pjdesno

6 ms·

1.
by pjdesno 3d ago
What kind of vehicle takes 10 quarts of oil for a single oil change?
2.
by pjdesno 8d ago
I wonder if faster SSDs would help? In particular you can still get used Optane SSDs on eBay, although they’re fairly pricey. (not the bogus m.2 ones that are slower than a halfway decent consumer NVMe)
3.
by pjdesno 8d ago
What he said. I was a VMware workstation user in the late 90s. I worked on the VMware monitor team back in 2007-2008, which probably put my employee number way in the 1000s. Ole Agesen, Carl Waldspurger, and other early folks were still the
4.
by pjdesno 12d ago
There's an interesting comparison to HyperCard, which didn't have the intellectual scaffolding of Xanadu, but just worked, even on a typical Mac of the day with 1MB of RAM.
5.
by pjdesno 20d ago
For those of us who have just been using Emacs, rather than following its recent evolution, "ts-mode" refers to a mode which uses tree-sitter for parsing, highlighting etc.
6.
by pjdesno 20d ago
I think we're all talking about CEOs with business degrees, who subscribe to the Jack Welsh school of domain-knowledge-free corporate leadership.
7.
by pjdesno 23d ago
and this is why you don't want tech people designing user interfaces...
8.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
To translate to Rust, it would have been "we missed a single line Rust check"... This is a bug involving intersecting concerns and a deficit of cross-domain knowledge. It probably would have been the same in Lisp or assembly langu
9.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
Most people don't plant an alfalfa field in the desert and then try to use the local municipal water supply for irrigation. Some of the folks looking to build datacenters to cash in on the AI craze aren't as bright as that.
10.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
It's near Springfield, Massachusetts. My point is not that evaporative cooling is necessary - it's that it's efficient, and therefore common. I found some 10-year-old info from our datacenter, and it looks like mid-summer mon
11.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
There aren't many heavy industries that dissipate 100MW of thermal energy, never mind a GW. Those that do - power generating facilities, large smelters, etc. - have very significant environmental footprints.
12.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
Historically, cooling alone has accounted for up to 40% of a data center’s electricity consumption The key word here is "historically". Modern data centers typically have a PUE lower than 1.2, with the .2 including not o
13.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
Water use isn't a myth. Our data center is mostly air-cooled, with 100F hot aisles and chilled water going to heat exchangers in every third rack position, although some of our newer GPU racks use chilled water directly. For most of th
14.
by pjdesno 3mo ago
Note that for the businesses mentioned in the article, the service is the product. I don't care about service at a gas station - I want to fill my tank, pay, and get out. It's different when I take it to the mechanic - it's
15.
by pjdesno 4mo ago
Note that there are a fair number of native speakers of English in Nigeria - more than in all but 3 or 4 US states. In addition, "non-native" English speakers in India (and Nigeria?) typically study English from the first grade, a
16.
by pjdesno 4mo ago
They overstate their results in the headline. In section 2, 34% of cases are found to have "substantive" disagreements differing by 2 or more buckets - True + Misleading, Mostly True + False, or True + False. This is probably a be
17.
by pjdesno 4mo ago
If you run "make" in the papers/IBIC2013 directory you'll get this paper: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1743073/files/thbl2.pdf It's quite interesting - this isn't ethernet as we kn
18.
by pjdesno 4mo ago
"I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memor
19.
by pjdesno 4mo ago
Jatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch: "The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to b
20.
by pjdesno 4mo ago
> I’m curious what the performance of this implementation is Almost certainly crap. As the author states, it's a simple fork-on-request server, which was state-of-the-art in about 1996. But that's not the point.
21.
by pjdesno 5mo ago
Also note “Disks are like snowflakes - no two are alike”, Krevat, Tucker & Ganger, HotOS 2011. The number of tracks and bit density is not the same on different surfaces within the same disk, or across disks of the same model. https:&#
22.
by pjdesno 5mo ago
Read this paper: “ Revisiting HDD Rules of Thumb: 1/3 Is Not (Quite) the Average Seek Distance”, MSST 2024. https://www.msstconference.org/MSST-history/2024/Papers/msst... It has a very good approximati
23.
by pjdesno 5mo ago
Why should Backblaze back up their competitors’ data? And what use is it to you for it to do so?
24.
by pjdesno 5mo ago
Interesting. My only experience with Veracrypt is via a law firm I was consulting with, who used it to protect some files they were sharing with me. Law firm and their end client are both big, prestigious companies.
25.
by pjdesno 5mo ago
It's a soda bottle - it fits in your water bottle holder, and you can replace it for a couple of bucks if it fails. 80 psi is pretty low pressure (typical narrow tires are 100-120) and the bottle itself is very low mass, so the fabric
26.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
Look up the Osborne 1, the first "portable" (i.e. luggable) computer. They went out of business not only because they lost money on each unit, but because of how many they sold. Then they pre-announced their next model, which kill
27.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
I don't actually get your point. You dismissed the standard lock-guarded data structure as a "bogus comparison", despite it being the way every programmer is taught to write multi-threaded code. Now the more you write, the mo
28.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
It's not a "bogus and misleading baseline". It's precisely the way we teach people how to build thread-safe systems. And we teach them to do it that way because we've learned from experience that letting them code u
29.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
What's not guaranteed for "normal" loads and stores on many architectures is the order in which writes become visible to other CPU cores.
30.
by pjdesno 6mo ago
That's what "lock-free" means. You still need to use the hardware mechanisms provided for atomicity. The whole point of lock-free data structures and algorithms is that sometimes you can do better by using these atomic operat

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