DougBTX (u/DougBTX) - Readit News

DougBTX commented on Testing shows automotive glassbreakers can't break modern automotive glass core77.com/posts/138925/T... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

QuiEgo · 24 days ago

The front ones seem easy enough, the rear ones are a lot harder

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...

DougBTX · 24 days ago

Spicy:

> Use caution when using the manual door release; the window will not automatically lower when the door is opened and damage to the window or vehicle trim may occur.

Manually opening the rear doors is a destructive operation!

DougBTX commented on Building the largest known Kubernetes cluster cloud.google.com/blog/pro... · Posted by u/TangerineDream

ZeroCool2u · a month ago

But, and I'm honestly asking, you as a GKE user don't have to manage that spanner instance, right? So, you should in theory be able to just throw higher loads at it and spanner should be autoscaling?

DougBTX · a month ago

Yes, from the article:

> To support the cluster’s massive scale, we relied on a proprietary key-value store based on Google’s Spanner distributed database... We didn’t witness any bottlenecks with respect to the new storage system and it showed no signs of it not being able to support higher scales.

DougBTX commented on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-... · Posted by u/delaugust

adrian_b · a month ago

There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients.

Attempting to roast a full chicken or turkey is not the correct way to use microwaves. You must first remove the bones from the bird, then cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. After using a boning knife for the former operation, I prefer to do the latter operation with some good Japanese kitchen scissors, as it is simpler and faster than with a knife.

If you buy turkey/chicken breasts or thighs without bones, then you have to do only the latter operation and cut them into bite-sized pieces.

Then you can roast the meat pieces in a closed glass vessel, without adding anything to the meat, except salt and spices (i.e. no added water or oil). The microwave oven must be set to a relatively low power and long time, e.g. for turkey meat to 30 minutes @ 440 W and for chicken to less time than that, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes. The exact values depend on the oven and on the amount of cooked meat, but once determined by experiment, they remain valid forever.

The meat cooked like this is practically identical to meat cooked on a covered grill (the kind with indirect heating, through hot air), but it is done faster and without needing any supervision. In my opinion this results in the tastiest meat in comparison with any other cooking method. However, I do not care about a roasted crust on the meat, which is also unhealthy, so I do not use the infrared lamp that the microwave oven has for making such a crust.

Vegetable garnishes, e.g. potatoes, must be cooked at microwaves separate from the meat, as they typically need much less time than meat, usually less than 10 minutes (but higher power). Everything must be mixed into the final dish after cooking, including things like added oil, which should better not be heated at great temperatures.

Even without the constraints of a microwave oven, preparing meat like this makes much more sense than cooking whole birds or fish or whatever. Removing all the bones and any other inedible parts and also cutting the meat into bite-sized pieces before cooking wastes much less time than when everybody must repeat all these operations every time during eating, so I consider that serving whole animals at a meal is just stupid, even if they may look appetizing for some people.

DougBTX · a month ago

> Then you can roast the meat pieces in a closed glass vessel

It sounds like this is steamed meat, as opposed to roasted. Your cooking time seems to match a quick search for steamed chicken recipes: https://tiffycooks.com/20-minutes-chinese-steamed-chicken/

DougBTX commented on FAA to restrict commercial rocket launches to overnight hours space.com/space-explorati... · Posted by u/bookmtn

roncesvalles · 2 months ago

But the stakes are much higher.

On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.

So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.

DougBTX · 2 months ago

From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/

> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.

Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?

DougBTX commented on John Carmack on mutable variables twitter.com/id_aa_carmack... · Posted by u/azhenley

hackthemack · 2 months ago

One area that I like to have immutability is in function argument passing. In javascript (and many other languages), I find it weird that arguments in function act differently depending on if they are simple (strings, numbers) versus if they are complex (objects, arrays).

I want everything that passes through a function to be a copy unless I put in a symbol or keyword that it suppose to be passed by reference.

I made a little function to do deep copies but am still experimenting with it.

  function deepCopy(value) {
    if (typeof structuredClone === 'function') {
      try { return structuredClone(value); } catch (_) {}
    }
    try {
      return JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(value));
    } catch (_) {
      // Last fallback: return original (shallow)
      return value;
    }
  }

DougBTX · 2 months ago

> I want everything that passes through a function to be a copy unless I put in a symbol or keyword that it suppose to be passed by reference.

JavaScript doesn’t have references, it is clearer to only use “passed by reference” terminology when writing about code in a language which does have them, like C++ [0].

In JavaScript, if a mutable object is passed to a function, then the function can change the properties on the object, but it is always the same object. When an object is passed by reference, the function can replace the initial object with a completely different one, that isn’t possible in JS.

Better is to distinguish between immutable objects (ints, strings in JS) and mutable ones. A mutable object can be made immutable in JS using Object.freeze [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(C%2B%2B)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

DougBTX commented on Formal Reasoning [pdf] cs.ru.nl/~freek/courses/f... · Posted by u/Thom2503

griffzhowl · 2 months ago

Use of the word "mechanical" to describe formal reasoning predates computers.

Here's the first sentence of Godel's 1931 On formally undecidable propositions...

"The development of mathematics in the direction of greater exactness has—as is well known—led to large tracts of it becoming formalized, so that proofs can be carried out according to a few mechanical rules."

Leibniz had discussed calculating machines (and even thought about binary arithmetic being the most appropriate implementation), so the general idea probably goes back quite far

Edit: Oh, I guess by "late 1930s" you're referring to Turing's 1936 paper where he defines Turing machines, rather than actual electronic computers. Still, understanding "formal" as "mechanical" predates it.

DougBTX · 2 months ago

Perhaps it has to be that way, the motivation to build a mechanical computer is based on the belief that computation can be mechanised.

DougBTX commented on Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image bitbytebit.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/recroad

hwc · 3 months ago

How did they make any money at all without ads?

DougBTX · 3 months ago

1999, $25 million investment: https://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/06/google-receives-25-...

2000, launched ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads

2001, profitable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/aug/08/internetn...

DougBTX commented on Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks pnpm.io/blog/releases/10.... · Posted by u/ivanb

mcintyre1994 · 3 months ago

In the case of the chalk/debug etc hack, the first detection seemed to come from a CI build failure it caused: https://jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-found-malicious-code...

> It started with a cryptic build failure in our CI/CD pipeline, which my colleague noticed

> This seemingly minor error was the first sign of a sophisticated supply chain attack. We traced the failure to a small dependency, error-ex. Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer, so it installed the latest version 1.3.3, which got published just a few minutes earlier.

DougBTX · 3 months ago

> Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer

Is that possible? I thought the lock files restricted to a specific version with an integrity check hash. Is it possible that it would install a newer version which doesn't match the hash in the lock file? Do they just mean package.json here?

DougBTX commented on Language models pack billions of concepts into 12k dimensions nickyoder.com/johnson-lin... · Posted by u/lawrenceyan

singularity2001 · 3 months ago

If you ever played 20Questions you know that you don't need 1000 dimensions for a billion concepts. These huge vectors can represent way more complex information than just a billion concepts.

In fact they can pack complete poems with or without typos and you can ask where in the poem the typo is, which is exactly what happens if you paste that into GPT: somewhere in an internal layer it will distinguish exactly that.

DougBTX · 3 months ago

With binary vectors, 20 dimensions will get you just over a million concepts. For a billion you’ll need 30 questions.

DougBTX commented on Use singular nouns for database table names teamten.com/lawrence/prog... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

danbruc · 3 months ago

1. Strictly speaking, we’re not naming a table, we’re naming a relation.

And a relation is a set, hence plural.

2. It reads well everywhere else in the SQL query:

   SELECT Employee.Name
        , Manager.Name
     FROM Users AS Employee
        , Users AS Manager
    WHERE Employee.ManagerID = Manager.ID
      AND Employee.DateOfBirth IS NULL;

3. The name of the class you’ll store the data into is singular (User). You therefore have a mismatch, and in ORMs (e.g., Rails) they often automatically pluralize, with the predictable result of seeing tables with names like addresss.

The class User represents a single row, not the entire table, hence singular. If the O/R mapper or some other tooling has issues with singular and plural, then I agree, it might not be worth fighting the tools.

4. Some relations are already plural. Say you have a class called UserFacts that store miscellaneous information about a user, like age and favorite color. What will you call the database table?

I think having the table and the class name both in plural would be fine. That also seems rare enough in practice that I would not let this dictate the decision. In the given example I would also tend to record the user facts as a list of them. A user fact is a key value pair associated with an user, the keys living in their own table. Having the keys implicit as column names will also make some queries unnecessarily complicated and as the number of facts grows, the table will become increasingly wide.

Also sometimes we have singular names for collections of things, then it is fine to have a singular table name, you can name your Trees table Forrest if that makes sense in the domain.

DougBTX · 3 months ago

> they often automatically pluralize, with the predictable result of seeing tables with names like addresss.

This is a very poor example, that case is literally in their unit tests file:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/b0c813bc7b61c71dd21ee3a6...

That test has been there over 18 years!