ucarion
Joined 13 years ago
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1,430
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317
Member since
Apr 6
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 months ago
It does get at what I'm talking about. But I've seen retrying in this situation lead to worsening the situation, because your basic problem is two hot paths conflicting with each other and now you're conflicting even more.
Comment · 3 months ago
Do folks have any thoughts on ways of avoiding deadlocking access patterns? In a codebase where folks are sort of adding ad-hoc endpoints left and right, it's hard to avoid the case of two endpoints that more or less want to do:
tx1: update a
tx2: update b
tx1: update b
tx2: update a
Comment · 5 months ago
> I do not agree that slice() should operate on extended grapheme clusters. Don’t lump the grapheme cluster/scalar value split in with the sins of UTF-16 and its unreliable code point/code unit split.
Maybe a simpler argument against this idea is that the definition of an extended grapheme cluster changes between versions of Unicode. The relevant standard is on its 47th revision (not all of which change extended grapheme clusters, but many do): https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/
Comment · 6 months ago
In old-school chess AIs, zugzwang is also of interest because it can break null-move pruning[0], which is a way to prune the search tree. "Null move" just means "skip your turn", and the assumption that skipping your turn is always worse than the optimal move. But in zugzwang positions, that assumption is wrong, so you have to avoid doing null-move pruning.
Stockfish's heuristic for "risk of zugzwang" is basically "only kings and pawns left over", alongside logic for "is null-move pruning even useful right now" [1]:
// Step 9. Null move search with verification search
if (cutNode && ss->staticEval >= beta - 16 * depth - 53 * improving + 378 && !excludedMove
&& pos.non_pawn_material(us) && ss->ply >= nmpMinPly && !is_loss(beta))
{
[1]: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/1a882ef...
Comment · 7 months ago
Leads me to discover: https://www.twitch.tv/chat_loadtest_01 ... neat!
Comment · 8 months ago
I've almost never needed any of these, but there's all sorts of weird redirections you can do in GNU Bash: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Redirecti...
Comment · 9 months ago
It is news to me that manipulating ASCII art is something AI can do well! I remember this being something LLMs were all particularly horrible at. But I just checked and it seems to work at least with Opus 4.5.
claude(1) with Opus 4.5 seems to be able to take the examples in that article, and handle things like "collapse the sidebar" or "show me what it looks like with an open modal" or "swap the order of the second and third rows". I remember not long ago you'd get back UI mojibake if you asked for this.
Goes to show you really can't rest on your laurels for longer than 3 months with these tools.
Comment · 11 months ago
Eddie Izzard was joking in 1998 about the "The" and the prohibited names for The City (https://youtu.be/QRB_GhLXCds?si=R4kYkodzvYDxe33H&t=276), so it's probably been like this for many decades thence!
Comment · 1 year ago
For those unfamiliar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ... It's basically a bunch of posts that 'dang and 'tomhow (others too? idk) think are underrated, so it tends to be potent hacker-catnip stuff.
Comment · 1 year ago
For others, I'm sure parent knows: OKLCH is largely a bugfix for CILEAB. Both try to make a color space where even steps feel evenly spaced to a human. But CIELAB had procedural flaws in its creation.
See slide 19: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/Workshop/slides/talk/lille... -- if you ask CIELAB to make "pure blue" (RGB 0 0 100%) become grayscale, the intermediate colors become purple to the human eye. The entire point of a perceptual color space is that that doesn't happen. OKLCH fixes that.
BTW, credit to Björn Ottosson, who basically side-projected a color space into the web standards and more: https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/ ... folks like him are why we sometimes have nice things!
Comment · 1 year ago
Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.
Comment · 1 year ago
Seems their IG has some of these, including the shot from the article: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C8hRS0ctzCp/
Factory Butte: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C6gg-wpS-tr/
"Long Dong Silver": https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C-yLCskOGiC/
Comment · 1 year ago
> Into the Past by Jim Hildreth
The area in this photo -- the Caineville Mesa, Factory Butte, "Long Dong Silver" (I'm not aware of a more polite name) -- is some of the strangest land in America. It really is that lunar blue gray. The Temples of the Sun and Moon (enormous natural sandcastles) are also nearby, and are similarly eerie in the evening.
The closest I've ever felt to being in space. Recommend!
Comment · 1 year ago
Since we both worked there: I can think of a few places at Segment where we'd have added more reporting/analytics/search if it weren't such a pain to set up a OLAP copy of our control plane databases. Remember how much engineering effort we spent on teams that did nothing but control plane database stuff?
Data plane is a different story, but not everything is 1m+ RPS.
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