Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
> Defaults are bad. Agents can be expected to read the documentation, register what good starting values are, and fill them all in, in place.

That is pretty bad, when you now need to look at this code, and you have 95% of the output being craft, but sometimes it isn't, and you need to understand the difference between each.

A great example of that is:

    int fd = open("log.txt", O_RDONLY);

Versus:

    // 1. Manually build and initialize the Security Attributes structure
    SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES sa;
    sa.nLength = sizeof(SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES);
    sa.lpSecurityDescriptor = NULL; // Explicitly no custom security descriptor (inherits default)
    sa.bInheritHandle = FALSE;       // Explicitly state this handle cannot be inherited by child processes

    // 2. We need a handle for the template file parameter. 
    // Win32 requires this to be an active file handle opened with GENERIC_READ, or explicitly INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE.
    HANDLE hTemplateFile = INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE; 

    // 3. Now we call CreateFile with every single parameter fully populated
    HANDLE hFile = CreateFile(
        "log.txt",                 // 1. lpFileName: The file we want to open
        GENERIC_READ,              // 2. dwDesiredAccess: Read-only access
        FILE_SHARE_READ,           // 3. dwShareMode: Prevents any other process from writing to it
        &sa,                       // 4. lpSecurityAttributes: Pointer to our explicitly defined struct
        OPEN_EXISTING,             // 5. dwCreationDisposition: Only open if it already exists
        FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL,     // 6. dwFlagsAndAttributes: Normal file, no special caching or async flags
        hTemplateFile              // 7. hTemplateFile: Passing our explicit invalid handle instead of NULL
    );
An agent can output the second just as well, sure. However... which one do you think is better to read or understand?

Did you catch the fact that this is blocking concurrent writers? Or that we expected the file to exist?

Or what about:

    HFONT hFont = CreateFont(
        12, 0, 0, 0, FW_NORMAL, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, 
        DEFAULT_CHARSET, OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS, CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS, 
        DEFAULT_QUALITY, DEFAULT_PITCH | FF_DONTCARE, "Arial"
    );
Versus:

    const char* fontPath = "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/arial.ttf";
    FT_New_Face(library, fontPath, 0, &face);
    FT_Set_Pixel_Sizes(face, 0,16  );
Same thing, but actually understanding what is going on is orders of magnitude different.
Comment · 5 months ago
Nevertheless, you are still talking about 15B / year - when the initial investment was < 30B. That investment also probably covers things like power, salaries, etc.

So you are still covering all of that.

Comment · 10 months ago
All financial systems don't care about time.

Prety much all financial transactions are settled with a given date, not instantly. Go sell some stocks, it takes 2 days to actually settle. (May be hidden by your provider, but that how it works).

For that matter, the ultimate in BASE for financial transactions is the humble check.

That is a great example of "money out" that will only be settled at some time in the future.

There is a reason there is this notion of a "business day" and re-processing transactions that arrived out of order.

Comment · 10 months ago
Committing to NVMe drive properly is really costly. I'm talking using O_DIRECT | OSYNC or fsync here. Can be in the order of whole milliseconds, easily. And it is much worse if you are using cloud systems.
Comment · 10 months ago
Isn't that very much intentional on the part of GCC?
Comment · 10 months ago
That suffer from a serious issue

You must have the data upfront, you cannot build this in an incremental fashion

There is also bo mention on how this would handle updates, and from the description, even if updates are possible, this will degrade over time, requiring new indexing batch

Comment · 11 months ago
Not this is explicitly marked as Not Planned
Comment · 1 year ago
> maintenance_work_mem

That kills the indexing process, you cannot let it run with limited amount of memory.

> How do you think a B+tree gets updated?

In a B+Tree, you need to touch log H of the pages. In HNSW graph - you need to touch literally thousands of vectors once your graph gets big enough.

Comment · 1 year ago
Probably avoid zero write optimizations. This force actual allocation of disk space for the data, instead of pretending to do so.
Comment · 1 year ago
Amazon Glacier on the list is a pretty big surprise to me.
Comment · 1 year ago
That isn't spying. That is called doing code review on a shared depenendcy
Comment · 1 year ago
OpenAI, Ollama, DeepSeek all do that.

And wanting to programmatically work with the result + allow tool calls is super common.

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