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cynicalkane

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cynicalkane
·9 gün önce·discuss
Where did I defend whatever "indefensible" things you're accusing me of defending? The OP post described specific ways Google's culture changed, on the inside. I said those were true. This was the entire scope of the claims I made.

Your response to that is "my personal opinion is canonical, your specific examples to the contrary don't matter, and I'm going to go ahead and imply you're bad for working there or saying anything."

I'm not going to spend more time here. I don't think you and these others are commenting in good faith.
cynicalkane
·9 gün önce·discuss
Holy cow dude, I am not personally answerable for all the faults of a megacorp, nor am I "only now beginning to admit" anything in your imaginary personal history about me that you made up now.

This entire thread makes me sad. A handful of people, the original writer and some other commenters, are saying "this corporation has changed for the worse in some ways" and the overwhelming majority of posts are these weirdos attacking them for why didn't you specifically say the opinion that I want, and why didn't you say it sooner than this post I just became aware of?
cynicalkane
·9 gün önce·discuss
I worked at Google for a similar span. It was different 9 years ago, in ways that are specifically described in the blog post you're ignoring, which I and many other Googlers would confirm are true.
cynicalkane
·13 gün önce·discuss
Even before AI training clusters became important, Google has had an outstanding custom fabric (there's papers about it) together with the ability to tune NICs for their own cases, and "their own cases" meant nearly everything engineered within Google. Ethernet hardware has had low kernel latency and DMA for a long time; it's the rest of the stack that hurts. But as far back as the early 2010s (if not further back, that goes beyond my knowledge horizon), you could just make it not hurt, if you had the software engineers to do it.
cynicalkane
·18 gün önce·discuss
For over the last >1 year, Google has been dismissing people without warning or cause. The days where it was nearly impossible to be fired are over; now you might be severed by surprise for no given reason at all.
cynicalkane
·20 gün önce·discuss
One big advantage of IPv6 local addresses is that you can pack a lot of semantic information in an address that's easy to remember, plus bits to help with routing and/or firewalling if you need.

DNS and mDNS don't "just work". You don't need but probably really want HA for DNS which is overkill for a homelab user, and you really want a fixed address for that DNS, because who wants to fix issues when you can't even address your services, and you really want your routers to have fixed addresses for the same reasons; you need VLAN and/or Avahi reflecting for mDNS, and if you need firewalling on your LAN, have fun dealing with the fact that mDNS clients prefer GUAs, then IPv4s, then ULAs in that order, by RFC rule, and managing GUAs sensibly when your ISP keeps changing your prefix -- well, IPv6 is almost 30 years old and home/SMB equipment still can't handle that reliably or flexibly, if it even lets you do anything besides assign /64s, and there's nothing stopping your ISP from saying "here just have a single /64, sorry if you wanted to actually use IPv6 for anything clever like having multiple subnets, who would ever want that?" So you say "I'll just use DHCPv6" and it turns out that DHCPv6 kind of sucks and it also turns out many devices don't support that by default or at all, including every single Android and Chrome device, for starters.

IPv6 is full of these design issues where you have a lot of things that are supposed to Just Work, Look It's So Much Simpler Than IPv4, and look at all these address bytes (excuse us while we take 64 of them away for no reason), except you discover that nothing Just Works with anything else in mildly nontrivial cases. You end up on a yak shave only to discover no yak underneath, and you end up just having a broken network while standing in a pile of yak hair. The whole story above is just one example. IPv6 is a migraine in RFC form, and if it weren't that I accidentally bought some expensive IOT devices that are IPv6-only, I'd be happy to never touch it. At this point, it would have been a better time-money tradeoff to have thrown those in the trash as soon as I had seen the problem.
cynicalkane
·geçen ay·discuss
Tesla is a meme stock like GameStop, but for a good fraction of America, so the market cap can be much larger. As long as TSLA owners don't care about the stock defying gravity, it will continue to do so.
cynicalkane
·2 ay önce·discuss
Think GP is suggesting an N-dimensional plane in K>N dimensions.
cynicalkane
·2 ay önce·discuss
Why would I answer that when you already said one statement being wrong doesn't matter? If one statement being wrong doesn't matter then why are you changing your mind and asking? Would there be any point in replying?

I've met a lot of folks in software who think contradicting themselves in order to "gotcha" the other person is some form of being clever. You can't really have success reasoning them out of it; they think being incorrigible is the same as winning.
cynicalkane
·2 ay önce·discuss
> "If you think a specific statement was wrong, harmful, or dishonest, then explain why"

> someone picks a specific statement

> "If the use of a single phrase... is enough to make you dismiss someone entirely"

Bro, you asked for a specific statement. Was GP actually supposed to provide N specific statements, where N is a hidden number known only to you?
cynicalkane
·2 ay önce·discuss
I'll raise my hand here and risk downvotes from very smart people who are smarter than me, but I've heard of CVE but not LPE or RCE. I know what the latter two terms are but am not used to seeing them in acronyms.

So what's missing is that keeping up-to-date with CVEs is important and some CVEs are Internet-nerd famous. Remember Heartbleed? Even some casual gamers I know had heard of it. And everyone who's mildly serious about sysadmin knows you want to defensively keep systems patched against important CVEs. The second layer of that, what the exploits actually are or do, is a second-layer term of art, one that one might miss the jargon for even if one has familiarity with the concepts.

To me, the fact that the page is obviously AI-assisted is way more upsetting than some guy not knowing what an acronym means. There's something about AI prose that is just so fucking tedious. It makes the mind glaze over.
cynicalkane
·3 ay önce·discuss
Boastful lies like this are a telltale sign of vibe-coded projects. Approximately, an AI is making word-association guesses from its context window, and arranging those guesses into grammatical forms that human RLHF reviewers find impactful. Frequently the lies are obvious if you have a mental model of the project, which the AI doesn't have.
cynicalkane
·3 ay önce·discuss
Yes, this paper is insane. The actual quote about caching is:

> Once a region of tape has been read, the controller stores the result. Subsequent operations reference the cache rather than re-interrogating the physical medium. Re-reading a known bit is unnecessary; the controller already holds its state

However, earlier, the paper claims:

> The transformer architectures underpin- ning modern large language models are bandwidth-limited, not compute-limited [1–3]. The energy consumed moving data between DRAM, NAND flash, and processor cache already exceeds the energy consumed by arithmetic in datacenter AI accelerators [2]. This is not an optimization problem. It is a materials problem [emphasis mine].

as part of a longer rant about the AI "memory wall" in the very first section. If we open with a long spiel about how memory is expensive in material cost and energy cost and this material is a solution for that then what are we caching the read in? On that note, what kind of computer engineer thinks about cache on the order of individual bits on a medium?

And, as you point out, 25 PB/s is a lot. Around 1000x that of a typical on-die SRAM cache, I think.

A while later, the author speaks of using atomic force microscopy to read the data back. The size of AFM scans are, in practice, as I understand, along the order of square micrometers. I think this whole paper is an AI-driven, as you put it, 'fever dream', enabling an author to put forth 60 pages of sciencey claims and sciencey math without -- as far as I can tell -- any concrete and novel scientific result of any kind. AI-driven reality warps are not new; the difference is nowdays AIs are good enough at sounding smart to get past the barriers of a typical smart person who might want to be fooled or make a show of being open-minded. Later on, the author proposes using "shaped femtosecond IR pulses" -- without further elaboration -- to address single atoms! IR wavelengths are on the order of a micrometer at minimum!
cynicalkane
·4 ay önce·discuss
Strong chance the same robot that wrote the benchmark also wrote the sentence to sound impressive.

This is another one of the vibe-coded slop projects that are routinely frontpaging HN now. As someone else pointed out, the single author has "written" >100kLOC in diffs per week. It's not possible that any human knows what's in the codebase in any reasonable detail.
cynicalkane
·4 ay önce·discuss
This is a really embarrassing post. You stalked the author's online presence, turned up a TCP bridge utility, not really relevant to anything, and tried to shame the author for writing it, all so you can pretend you won an argument on the Internet?
cynicalkane
·4 ay önce·discuss
The app is vibecoded. The author isn't making decisions about these tradeoffs and possibly wasn't aware of the implications of these decisions at all. The robot they used tried to fulfill its given prompts at the expense of everything else, which is why it's looking in bad directories and trying to install Docker environments in the build script.

I suspect that some of the author's comments in this thread are vibe-written, also. They are LLM-flavored and contrast strongly vs. their regular commenting.
cynicalkane
·5 ay önce·discuss
The awful graphic at the top is certainly not made by a human.
cynicalkane
·5 ay önce·discuss
OP didn't claim you of misrepresenting facts in the document directly; OP claimed you of grossly mischaracterizing those facts in order to support claims the document does not support. The document is cited as supporting massive fraud "beyond intellectually serious dispute" while the scale of the fraud is disputed in the cited document.

But, on the other hand, I suppose intellectually serious dispute requires both sides to be intellectually serious. One good step in that direction would be to arrange one's citations such that they are supporting the claims you are citing them for.

I will also remark, as others have, that it's odd to make a big deal about this particular fraud when there's a lot more fraud happening a lot more obviously in a lot more of the nation. This is not to question Minnesota officials who are, rightly and appropriately, investigating suspected fraud in their zone of investigation; but it is worth questioning voices who have, apropos of nothing I can discern, made decisions about what's important to talk about and what isn't, and further made decisions to misrepresent allegations in alignment with people who very aggressively lie for evil reasons. As others have pointed out, the essay's core is seemingly cromulent, and it doesn't need you to do that.
cynicalkane
·7 ay önce·discuss
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
cynicalkane
·8 ay önce·discuss
The rich do not, in general, possess Scrooge McDuck vaults full of "prior government backed currency". The assets of the wealthy are generally real assets and business investments.

Cash is such a poor investment that the word "investment" typically means trying to find something more productive than holding cash. Neither do alternatives to cash have a reliable history of benefitting the poor. In the US there's been lots of attempts at local currencies; they tend to fail naturally without government interference. Recently, cryptographic alternatives to cash have mostly served to benefit crypto barons and scammers.