themgt
Joined 15 years ago
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Member since
Mar 26
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 days ago
I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Around the world, people are being silenced, monitored, and denied access to information.
Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated
The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.
Doing this axis of evil routine without even a token mention of censorship by "western" regimes, including your own, suggests a level of willful blindness or self-delusion. The censored internet has always been Eurasian, etc.
Comment · 7 days ago
But that just kicks the can.
The modern record for a matter-wave superposition stands at a nanoparticle composed of roughly 7,000 sodium atoms (about 8 nanometers wide), achieving a massive "Schrödinger's cat" state at the scale of a small virus.
So then particles don't exist, and viruses also don't exist? Is "reality" just a dynamic pattern that doesn't exist in the naive sense? As astute stoics we should not worry ourselves with such matters, "shut up and calculate"?
There is something about quantum theory that is different in character from any physical theory posed before. To put a finger on it, the issue is this: The basic statement of the theory—the one we have all learned from our textbooks—seems to rely on terms our intuitions balk at as having any place in a fundamental description of reality. The notions of “observer” and “measurement” are taken as primitive, the very starting point of the theory. This is an unsettling situation! Shouldn’t physics be talking about what is before it starts talking about what will be seen and who will see it? Perhaps no one has put the point more forcefully than John Stewart Bell:
> What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system . . . with a PhD?
Comment · 7 days ago
> They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do
There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.
The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout...Comment · 9 days ago
However, when engineers scale these chips toward cortex-level complexity, projected power climbs into the kilowatt-megawatt bracket, whereas the human brain performs comparable computation on roughly 20 watts (Mehonic and Kenyon, 2022). Biocomputing has been proposed as one route to address energy limitations in silicon-based systems by using brain organoids grown on multielectrode arrays.
All our experiments were conducted using FinalSpark's NeuroPlatform (Jordan et al., 2024), providing access to organoids over a cloud-based system, as shown in Figure 1. In this setup, forebrain organoids are cultured to approximately 500 μm in diameter (Govindan et al., 2021) and contain mature neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes displaying robust network activity. Maintained under continuous perfusion, they can remain electrophysiologically active for up to approximately 100 days under favorable conditions
This is absolutely fucked. The original argument for these human brain organoids were they're only 10k neurons. Now five minutes later they're talking about energy savings in scaling to cortex-level human brain cloud API.
Comment · 9 days ago
A story which may or may not be based on lived experience: one day a Sprite stops booting. JuiceFS is asking object storage for a chunk and getting a 404. We wanted to go fast, so we ran JuiceFS in writeback mode. It records a chunk in its metadata first and uploads the bytes after. If the machine is killed at any time between those two steps, the metadata points at a chunk that doesn’t exist.
So we built a harness that drives fleets of Sprites through write, checkpoint, sleep, wake and restore, over and over, verifying every byte that comes back. We pointed it at 400 JuiceFS Sprites for about 5,000 cycles. A nonzero number of them permanently lost the ability to checkpoint. Well … fuck.
Enter: the Sprites Block Device (SBD). It takes a bucket and presents it to the Linux kernel as a block device, over NBD. The Sprite formats that device as ext4 and mounts it, the same way you’d mount a disk on any Linux box. Duh.
This blog has has a strange vibe like "the last BRAWNDO we made in a bathtub may or may not have killed some customers lmao, try NEW BRAWNDO 2.0 TODAY!" that I didn't realize could work for corporate messaging around an in-house CoW cloud filesystem.
Comment · 13 days ago
I have a very simple framework I use for working with John von Neumann ... the idea is very simple, and can be summarized by: whenever you work on something with John von Neumann, you should use:
1. Your brain, and then
2. John von Neumann, and then
3. Your brain
Explaining a bit more… Before you tell John von Neumann to start working on anything, you go there and read and understand it first. And when John von Neumann brings you the solution, you will know if it’s right, or if it’s too much, or if it’s completely solving the wrong problem, etc.
Comment · 17 days ago
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of agent DLC in this country. The AWS Bedrock AgentCore was agent DLC to own. Then the other guy came out with an eight-agent team. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Bedrock Managed Agents Cloudtrail Datalake. That’s eight agents and a data lake. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I’m telling you what happened—the bastards went to nine domain experts, a reviewer and a composer. Now we’re standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling eight agents and a datalake. Moisture or no, suddenly we’re the chumps. Well, fuck it. We’re going to fourteen agents with eleven domain experts.
Sure, we could go to nine domain expert agents next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, eight worked out pretty well, and nine is the next number after eight. So let’s play it safe. Let’s make a thicker sandbox, add some IOPS and call it the Bedrock9SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we’re a business, that’s why!
You think it’s crazy? It is crazy. But I don’t give a shit. From now on, we’re the ones who have the edge in the multi-agent game. Is Devin the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Bedrock AI-DLC is the best a man can get.
Here’s the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don’t tell me what to invent—I tell them. And I’m telling them to stick two more agents in there. I don’t care how. Make the agents so token efficient they’re invisible. Put some on an Alexa. I don’t care if they have to cram the fourteenth agent in perpendicular to the other ones, just do it!
Comment · 18 days ago
He was diagnosed end of March, told he had six months in May. Handled with incredible grace. RIP.
While the news isn’t great, not much changes for me personally. We’ll still show up and do the work as I’ve previously talked about, on the chance that we can prove the oncologists wrong. Outside of that, I’ll prioritize spending time with the kids, trying to handle as much as possible to make things as easy as possible for Sara after I die, and enjoying the days that I have left.
Comment · 21 days ago
The DR plan for pros, "I could go buy colo tomorrow by contacting the right people"
Comment · 22 days ago
Eppur si muove.
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