mcfig · HackerTrans

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

I appreciate the details in this, but I also notice it is very machine-focused. When a user wants to sandbox an AI agent, they don’t just want their local .ssh keys protected. They also want to be able to control access to a lot of off-machine resources - e.g. allowing the agent to read github issues and sometimes also make some kinds of changes.

mcfig

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Great article. One real case I encountered that I find thought provoking, is where a bunch of test failures were bucketed into the same bucket because link-time code-generation had noticed that a bunch of C++ getter functions had the same output code and combined them all. So stack traces became confusing because the address-to-symbol mapping was more complicated than the logic we had in place was prepared for.

i.e. optimization had violated a rule we were implicitly relying on (that each non-inlined function should start at a distinct address, so that address-to-symbol mapping could be done easily). But that’s not an explicit guarantee and optimizers don’t seem to think about it much. (Well for inlining it seems to have had some thought, still sucks, but anyway this case doesn’t fit the pattern of inlining).

I find it hard to say anyone is dead wrong in this case… but I would turn off that LTCG optimization any time I could, except where proven necessary.

mcfig

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I see this was [posted 12 years ago](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3906253) too!

Anyway, it’s a good read and is what I have been doing too. One historical note:

> Microsoft has often mistakenly used ‘Unicode’ and ‘widechar’ as synonyms for both ‘UCS-2’ and ‘UTF-16’.

While Microsoft’s continued defaulting to UTF-16 is misguided, and continued conflation of “Unicode” to mean “UTF-16” is very confusing for everyone who isn’t a Unicode expert, it didn’t start as a mistake. Now it’s a sustained mistake - mainly because of inertia + backward compatibility at this point. And there has been movement, but inertia is real.

mcfig

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Asking questions of any repo on “repo” fails with “Error: Internal error while processing request.” This is pribably because I unlinked my Github connection after trying it out, but it shouldn’t be trying to use that in this case.

mcfig

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Right! e.g. for RTX 4080, TGP is 320W. Discrete cards definitely have a bigger power envelope.

mcfig

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Good point, I had glossed over the title. That is definitely clickbait, “life-sparking” is not the same as “potential life precursor”. The rest of the article seems unusually restrained, though.

mcfig

hace 3 añosdiscuss

People are reacting negatively to your comment, the reason is that however accurate your complaint may be about most such reporting (IMO you are correct), you have chosen to attach it to this article. I find no evidence in this article of “tone implying life is about to turn up”.

I think you have misread the tone. The article certainly has a tone of excitement throughout. But it’s excitement for further knowledge, in general.

Of the possibility of life showing up elsewhere, it says only this: “Scientists are still a long way from answering whether life could originate on Enceladus”

mcfig

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Why not?

(Is this about effectiveness, training time, forgetting, or something else?)

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