williamdclt

yesterdaydiscuss

> Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.

Your statement actually makes the way out of the spiral very explicit: Trump must stop being in power.

williamdclt

3 days agodiscuss

Your example are somewhat funny (in a not-so-funny way), the most obvious example for "foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is" is the US, from a european perspective

williamdclt

3 days agodiscuss

> I’m doubtful of most people building their own crypto libs and distributed consensus implementations. But maybe cloudflare can pull it off.

Who else than Cloudflare (or similar company in expertise and size) would be a better fit to implement distributed consensus?

williamdclt

3 days agodiscuss

I'm not reading anything in this article that seems to pretend like it's working in their favour?

It's just an article from a company about their industry, companies do that all the time for brand recognition, building trust (showing expertise in their domain), and educating potential customers about why they might need this sort of product (lead generation).

williamdclt

4 days agodiscuss

Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American.

This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.

williamdclt

15 days agodiscuss

You're not wrong that the position of many anti-datacenter people isn't entirely rational (in the sense of "backed by solid numbers"), but you're entirely missing the point of why they are angry.

Consider this:

    - People are struggling more and more financially, with income that does not keep up with inflation
    - People are seeing inequality rise with the ultra-rich getting ultra-richer
    - People are seeing climate change quickly changing their environment for the worst: droughts, heatwaves, storms...
    - People are expecting climate change to make their financial prospect worse, too

And now, they see a wave of building datacenters. Not only do these data centers have externalities for the climate, but their _purpose_ seems like a negative: putting their jobs at risk because AI, redirecting this wealth to the ultra-rich. There's nothing for them in this, it's lose-lose!

And they see their own government encouraging and subsidising these projects, how could they not feel betrayed?

> People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”.

I don't think so. People would rather these benefits weren't there, but people exist in society and balance principle with practicality. You're allowed to criticise how AI is being brought into society while also using AI yourself, moral purity isn't a requirement to having opinions.

williamdclt

18 days agodiscuss

I'll happily live in a world where this is the extent of police authority abuse.

williamdclt

19 days agodiscuss

> there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west

Not even close to being true!

- There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times. - 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s - 440Hz is the "official" standard since then - Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays

So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.

williamdclt

19 days agodiscuss

> adjust between A440 and A400

Someone shared this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s I struggle to conceive being able to hear the difference, but _singing_ it entirely blows my mind

williamdclt

19 days agodiscuss

Baroque was 415Hz. I'm not aware of 436Hz having been a thing but 432Hz used to be standard before 440Hz came along. And nowadays, 442Hz is getting pretty common.

williamdclt

19 days agodiscuss

> knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound

well that's the whole question isn't it? If you know how an open string is supposed to have, that's what people call absolute pitch?

williamdclt

19 days agodiscuss

It's really not that deep: they're characterising the business, you're characterising the hobby. The owner having a good time doesn't make it a successful business. A failing business can be a successful hobby, sure, that's still a failing business.

williamdclt

24 days agodiscuss

No that's not true.

I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect).

I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).

williamdclt

29 days agodiscuss

If they don't need $1300 cash, they don't have any real reason to sell it

williamdclt

last monthdiscuss

So, temporary situation then. That's a pretty short period with no paradigm shift, just a delay in capacity.

williamdclt

last monthdiscuss

> > The optimizer is usually smarter than you think.

> Except for when it isn't, and moves heavy calculation inside a nested loop inside a nested loop to avoid an index scan. Nothing is perfect.

Yeah that's also been my experience. It's true that Postgres is usually smarter than I think, when I try to figure out why it's not using a better query plan I eventually find out that it wouldn't be better at all. But from time to time, it genuinely is taking a bad decision and having no power over that at all is a problem

williamdclt

last monthdiscuss

> projects I simply could not have ever approached alone.

I think that's part of the divide between enthusiasts and naysayers. If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. If you use it on stuff that you're pretty good at, it's not a gamechanger (and if you're an expert, it's a minor boost at best). Many people's job are about doing what they're an expert at.

williamdclt

last monthdiscuss

I wouldn't spend any sort of effort on this fight but that does seem quite a lot better

williamdclt

last monthdiscuss

I don't know if that'll make you feel any better but yeah, you're indeed asking for the impossible! You need consensus between your nodes that store state _somehow_, either these nodes are Redis and it does that for you, or these nodes are your pods and you need to do consensus yourself (zookeeper might help, but you're definitely in "complicated stuff" territory).

Spinning up an in-memory (no persistence) Redis cluster in your k8s should be easy enough, hopefully?

williamdclt

last monthdiscuss

> If I flag every line in your PR as a potential security bug then I have 100% recall.

No. A code review isn't about "flagging a line of code", it's about identifying an issue or a risk. If a 10-line PR has one issue and you leave a comment on every single character, if you still miss the issue you have 0% recall.

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