jsmith45

> From what I can tell, dsl of any type didn’t really take off in America.

VDSL was the core of the AT&T U-verse offerings in the US for a good decade perhaps a little more. This was marketed as a full cable replacement, as it included Internet, TV (including the normal cable channels), and optionally landline phone (over ip, but without some of the normal headaches of VOIP, as AT&T could treat this more like a digitized POTS line on their side, much like the normal pots lines they digitized behind the scenes). There were also some other smaller deployments here and there, but that seemed to be the biggest one in the US.

ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ certainly did exist, but to work well you need to be relatively close to the local exchange, needed copper wires in good condition, etc. It was offered fairly widely, like by most companies offering phone service over copper lines, but because the quality could vary quite significantly depending on things not obvious to the purchaser, it tended to get a bad-rap. If you tried it once, but was unluck enough to have it not work well, you would write off the tech, and tell all your firends not to bother, and go go with the cable offering.

For me personally, in its heyday, ADSL2 beat cable hands down, as in that time frame cable was only using a tiny fraction of its bandwidth to provide internet service, and only a few feeds coming out of the local office, so the amount of oversubscription was insane, and amounted to basically fraud, as you could only ever get anywhere near your advertised speed at like 4 am.

That's at best a partial fix for the API side. Python side CPython sill exposes a LOT of implementation details, and as a result occasionally projects will choose to rely on some of these details. Then other implementations need to decide whether to also pick the same implementations details and expose them, or use different details, and lack compatibility with any library that depended upon them.

The python documentation has historically also not been especially clear at distinguishing between what the language guarantees, vs what is just implementation details of the cPython implementation. So even if libraries wanted to try to avoid depending on implementation specifics, it isn't always clear what those are.

The net result is that for the end user python the language is effectively: whatever cpython does. This really, really discourages creating alternate implementations, as the only way to be an alternative implementation with good compatibility is to be a living fork of cpython, constantly merging in all the changes from it, while also maintaining your improvements.

The current WebP Spec RFC9649 defines the format as effectively:

A 'RIFF' chunk containing formtype 'WEBP' and a mandatory 'VP8 ' or 'VP8L' chunk, and optional 'VP8X', 'ICCP','ANIM', 'ANMF', 'EXIF', 'XMP ' chunks and possibly some unknown chunks, where if any of these optional chunks appear 'VP8X' must be first, and with certain ordering restrictions on the chunks.

It is true that earlier spec versions only allowed the core 'VP8 ' or 'VP8L' chunk, and the spec does warn that some older software might not support files with the newer chunks, so they should only be used if really needed for best compatibility.

This is the spitting image of old pre-CRM thinking:

If I try to force the captain to go around, (or follow procedures or whatever), then i am exceeding my authority and will probably be fired. Some cultures have this sort of mentality a lot stronger than others, and it has zero place in the modern cockpit.

While a captain can pull rank, they really should only ever do it with respect to the first officer if: an inexperienced first officer is trying to insist on something dangerous or forbidden by law or policy, or if the captain fully understands an FO's concerns, is fully accounting for them, and as the person ultimately responsible for safety, has determined from experience and training that the current action is safer than alternatives, and would explain but cannot explain right now for workload/emergency status reasons.

That's it, the only two reasons.

Yeah, my bigger worry here is more about if somebody direct edits a file in their venv and uv was unable to make the venv with reflink/COW semantics and fell back to hardlinks.

This could happen with a user asking their editor to show definition, and then not realizing the result was in some other package, changing it, and saving it, but only if the editor's normal atomic replace mode is disabled. So perhaps that sounds farfetched. But if an AI agent wants to patch some package in a venv, I've seen them bypass the editor and use command line tools to make edits often enough to be concerned. Like corrupting the cache for one package version is already not ideal, and this could potentially affect multiple versions now?

I suppose is this happens the right fix is to nuke the cache completely?

You wouldn't.

But keep in mind that there are multiple kinds of exceptions.

Some exceptions, indicate scenarios the caller could reasonably have avoided. This include things like argument bound or null checks. A caller absolutely could avoid these exceptions by doing its own checks. This can be split between checks that the caller really should have done, like not passing null to a function that cannot take null, vs those where baking the relevant knowledge into the caller would be undesirable (perhaps because future versions of the library expect to accept more values).

There are exceptions that in theory a caller could avoid, but in practice it is impractical, like an exception thrown by a parser of some complex format if the provided input isn't legal. The only good way to avoid such an exception is to have a non-throwing parser that you can check with, but you probably don't want to parse twice. An alternative interface for the parser might be able to totally avoid the exception, returning either succeeded (with result tree) or fail with error message, but that would be a design choice of the implementor, not the caller.

There can be exceptions that indicate a logic bug in the impleentation (things like throwing if some invariant the implementation is in charge of is violated), but more often this is assertions instead.

Lastly, you have exceptions that there is no possible way the caller could always avoid. IO exceptions are among these. While you can sometimes do existence, space, or permission checks or similar to reduce the probability of getting certain exceptions, something else could race your app between the check and performing IO, and make them happen anyway.

The primary target for contracts are exceptions that callers both could and should have avoided, and the exception/assertion case that is trying to verify the implementation is working as expected.

The other categories of exceptions are more or less totally out of scope.

To be clear, they are billing for all the coded line items at the listed prices, it is just that the agreements with the insurance company will disallow many of the line items in favor of other ones. They bill everything, because they may accept some insurance that has not negotiated a day rate, and in that case, the day rate code would be disallowed and some of the other line items will be paid at relevant negotiated rates instead (with others still likely disallowed). It needs to be the same bill in both cases, so they need to include everything, and the list prices need to be greater than or equal to what any insurance would pay, or they might lose out on the difference.

This is one of the areas where more standardization would certainly help. If there were more standardization of which codes disallow which other ones (which can currently vary wildly by plan even with the same insurer, must less across insurers), then a lot of line items could actually get removed as truly redundant, vastly simplifying the bill.

I have successfully had am M1 MacBook open and in active use (albeit not with very heavy workload, mostly text editor and web), while plugged into a Nintendo Switch 1 charger (only thing I had handy at that moment), and was watching the battery percentage slowly increasing over time. So even laptops can sometimes charge slowly while in use with a rather underpowered type C charger (Albeit still slightly better than a cheapo 5V 3A Type-C phone charger).

The original design intention of this approach was that wallet apps were independant and interchangable, with any wallet app able to talk to any attestation provider, to get age attestation tokens, and any site/app able to talk to any wallet. The wallet's job was merely to securely hold a bunch of attestations tokens, and dispense them to other sites/apps on request.

So you could use an open source app, or government provided one, or one provided by your bank, whatever you trust the most to not be recording data about relying parties and sending it somewhere you don't want.

The version of the document currently on GitHub has heavily deviated from that original intention. This is very unfortunate.

Even so this version is supposed to still be incapable by design of sharing any data with a relying party other than "over 18" and was designed such that the only way for a relying party to determine your identity is to be colluding with the attestation provider, or by colluding with the wallet app.

To attempt to address the first issue they have the unfortunately optional ZKP protocol. The original design assumed that users could find a wallet that they were certain would not collude with the RPs, and was considered a non-issue, but unfortunately it is a huge hole in the current version.

Yeah, an agent should run with permissions no greater than that of the user on whose behalf it is executing, and ideally with less permissions. This is the scenario that is easier to fix, simply give the agent an API token with rights no greater than the user it is acting on behalf of. This could be a literal token for their account, or a limit-rights-to field or whatever, multiple possible approaches.

The harder problem is outside actors trying to prompt inject to get the agent to do something the user has rights to do but which the user doesn't want to happen. That is the hard scenario to fix, due to the nature of LLMs.

Yep.

Thrashing is a well known known issue that can occur with swap, but it can also happen from page cache or memory mapped files. Indeed not having swap enabled can make things worse, as private pages that haven't been used in a hours cannot be swapped out to keep the important files cached or memory mapped.

Realistically for measuring physical memory sufficiency, you care about memory/data of any type (even files) that will be used in use upcoming time period, and ensuring that a sufficient percentage of it can be held in physical memory to avoid thrashing.

This is hard! Technically impossible to know for the general case (halting problem), and all methods of trying to approximate it involves trade-offs.

In theory, sure, an identity verifier could issue you you a bunch of single use JWTs signed by them that contain `{"over18":"true", "nonce": 12748583..., "iss": "<issuerurl>"}`, signed by their key. A relying party just needs to know the public keys of all the issuers they trust, and can consume this JWT, verify it, and never learn anything about your IRL identity.

The important things are that they must issue a bunch at once. (Otherwise, correlating who you are becomes easy). They must keep no record tying nonce or the full JWT to an individual identity. Something user local or otherwise trustworthy (not keeping logs), needs to hold on to these, and send them out as needed, being very very careful never to reuse one (as that would enable cross site tracking). Lastly a relying party must be required to trust many issuers, not just those they are colluding with track users across sites with this.

The European Commission actually proposed pretty much exactly this system, also with a variation where instead of revealing the signed token, a ZSNARK proof (that you possess a validly signed token with the over18 attribute from a specific issuer) could be given to the relying party instead (to make it impossible for issuer and relying party to collude to release your identity). Many people here seemed to not like it.

I'd argue they are not commutive in regexes either, at least as implemented in practice. Implemented regexes favor the leftmost alternative even when both sides of the alternative match. This matters in cases like: capturing groups, and backtracking implementations. There absolutely are cases where one ordering of alternatives could yield catastrophic backtracking for some input, while the other will avoid it completely.

I personally don't like this at all. This means that regex engines that try to generate optimized matching code for an expression can end up generating suboptimal code if you don't want alternative order to matter, since the engine needs to keep that invariant, except in the case when it can prove that the alternatives won't overlap, and a later one can be checked in constant time. If both are true, it is legal to reorder them to do the constant time check before the big complicated wildcard-filled alternative.

But personally, I have never written a regex where I actively cared about the alternative evaluation order. I've used some other people made where order is important but never written one myself.

I'd love to be able to tell the engine "feel free to swap the evaluation order of my alternatives while optimizing", but few if any such engines offer that as a feature.

Now I get that PEGs have commutivity problems are that are different from regexes', which make the issue worse, but that doesn't mean regexes do things right either.

If the compiler can find any operation prior to the null check that would be UB if the value is null (even if it is something that in assembly would be harmless, like performing pointer arithmetic on it), the compiler is allowed to assume the pointer is not null, and thus omit the null check. This could then lead to something that will in practice cause problems like dereferencing the pointer.

Compilers keep taking more and more advantage of inferring that a values in variables cannot be `x`, because if it were than some previous usage would have been UB. When people file bugs to complain, the compiler authors point at the spec which allows them to assume that UB behavior never happens, so the compiler behavior is legal. The only counterargument is if the compiler has chosen to document some specific behavior for this UB (possibly only with specific flags enabled) in which case the compiler testing that scenario as proof of impossibility is indeed a bug (when the required flags are set).