scottlamb

5,043 karmajoined 13 ปีที่แล้ว

https://www.slamb.org/

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เมื่อวานdiscuss

I'd be interested to hear the author's answer to your question, but I see it as an interesting proof-of-concept. It's testing the viability of not only rewriting PostgreSQL in Rust (and their choice of deps) but also in switching the threading model and other architectural changes. LLMs shine at pumping out prototypes insanely fast, and a working prototype can put an end to a lot of speculation.

I likely wouldn't use a rewrite of such a huge project if it doesn't have the backing of the original team (or a significant fraction thereof) and a believable story for having matched/exceeded the original code quality and maintenance. I also think in general using an LLM for license-laundering is legally and morally hard to defend, although this case is different in that they chose a more restrictive license. Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that you can just download PostgreSQL, do s/MIT/AGPL/ and release it, legally. (The original MIT-licensed version still exists, so no reason anyone would prefer yours until you make another release with some compelling new feature.)

เมื่อวานซืนdiscuss

> Disclaimer: An earlier version of this post claimed the structure is wait-free, this is incorrect. Being wait-free requires that failure or suspension of any thread can’t cause failure or suspension of another thread. This queue in fact does not fulfill that requirement. The main section which discusses the wait bounds of queue operations has been amended to reflect this, but other parts of this article have not been. As such there may parts of the text which refer to this as a wait-free queue, which it is not. I chose to keep those sections to avoid rewriting chunks of this post after it was already posted. Thanks for the correction Reddit user matthieum!

Classy disclaimer! matthieum's (long) reddit comment is also an informative read: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1up0uhg/girls_just_wa...

เมื่อวานซืนdiscuss

> I mean I might not know what a strawman is, but I thought it was claiming people were making an argument that in fact they were not.

What I mean is: I expect you originally heard a version of this that was more nuanced and supported by data than what you presented. Your paraphrased form is weaker, which I call a strawman. (The "duh, QED" was kind of a give-away.)

Wikipedia lists (among other things) "Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version." and "Exaggerating (sometimes grossly) an opponent's argument, then attacking this exaggerated version." as characteristics of a strawman.

btw the opposite is sometimes called a "steelman": arguing against the most solid version of the opponent's argument that you can imagine.

> I mean, sure. I've long argued that the US strategy of printing money and giving it to asset owners is bad. I doubt a wealth tax would help, IMO the real issue is the welfare for wealthy people. Seems kinda dumb and the people claiming that the economy would collapse without it appear to be making up their principles as they go along.

As in Quantitative Easing? I confess I don't understand it as well as I probably should, but I think it's cyclical? and inequality is increasing even when it is not happening? Would a pinky-promise that we will stop and never do it again achieve start reducing inequality, as opposed to just lessening the increase? If not, I don't think that's radical enough on its own. What serious alternative is there to a wealth tax or going back to 70+% highest marginal tax rate?

> But we should all want to encourage wealth. It makes people wealthy.

To the extent anyone and everyone can become wealthy, I agree. What policies would you suggest to achieve that meaningfully (obviously inflation doesn't count)? What I see in these charts is instead a zero-sum game in which the most wealthy become even more so at the expense of the least wealthy.

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> Going from "predominantly what happens" to "it's theoretically possible occasionally" is a question of magnitude rather than direction.

Okay, fair enough. I took "without adding any new buyers" literally but yes, I can imagine this creating some downward pressure on stock prices.

> Or their spending it on food and rent results in an increase in rents, even for the people who didn't get any, which rents go in part to foreign investors who remove it from the jurisdiction, and then domestic people have even less to invest than before. ... Compare this to the thing where you e.g. relax zoning rules to reduce housing scarcity so that rents come down and then domestic people have that money to invest.

Are these mutually exclusive? I concede that people being unable to afford rent limits rent to some extent, but it's not my preferred price control. Giving them more money that they could use on rent might make it more clear we need to make other changes, and I can live with that.

> you've now created a preference for spending rather than saving/investing while increasing your reliance on the taxation of saving/investing.

Yes. Is that worse than the status quo? There's a lot of spending now that should be happening and is not—people literally dying from inability to afford medical treatment. You'll probably say—just as with the rent example—that people being more able to pay will cause medical costs to increase further, and I agree that should be addressed, but again I think people being flat-out unable to afford it is not the best way to control medical spending.

> [...pointless wars are a massive overall net loss...]

I think you understand this, but just to be clear in case anyone was wondering: I also hate pointless wars, just was making the point that even in the stupidest use of the tax money I can imagine there's still someone getting money to buy Apple stock, even though as a whole we're worse off.

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

>> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me...

> Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument?

I think the "even" and "..." are doing a lot of work in my sentence. You presented a less strong version of the argument than that given by people who support it, thus it is a straw man, period.

> an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market

Would you say we had a free market in the 1970s, when the chart I linked showed the top .01% by wealth's share of taxes exceeded their share of wealth? That's essentially what I'd like to go back to, perhaps by a wealth tax. I would say we had a free market then, showing progressive taxation and free markets are absolutely compatible. This isn't Soviet-style central planning.

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> Increasing inequality is bad

I'm not at all sure everyone in these discussions agrees on this point!

I agree with you not only that this is bad but also that wealth taxes are not the only way to address it. They are a way that is getting momentum right now, AFAICT more than the other things you mentioned, and we may have to choose between voting for a wealth tax (or candidates who support one) or doing nothing.

fwiw, I'm really not sure which approach(es) I'd choose if I could single-handedly decide how to reduce wealth inequality.

> The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fake.

I think "federal receipts as a percent of GDP" isn't the right chart to answer this question. Overall tax rate != how progressive the tax is or how high the "effective" marginal tax rate is. On https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/ the "The Top .01% Don't Pay Their Fair Share as They Hoard More Wealth" shows a clear cross-over point where before about 1980 the top .01%'s share of tax was greater than their share of wealth, and after it reversed. That's consistent with the 1981 change I mentioned.

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I agree: there is no precise, objective way to compare the utility of two arbitrary wealth distributions, and redistribution does not always maximize the total well-being of society.

Yet I assert it's useful to ask if the status quo—one person has >$1T and many others don't have enough for basic needs like shelter, medicine, and food—is optimal or if it'd be better to redistribute some of this.

* We don't need the ability to quantify or rank all wealth distributions, just compare some of immediate relevance. That's much easier, in the same way that even though the halting problem is undecidable, we can prove some realistic program A will halt and some realistic program B may not.

* We don't need objectivity. Democracies decide many subjective things by majority vote (sometimes 2/3rds or whatever), directly or through representatives. I don't always agree with the outcome, but it's the system we have here in the US/California, and I assert it's better than a dictatorship or requiring 100% consensus to take any action.

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively because it is all just obvious that it doesn't need to be justified. Poor people will get more money if rich people have less, duh, QED.

Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me alongside graphs showing the extent to which our inequality is growing. https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/ see the "The Top .01% Don't Pay Their Fair Share as They Hoard More Wealth" graph in particular.

This is more a disagreement of values than facts, I think. Some people see the richest man's net worth go from $100B to >$1T and think he deserves that for starting these companies, and taking any of it from him is class warfare. Others think that rich people's pissing contests and lifestyles would be essentially the same if their wealth capped out at say $100B instead, we're morally obligated to use that money to try to meet Americans' basic needs, and using other's taxpayer dollars to allow him to reach those heights (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that>) is class warfare.

High marginal income taxes (it was 91% in 1963, 70% until 1981, there's your compelling case where they turned out to be right, inequality was not growing then like it is now) or a wealth tax are not the same as Soviet style socialism. They still give an incentive for entrepreneurs, innovators, and hard workers.

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers.

Is that assuming the tax money is going into the void? I agree it might force roughly 0.8% of shares to be sold in a given year. But as to not adding any new buyers: no one's being forced to buy stock in the same way, but shouldn't someone be getting the money and potentially using it to buy Apple stock?

Let's imagine for a second the wealth tax money is simply given to people who are below the threshold. Most of them may waste it on silly things like food and rent, but some might end up with a surplus and become investors. Same effect if say the income tax is lowered to make the wealth tax revenue-neutral. Or if say it's used to expand Medicare. It's hard to for me to imagine a way to spend taxes that doesn't help someone. Even if the money is used on war—a net destruction of value and lives—there are some people selling missiles better off a result.

9 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Well, I qualified with "here in California", and I don't know if that's where tancop lives.

I think the current situation is not great, but I'd want to fix it by investigating why we're seemingly unable/unwilling to impose the punishment currently on the books. I think it would be plenty if we did—to me, more than six months jail time for stealing <$950 would be excessive. We could increase the fines and decrease / take away the jail option, but does it matter? It's not happening anyway.

9 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.

Don't we already? Police and DAs at least here in California are not serious about punishing shoplifters AFAICT. I hear people say this is specifically because of the 2014 Proposition 47 (raising the threshold for felony theft from $400 to $950). Not sure that's true (misdemeanor theft can still be punished by up to six months of jail time and/or up to a $1,000 fine, and California's current thresholds are similar to other states) but there was a federal mandate to address prison overcrowding, and California chose to do that by not having as many prisoners instead of building a ton more prisons. Prop 47, and perhaps some policy changes made with far less fanfare, were intended to achieve that.

There's still more deterrent for misdemeanor shoplifting than for nationwide egg price-fixing though!

13 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> I'd love to look into the Quick Access placement. It is supposed to appear on all spaces and sets an NSWindow property to do so. Is there anything particular that you think triggers it (multi-monitor, full screen apps, etc)?

Thanks! I haven't seen it in a while, so maybe it's been fixed by either a 1Password or macOS update or is specific to a setting I since changed. But I'll keep my eyes out for if it happens again. I do have a multi-monitor setup.

I do see right now that if I'm on a full-screen app, 1Password's quick access window doesn't show up; if I move to the next space over I see it for a moment and then it disappears. In contrast, Spotlight search will actually pop up directly over my full-screen app, though knowing Apple they could be using some private API for this behavior.

15 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> These are tiny paper cuts that add up to pain, like the ones you mentioned that affect me/a tiny portion of the user base so they aren't worth fixing. Is the justification I'm sure that's being made.

I think it's not only that but also that making site-specific changes (as I did with a TamperMonkey script) is fragile and could get them into trouble if their changes do the wrong thing (immediately for everyone, for some users, or after some site change). Might be better from their perspective to honor the site's stated intent even if that intent is questionable. In my top example, the "password" field actually is a password if the user hasn't enabled 2FA, so the changes I made wouldn't work for 1Password to apply to everyone. They could detect the label "PIN + Token" to gate it, but what if that text changes in a redesign or is sometimes localized into another language? and so on.

In the broadest sense, I agree there are big UX problems, but how much should we expect the password manager to do unilaterally? fwiw even when a bunch of players got together to make broader changes, we ended up with passkeys, which are far from perfect in many ways. (The flows about scanning a QR code from one device to another, without necessarily even knowing which device has a working passkey for that site... the simultaneous confusing offers of different ways of signing in... try talking your vision-impaired father through that over the phone.)

> if the editor is on a different workspace on mac you have to go to the application space/desktop than three finger swipe back to the browser space/desktop and then back to the application space/desktop and then back-and-forth to fill in four different security questions.

Yeah, that sounds similar to my own complaint about quick access opening on the wrong Space, just applied to the main window instead. And of course when you have to use the security questions something else has gone really wrong, like the main password having changed on the site without having changed in your password manager.

* One way I've seen this is when people have overlapped usage in two different password managers (1Password vs either Google Passwords or Apple Passwords). They have import and export (except for passkeys), but it'd be nice if they had an incremental version to help you get out of this mess if you weren't disciplined in switching over all at once.

* Another is that when you change the site's password even while using the password manager, the actual site change and recording it in the password manager's database is hardly transactional. You can click the password manager's update pop-up even if it failed, or not notice it even if it succeeded. Again not really sure how they would address this unilaterally.

> I just hit one. Creating a new document in 1Password, the name of the document isn't preselected, so I have to hit delete to name it. Lots of little tiny shit like that.

Yeah, that's 100% on them.

16 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Can you give me an example of a UX problem that you attribute to the password manager? That'd help me understand.

I often hit problems with 1Password's autofill on particular websites, but by and large I blame the website. Few examples:

* one website expects me to type the PIN then a Symantec VIP OTP token into a single field called "password". That's a (possibly deliberately) password manager-hostile design. I finally got annoyed with it enough to use an open source project called `python-vipaccess` to create a proper `otpauth://totp/...` URL I could add into 1Password and wrote a TamperMonkey script that added separate autofillable fields that would get concatenated automatically. Now 1Password works fine.

* frequently websites will complain about needing a valid credit card number after autofill. I have to go to the field, delete the last digit, add it back, tab away, then it works. I think they have just used the wrong event handlers and never tested it with autofill.

* they often will skip `autocomplete="new-password"` attributes, so my password manager will look for a (nonexistent) current password rather than prompting me for a new one, and/or they won't have the username and new password fields ever in the DOM at the same time so the password manager doesn't save it properly. (Even if it makes sense in terms of user-visible flow to do these in sequence, they can still leave the username in as a hidden form element for the benefit of the password manager.)

I've also hit UX problems in 1Password itself, for example the "quick access" pop-up doesn't reliably appear on the current Space in macOS. (Confusing and annoying to have to switch to another to see it.) But they seem less common.

18 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

ceejayoz> You want to let every merchant I swipe my card at know my age? To improve privacy?

Remember the site guidelines:

SG> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

The obvious solution is instead of "every transaction comes with the user's birthday", the vendor can in some way set a minimum age enum of say (13, 15, 18, 21, 25) — a handful of ages that are significant with respect to some law or regulation. Then the transaction succeeds or fails.

19 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

As I understand it, Hawaii had environmental concerns with ferries (requiring a review that was never completed), specifically whale/ship strikes and the risk of car-carrying ferries transporting invasive species between the islands. [1] I'm unsure if other islands would have similar concerns about cargo ships or not or if the environmental review would have been satisfactory if they'd just done it on time.

I'd expect ferries and/or small cargo ships to be an attractive option if allowed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry

22 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I don't think people are upvoting this for the fact at the top of "say something surprising" [1], but it indeed surprised me:

> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!

Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 30+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity [edit: times rpm, thanks Retr0id]. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?

SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.

[1] as I write this, the title "no feigning surprise" suggests <https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/> but the link points to "say something surprising" <https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/>.

[2] https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x1...

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

> Or is this a building permitting issue where for some reason the bureaucracy surrounding a permanent structure is expected to drag on for years but somehow they got the tents permitted rapidly?

Good point; some permit loophole might make sense.

It occurs to me this also could still turn out to be a giant failure: these may all still be unpowered, empty tents. They might end up taking two to three years to turn on, might never get a critical permit at all, etc. I'm vaguely recalling some story from Google's past. They had an experimental datacenter (`pq` maybe?) built out of shipping containers. There was some way they had hoped this would be cheaper that (iirc) didn't work out at all because the local fire marshal declared each shipping container to be a full structure and thus an unexpected set of regulations applied. and/or each may also have been required to have an emergency power-off button for the entire facility, which were hit by accident more than one might hope. They never built a second datacenter with that design.

Also remembering that for a long while Google's Dalles, Oregon site had building 1, building 3, and an empty concrete slab between them called building 2. I suppose Meta could have done something similar and had the slabs ready to go long ago.

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

That makes sense. Although I have to pick on your example a bit: wouldn't they still need a concrete foundation for all that weight and thus still need bulldozers? Still unsure how much of the work they're actually avoiding.

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Meta's first five buildings took between two and three years to build, but Williams is almost done building out 200 MW (additional) off-grid power plants in a year, and to match that they're putting their equipment in tents. That raises questions for me:

* Did they expect the next five buildings to also take between two and three years to build if done in the same manner? I'd hope it'd be significantly faster the second time because they've perfected the design, found good local contractors and suppliers, etc.

* How much of the time was the actual structure vs. all the stuff inside they still have to do with the tents?

* How long are they expecting to keep this? Are they anticipating extra problems like leaking roofs?

* What are the "off-grid power plants"? Is this basically a whole bunch of diesel or natural gas generators? [edit: oh, yes, "The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines". I wonder if they're trucking in the fuel too.] If so, yuck.