ISV_Damocles (u/ISV_Damocles)

ISV_Damocles commented on Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP github.com/lackeyjb/playw... · Posted by u/syntax-sherlock

philipallstar · 2 months ago

Why would OSS models threaten Nvidia?

ISV_Damocles · 2 months ago

Most of the big OSS AI codebases (LLM and Diffusion, at least) have code to work on any GPU, not just nVidia GPUs, now. There's a slight performance benefit to sticking with nVidia, but once you need to split work across multiple GPUs, you can do a cost-benefit analysis and decide that, say, 12 AMD GPUs is faster than 8 nVidia GPUs and cheaper, as well.

Then nVidia's moat begins to shrink because they need to offer their GPUs at a somewhat reduced price to try to keep their majority share.

ISV_Damocles commented on UTF-8 is a brilliant design iamvishnu.com/posts/utf8-... · Posted by u/vishnuharidas

gertop · 3 months ago

UTF-16 is both simpler to parse and more compact than utf-8 when writing non-english characters.

UTF-8 didn't win on technical merits, it won becausw it was mostly backwards compatible with all American software that previously used ASCII only.

When you leave the anglosphere you'll find that some languages still default to other encodings due to how large utf-8 ends up for them (Chinese and Japanese, to name two).

ISV_Damocles · 3 months ago

UTF-16 is also just as complicated as UTF-8 requiring multibyte characters to cover the entirety of Unicode, so it doesn't avoid the issue you're complaining about for the newest languages added, and it has the added complexity of a BOM being required to be sure you have the pairs of bytes in the right order, so you are more vulnerable to truncated data being unrecoverable versus UTF-8.

UTF-32 would be a fair comparison, but it is 4 bytes per character and I don't know what, if anything, uses it.

ISV_Damocles commented on Introducing S2 s2.dev/blog/intro... · Posted by u/brancz

shikhar · a year ago

Indeed... we sure wish we could have nabbed that crate name, but it was not to be. Our Rust SDK is here https://lib.rs/crates/streamstore

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

Replying to this one since you apparently can't reply to a comment that has been flagged. Why was the grandparent flagged? Google's S2 library has been around for more than a decade and is the first thing I think of when I see "S2" in a tech stack.

And the flippant response from the parent here that they don't really care that they're muddying the waters and just want the crate name is irksome.

ISV_Damocles commented on Why is Apple so bad at marketing its TV shows? fastcompany.com/91209369/... · Posted by u/ilamont

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

This article touched on a point that I feel is very relevant: unexpected show cancellations, apparently now happening for Apple TV+, as well.

Netflix and Disney+ trained me to not even watch a show until it's concluded because it could get cancelled and I don't want to invest my small amount of free time on entertainment that might not even finish. It does produce a self-fulfilling prophecy where people with the same mindset as me on this do the same, and then the rating for something I (and probably they) are interested in aren't high enough and it gets cancelled.

What should worry them, though, is that it also led to the final step for them; I cancelled my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions with no intention of renewing them around a year ago. The end result is that "TV series"-style shows are effectively dead to me; I've shifted my time on them mostly to novels (that are basically behind-the-curve on this trend, hopefully forever), followed by single-player video games, and finally movies. (Why didn't movies take the first slot? Because I'm only willing/able to give 30-60 minutes of continuous time to entertainment most of the time, and it's very unsatisfying to pause a movie to resume later.)

The continuous, immediate feedback on series performance coupled with a reputation of acting on that feedback immediately is killing the traditional television medium.

On top of all of that, Apple TV+ has the added albatross of requiring their hardware for the shows, as if they were somehow a siren song to get people more tightly nestled into their ecosystem, and therefore dooming their shows to failure, at least amongst people who don't want to pay for overpriced hardware running software of degrading quality over the years (I switched to Linux in 2016 because it was more reliable than my MacBook Air; being better than Windows isn't good enough anymore, especially when Linux has a greater catalog of software these days).

The needs of Apple, Inc weigh on their Apple TV division, they don't help it, and the sins of the streaming services against actually finishing a story further increase the trust deficit with Apple TV+. No amount of marketing is going to turn that around.

ISV_Damocles commented on Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation mitchellh.com/writing/zig... · Posted by u/tosh

wavemode · a year ago

You don't really seem to be understanding the point I'm making, or perhaps don't understand what memory safety means. Or perhaps are assuming I'm a Rust newcomer.

> Rust won't let you do the wrong thing here (except if you explicitly opt-in to with `unsafe`

There is no "except if you" in this context. I'm talking about unsafe Rust, specifically. I'm not talking about safe Rust at all. Safe Rust is a very safe language, and equivalent in memory safety to safe Java and safe Python. So if that's your argument, you've missed the point entirely.

> In any case, this is orthogonal to safety.

No, it's not orthogonal - memory safety is exactly what I'm talking about. If you're talking about some other kind of safety, like null safety or something, you've again missed the point entirely.

> ... calling `.clone()` all over the place or wrapping your value in `Rc<T>` if it's for single-threaded code, or `Arc<Mutex<T>>` ...

This whole paragraph is assuming the use of safe abstractions. If you're arguing that safe abstractions are safe, then, well... I agree with you. But I'm talking about raw pointers, so you're missing the point here.

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

You're moving the goalposts. Your original post had zero mention of unsafe Rust. You have now latched onto this as somehow proving Rust is less safe than Python and Java despite also mentioning how Java also has unsafe APIs you can use, which nullifies even your moved goalposts.

Btw, Python also has unsafe APIs[1, 2, 3, 4] so this doesn't even differentiate these two languages from each other. Some of them are directly related to memory safety, and you don't even get an `unsafe` block to warn you to tread lightly while you're using them. Perhaps we should elevate Rust above Java and Python because of that?

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/gc.html#gc.get_referrers

[2]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html

[3]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/_thread.html

[4]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.fork

ISV_Damocles commented on Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation mitchellh.com/writing/zig... · Posted by u/tosh

wavemode · a year ago

I'm talking specifically about memory safety (when using unsafe/raw pointers). Being able to say "once I allocate this memory, the garbage collector will take care of keeping it alive up until it's no longer referenced anywhere" makes avoiding most memory safety errors relatively effortless, compared to ensuring correctness of lifetimes.

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

Please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41720769

You can absolutely opt-out of lifetime management in Rust. It's not usually talked about because you sacrifice performance to do it and many in the Rust community want to explicitly push Rust in the niches that C and C++ currently occupy, so to be competitive the developer does have to worry about lifetimes.

But that has absolutely nothing to do with Rust's safety, and the fact that Rust refuses to compile if you don't provide it a proper solution there means it's at least as safe as Python and Java on the memory front (really, it is more as I have already stated). Just because it's more annoying to write doesn't affect it's safety; they are orthogonal dimensions to measure a language by.

ISV_Damocles commented on Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation mitchellh.com/writing/zig... · Posted by u/tosh

wavemode · a year ago

Simply because Rust requires you to manage memory yourself. It provides conveniences like Drop to help you do this correctly, but it still makes things harder (when using unsafe) than having a garbage collector to just throw your allocations at.

Java and Python both have access to unsafe operations (via sun.misc.unsafe/ctypes) but Java is multithreaded, which requires extra care, whereas Python is not.

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

`drop` is an optimization. You never have to call it if you don't want to, Rust will automatically free memory for you when the variable goes out of scope.

Rust won't let you do the wrong thing here (except if you explicitly opt-in to with `unsafe` as you note is also possible in other languages). The Rust compiler, when writing normal Rust code will prevent you from compiling code that uses memory incorrectly.

You can then solve the problem by figuring out how you're using the memory incorrectly, or you could just skip out on it by calling `.clone()` all over the place or wrapping your value in `Rc<T>` if it's for single-threaded code, or `Arc<Mutex<T>>` for multi-threaded code, and have it effectively garbage-collected for you.

In any case, this is orthogonal to safety. Rust gives you better safety than Python and Java, but at the cost of a more complex language in order to also give you the option of high performance. If you just want safety and easy memory management, you could use one of the ML variants for that.

ISV_Damocles commented on Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation mitchellh.com/writing/zig... · Posted by u/tosh

pkolaczk · a year ago

What makes you think Rust is any less safe than Java or Java less safe than Python?

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

Agreed. My personal experience is Rust is more safe than Python as you get runtime errors when your interpreted Python code has a type error in it, but that's a compiler error in Rust so you don't have an "oopsie" in production.

Much harder to write Rust than Python, but definitely safer.

(Rust vs Java is much closer, but Java's nullable types by default and errors that are `throw`n not needing to be part of the signature of the function lead to runtime errors that Rust doesn't have, as well.)

ISV_Damocles commented on AMD records its highest server market share in decades tomshardware.com/pc-compo... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

jmakov · a year ago

Will be interesting to see how Intel recovers if at all. Actually, is there today (or since 1 or 2 years) any reason to go with Intel on desktop or server?

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

I personally only use AMD (excepting one test machine), but Intel does have the best single-thread performance[1] so if you have some crufty code that you can't parallelize in any way, it'll work best with Intel.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html...

ISV_Damocles commented on Full AMD Ryzen PC in a Folding Mini Keyboard tomshardware.com/desktops... · Posted by u/RobertJaTomsons

ISV_Damocles · a year ago

The suggestion to use AR glasses with this keyboard computer feels very Ghost-in-the-Shell cyberpunk to me. Stepping onto a train and you find some guy with glasses sitting near the train door staring blankly at other passengers while typing furiously on the keyboard. Looks a bit creepy. After a moment it's revealed he has an AR display and he's writing an email or whatever.

...why do I feel nostalgic for a cyberpunk dystopia?