leapis

2 years agodiscuss

Agreed- I come from a Java/C++ shop where we tried to tackle this dichotomy with interop but it ended up causing more problems than it solved. A lot of the work that Java has done with modern garbage collectors is impressive, but even they admit (indirectly, via Valhalla) that no/low-alloc code has it's place.

leapis

2 years agodiscuss

I mostly agree with this, but I've been a big fan of having primitive types in config. Most of the time if I have something I want to configure, it's either one of the following (or a map/list-based structure consisting of):

- scalar value

- feature toggle

- URI/enum option/human readable display text

Having float/long/boolean is trivial to validate in the config language itself, and if they're useful and simple enough isn't it nice to be able to validate your config as early as possible?

leapis

3 years agodiscuss

Yup. We've clearly benefitted- G1 and generational ZGC have large advantages over CMS- but it's a lot of experimentation and trial-and-error to get there, whereas other deprecations/removals are usually easier to resolve.

leapis

3 years agodiscuss

Nullable is a huge issue in Java, but annotation-based nullability frameworks are both effective and pervasive in the ecosystem (and almost mandatory, IMO).

I'm really excited about https://jspecify.dev/, which is an effort by Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc to standardize annotations, starting with @Nullable.

leapis

3 years agodiscuss

Depends- one of the hardest parts of the 11-20 upgrade for us was that cms gc was removed.

If you run a bunch of different microservices with distinct allocation profiles, all with high allocation pressure and performance constraints, and you've accomplished this w/ the help of a very fine-tuned CMS setup, migrating that over to G1/ZGC is non-trivial

leapis

3 years agodiscuss

The re

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