Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
> The merchants think so, too, or they wouldn’t accept the processors that let their banks hand out these cards.

Visa / Mastercard / American Express all have lines of premium credit cards (Visa Infinite, World Elite Mastercard, Amex Platinum), and they're very much too big to ban. You'd just be left with one processor in the US (Discover, now owned by Capital One).

Comment · 4 months ago
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Comment · 5 months ago
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Comment · 6 months ago
Hilariously, "os as g" adds one more byte than it saves, since os is only used 4 times but the alias takes 5 extra bytes to save 4. And "socket as s" comes out even.

If you wanted real savings, you'd use "d=bytes.fromhex" instead of defining a function -- 17 bytes!! And d('00') -> b'\0' for -2 bytes.

We could easily get the byte count down further by using base64.b85decode instead of bytes.fromhex (-70 or so), but ultimately we're optimizing a meaningless metric, as you mention.

Comment · 6 months ago
Agreed. That said, FDIC would have not been able to cover all $150 billion or so of uninsured SVB deposits directly from the insurance fund, so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, then FDIC would have had to pass.
Comment · 6 months ago
Indeed; most personal banking customers can fall back on FDIC insurance ($250k should be more than enough to cover your emergency fund). This isn't the 1920s.
Comment · 6 months ago
> I didn’t know about the term happy eyeball to signify that all requests fire at the same time.

It's not quite the same. Usually with Happy Eyeballs, you want to try multiple protocols (e.g. QUIC vs TCP, or IPv6 vs IPv4), and you have a preference for one over the other. As such, you try to establish your connection via IPv6, wait something like 30ms, then try to establish via IPv4. Whichever mechanism completes channel setup first wins, and you can cancel the other one.

It's a mechanism used to drive adoption of newer protocols while limiting the impact on end users.

Comment · 6 months ago
> magic eyeballs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs is the usual name. It's not quite identical, since you often want to give your preferred transport a nominal headstart so it usually succeeds. But yes, there are some similarities -- you race during connection setup so that you don't have to wait for a connection timeout (on the order of seconds) if the preferred mechanism doesn't work for some reason.

The main term I've seen for this particular approach is "request hedging" (https://grpc.io/docs/guides/request-hedging/, which links to the paper by Dean and Barroso).

Comment · 6 months ago
This is approximately the section in the video titled "Memory controllers hate you" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKbgulTp3FE&t=1399s), combined with the following section.

The actual explanation starts a couple minutes later, around https://youtu.be/KKbgulTp3FE?t=1553. The short explanation is performance (essentially load balancing against multiple RAM banks for large sequential RAM accesses), combined with a security-via-obscurity layer of defense against rowhammer.

Comment · 7 months ago
Eh. It depends what your bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is now, say, CPU cache contention because you've doubled your thread count, it's entirely possible that FL1 running on the new server generation is operating in a different regime than on the previous generation. You can see some hints of that happening, since doubling thread count didn't result in a doubling of throughput.

In fact, I suspect based on the throughput doubling with FL2, we're back in the same regime as the baseline.

It would be useful to see what the latency is of FL2 on Gen12 compared to baseline (FL1 on Gen12), just to confirm.

Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
> Kaeshibashi

The preference is to use a separate pair of communal chopsticks that is not used directly for eating.

> Kosuribashi

I have heard that this one is because it's considered to be an insult implying that the chopsticks are low-quality. (That said, if your chopsticks are indeed low-quality, then avoiding splinters is probably preferable to then visibly plucking splinters out of your fingers.)

Comment · 7 months ago
Agreed on all those fronts. I'm just dismayed by all the comments suggesting that maintainers just merged PRs with this trojan, when the attack vector implies a more mundane form of credential compromise (and not, as the article implies, AI being used to sneak malicious changes past code review at scale).

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