AlotOfReading (u/AlotOfReading)

AlotOfReading commented on Mom and daughter find stranger in trunk of Waymo abc7.com/post/los-angeles... · Posted by u/lxm

01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 2 hours ago

Trunks are supposed to have light-up safety releases for that exact scenario. Something tells me he's lying

AlotOfReading · an hour ago

There's a fine legal distinction between a trunk and a rear/5th door. Only the former is required to have the latch. The ipace has the latter.

I haven't crawled around in the trunk of one looking for the release latch, but there probably isn't a latch given that Jag doesn't even put them into the European models of their sedans.

AlotOfReading commented on Mom and daughter find stranger in trunk of Waymo abc7.com/post/los-angeles... · Posted by u/lxm

ncr100 · 2 hours ago

These and other kinds of, "I didn't think about it" scenarios are not being thought of, today, by Googlers.

Obvious but worth considering.

AlotOfReading · 2 hours ago

Because this scenario is supposed to be taken care of at the vehicle design stage. The rules in the US are that sedans (i.e. anything with an enclosed trunk) are required to have interior emergency trunk release latches as an anti kidnapping measure. Vehicles with a 5th door (i.e. SUVs and hatchbacks) aren't, because the hypothetical kidnapping victim would be visible through the window.

The Jaguar I-Pace Waymo is using here has a 5th door, so it's not legally required to have an interior latch.

That said, it's impossible to anticipate everything that will happen out in the real world. Most of those stories, especially the fun ones, don't make it to news.

AlotOfReading commented on Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith twilio.com/en-us/blog/dev... · Posted by u/birdculture

et1337 · a day ago

If something is difficult or scary, do it more often. Smaller changes are less risky. Code that is merged but not deployed is essentially “inventory” in the factory metaphor. You want to keep inventory low. If the distance between the main branch and production is kept low, then you can always feel pretty confident that the main branch is in a good state, or at least close to one. That’s invaluable when you inevitably need to ship an emergency fix. You can just commit the fix to main instead of trying to find a known good version and patching it. And when a deployment does break something, you’ll have a much smaller diff to search for the problem.

AlotOfReading · a day ago

There's a lot of middle ground between "deploy to production 20x a day" and "deploy so infrequently that you forget how to deploy". Like, once a day? I have nothing against emergency fixes, unless you're doing them 9-19x a day. Hotfixes should be uncommon (neither rare nor standard practice).

AlotOfReading commented on Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith twilio.com/en-us/blog/dev... · Posted by u/birdculture

mlhpdx · a day ago

Wow. Their experience could not be more different than mine. As I’m contemplating the first year of my startup I’ve tallied 6000 deployments and 99.997 percent uptime and a low single digit rollback percentage (MTTR in low single digit minutes and fractional, single cell impact for them so far). While I’m sure it’s possible for a solo entrepreneur to hit numbers like that with a monolith I have never done so, and haven’t see others do so.

Edit: I’d love to eat the humble pie here. If you have examples of places where monoliths are updated 10-20 times a day by a small (or large) team post the link. I’ll read them all.

AlotOfReading · a day ago

The idea of deploying to production 10-20 times per day sounds terrifying. What's the rationale for doing so?

I'll assume you're not writing enough bugs that customers are reporting 10-20 new ones per day, but that leaves me confused why you would want to expose customers to that much churn. If we assume an observable issue results in a rollback and you're only rolling back 1-2% of the time (very impressive), once a month or so customers should experience observable issues across multiple subsequent days. That would turn me off making a service integral to my workflow.

AlotOfReading commented on An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine positive.news/society/fla... · Posted by u/ohjeez

throwaway173738 · a day ago

You’d need electricity for that and a lot of places don’t have it.

AlotOfReading · a day ago

You'd be surprised at the places that have electricity, like houses in middle of nowhere, central asia. One of the challenges with engineering technology for the global south is that poverty is wildly different for different people. I met a professor working on flatpack windmills to pump water/electricity. The major challenges he kept seeing in the the Andes weren't the sorts of longevity/efficiency/logistics issues we usually solve with standard engineering, but how the products interacted with local politics and society.

AlotOfReading commented on The Coming Need for Formal Specification benjamincongdon.me/blog/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

jackblemming · 2 days ago

Whenever you look closely at what these proof nerds have actually built you typically find… nothing. No offense to them, it’s simply reality.

AlotOfReading · 2 days ago

SeL4, a number of mathematical theorems, a bunch of cryptography. You've likely trusted your life to compcert. It's not nothing, but it's admittedly a bit limited.

Formal methods are the hardest thing in programming, second only to naming things and off by one errors.

AlotOfReading commented on Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/signa11

MarkusQ · 2 days ago

Why not ECC though? Unless this is a latched output of a robust system being held for use by another robust system I guess?

AlotOfReading · 2 days ago

ECC is one of the probabilistic protections I was talking about.

AlotOfReading commented on Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/signa11

MarkusQ · 2 days ago

This is silly. Rapidly refreshing the data that was (presumably) flipped by a cosmic ray last time won't do anything to prevent an error in whatever it hits next time. Unless the theory is that cosmic rays are somehow more likely to hit these particular bits compared to all the millions (billions?) of others in the system...in which case I have a different objection.

AlotOfReading · 2 days ago

Not all circuits are equally sensitive. The parts that are known to be sensitive or critical are protected by redundancies and error checking, which are probabilistic protection. You haven't completely eliminated the possibility of corruption, just made it incredibly unlikely. Refreshing your inputs is another form of probabilistic protection focused on mitigating the consequences.

AlotOfReading commented on Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars pluralistic.net/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/hn_acker

dmitrygr · 3 days ago

Yes, that’s exactly my point. My family has been poor. You just take the bus to the store, because you don’t pay extra money for someone to go there for you. You don’t have that money.

The effect of money is the opposite of this. You use it to save time. The poorer you are, the less your time costs effectively and the more things you do yourself, like going to the grocery store, no matter how far.

AlotOfReading · 2 days ago

Poverty is nothing if not diverse. You can't judge what others are dealing with based only on what was true for your experiences.

Instacart is a SNAP/EBT vendor, so clearly they have low income customers. Some people prefer online shopping because of the stigma of using benefits in-person. For others without reliable access to transportation, delivery might be the most reasonable option. Public transit also takes time that might be better spent with family, or at your job.