kilobaud

I was attending a conference back in, oh 2017 perhaps, where a few people from Microsoft were discussing their experience adopting TLA+ and somebody made the comment that they found that creating a spec was an exercise that could only meaningfully be done by the engineer (or perhaps team) writing the code. You wouldn’t, say, have an external TLA+ expert write the spec for you, but instead you would use the process of authoring the spec to ultimately learn more about your own design. And of course, perhaps avoid edge case bugs before they are written. Say what you want about Microsoft, but their observation does have a rather large sample size, and it sounded like formal methods was considered more impactful during software design rather than as software verification.

Eh there are also decades worth of audio electronics designs which use the 741 and the decision of which actual part to use is often an aesthetic one. (i.e., assuming all other parameters are compatible then just use your ears). There are always new (hobbyist) designs being drafted around specific parts that are otherwise obsolete simply due to the musical character of certain parts

(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?

Thanks for helping us launch LocalXpose however many years ago. I know it seems like product promotion is (rightfully) something to always be wary of, but I appreciate the forums you’ve provided startups hoping to find early adopters. We are (relatively speaking) successful nobodies, but I wonder if you have any memories of sites that “blew up” after being added on BetaList?

And your starter “production” deployment of the Nomad/Consul/Vault stack is literally 12 VMs, comprising three independent Raft clusters. There is no decent way to do zero-downtime instance replacement without building your own orchestration layer, but also they’ve had a years-long track record of shipping bad upgrades and following up with only manual remediations or workarounds instead of a fix.

As someone who has productionized and maintained truly hundreds of those clusters across several jobs, it is hard at this point for me to recommend Consul, Nomad, or Vault to anyone serious about building reliable applications. Too many broken upgrades and manual click-ops tasks just to keep them online. (…and I’ve said nothing of the actual product!)

> When not to use it > … > The workflow mostly lives outside Postgres and spans many heterogeneous systems.

How is this project at all comparable to something like Temporal? Am I misunderstanding the limitation implied by this particular recommendation?

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

I think the main idea is that MOSFET chips don’t sink or source much current on their own (“fundamental” seeming to mean the way that current does not propagate into the gates, and most designs only really draw current during transitions)

OTOH some chips (amplifiers for example) may indeed have current flowing through them and therefore the power consumption of the “chip” would equal the sum of heat loss and output power. At least that’s my interpretation of the framing “how they operate at a fundamental level”. I could be wrong too, I’m not a working EE

Hey I am super interested in this, got any links to check out?

Thanks for your work! Just curious, would it be possible to pad the denylisted binary with arbitrary bytes and circumvent the content hash?

Thanks, I can relate to the parent poster, and this is a really profound comment for me. I appreciate the way you framed this. I’ve felt compelled to fact check my own LLM outputs but I can’t possibly keep up with the quantity. And it’s tempting (but seems irrational) to hand the results to a different LLM. My struggle is remembering there needs to be input/query/calculation/logic validation (without getting distracted by all the other shiny new tokens in the result)

I am curious what you mean by doing it yourself, i.e., do you mean (as perhaps an oversimplification) having a DNS record pointing at your home IP address? What are you wanting to see as the alternative to a Cloudflare tunnel?

Your observation has an N of 1… Texas is almost never as cold as today, even in December. Most of the year is 35 C to 40 C and the cold water supply is warm to the touch.

Probably not an exciting answer but my work focused on stability and performance. There are indeed a lot of cool alternatives. I think Localxpose is for businesses who aren't interested in self-hosting and just need a service that will reliably handle production traffic. I don't know if that's unique (or cool, lol)