cogman10 (u/cogman10)

cogman10 commented on Go is still not good blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad

From what I have heard, Graal is still quite a headache if you are using libraries that are not compatible, but maybe this is out of date.

cogman10 · 2 days ago

Still an issue. The main problem is for native compilation you have to declare your reflection targets upfront. That can be a headache if your framework doesn't support it.

You can get a large portion of what graal native offers by using AppCDS and compressed object headers.

Here's the latest JEP for all that.

https://openjdk.org/jeps/483

cogman10 commented on Go is still not good blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad

the_duke · 2 days ago

I personally don't like Go, and it has many shortcomings, but there is a reason it is popular regardless:

Go is a reasonably performant language that makes it pretty straightforward to write reliable, highly concurrent services that don't rely on heavy multithreading - all thanks to the goroutine model.

There really was no other reasonably popular, static, compiled language around when Google came out.

And there still barely is - the only real competitor that sits in a similar space is Java with the new virtual threads.

Languages with async/await promise something similar, but in practice are burdened with a lot of complexity (avoiding blocking in async tasks, function colouring, ...)

I'm not counting Erlang here, because it is a very different type of language...

So I'd say Go is popular despite the myriad of shortcomings, thanks to goroutines and the Google project street cred.

cogman10 · 2 days ago

Slowly but surely, the jvm has been closing the go gap. With efforts like virtual threads, zgc, lilliput, Leyden, and Valhalla, the jvm has been closing the gap.

The change from Java 8 to 25 is night and day. And the future looks bright. Java is slowly bringing in more language features that make it quite ergonomic to work with.

cogman10 commented on How does the US use water? construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/juliangamble

Aurornis · 2 days ago

> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid.

Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.

I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.

cogman10 · 2 days ago

In the small town I lived in, we'd pretty frequently get water boiling notifications with our old water tower. Once that was replaced we never got a water boiling notice.

cogman10 commented on Branch prediction: Why CPUs can't wait? namvdo.ai/cpu-branch-pred... · Posted by u/signa11

whitten · 5 days ago

I know branch prediction is essential if you have instruction pipelining in actual CPU hardware.

It is an interesting thought experiment re instruction pipelining in a virtual machine or interpreter design. What would you change in a design to allow it ? Would an asynchronous architecture be necessary ? How would you merge control flow together efficiently to take advantage of it ?

cogman10 · 4 days ago

With the way architectures have gone, I think you'd end up recreating VLIW. The thing holding back VLIW was compilers were too dumb and computers too slow to really take advantage of it. You ended up with a lot of "NOP"s as a result in the output. VLIW is essentially how modern GPUs operate.

The main benefit of VLIW is that it simplifies the processor design by moving the complicated tasks/circuitry into the compiler. Theoretically, the compiler has more information about the intent of the program which allows it to better optimize things.

It would also be somewhat of a security boon. VLIW moves the branch prediction (and rewinding) into the processor. With exploits like spectre, pulling that out would make it easier to integrate compiler hints on security sensitive code "hey, don't spec ex here".

cogman10 commented on Lab-grown salmon hits the menu smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/bookmtn

janalsncm · 5 days ago

Lab grown meat solves a ton of issues: animal welfare, environment (both CO2 and clearing land for agriculture), food safety, and potentially cost too. It can’t come fast enough.

cogman10 · 5 days ago

> CO2, food safety

I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.

I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.

Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?

A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.

cogman10 commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

nostrademons · 6 days ago

So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S:

When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].

The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):

1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.

2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.

If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.

Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

cogman10 · 6 days ago

I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) and they saw what you are describing first hand.

One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1.

And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes.

The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people.

What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.

cogman10 commented on OpenBSD is so fast, I had to modify the program slightly to measure itself flak.tedunangst.com/post/... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

farhaven · 9 days ago

OpenBSD is a lot faster in some specialized areas though. Random number generation from `/dev/urandom`, for example. When I was at university (in 2010 or so), it was faster to read `/dev/urandom` on my OpenBSD laptop and pipe it over ethernet to a friend's Linux laptop than running `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda` directly on his.

Not by just a bit, but it was a difference between 10MB/s and 100MB/s.

cogman10 · 9 days ago

/dev/urandom isn't a great test, IMO, simply because there are reasonable tradeoffs in security v speed.

For all I know BSD could be doing 31*last or something similar.

The algorithm is also free to change.

cogman10 commented on Time travel is self-suppressing arxiv.org/abs/2508.09157... · Posted by u/warrenm

cogman10 · 9 days ago

Could it be that time travel suffers from the dark forest problem?

A hostile and aggressive alien species with time travel capabilities would naturally use it to go back in time and eliminate any evolved species that similarly discovers time travel.

The energy required would definitely be enough to annihilate planets.

cogman10 commented on "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit pluralistic.net/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224

owisd · 9 days ago

Having a device in your pocket that you take everywhere with no stigma to being seen with it yet it has unlimited access to any genre of porn you can think of is hardly comparable to finding a 90s porn mag in a bush from time to time, so you can't really say this has been happening forever.

cogman10 · 9 days ago

Erotic novels have been discreet for a while. It's also not been usual to have a laptop in public since the 90s. There are definitely pictures of people perusing porn on trains (visible in reflections).

Briefcases were also a thing as have been strip clubs since forever. Quick access to porn hasn't been a problem since the printing press was invented.

cogman10 commented on "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit pluralistic.net/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224

cogman10 · 10 days ago

The big problem I have with laws like the UK has been that they solve a non-issue at the cost of large infrastructure and potential privacy problems.

Teenagers have been looking at porn since forever. It's practically a trope of teens stealing their parents' porn mags. I don't think any of this has actually caused major societal issues.

The proposed solutions merely require that a teen steal their parent's identification, briefly, to create a porn account and move on. Heck, they can probably buy that information online if they are innovative enough. They certainly will be selling access to their porn accounts to their classmates. And even if they don't go through all that trouble, getting a porn mag is still pretty possible in the UK.

That makes this just a bad law. It doesn't meaningfully stop the problem it's meant to stop and it's expensive and intrusive. Even if privacy preserving age verification was bulletproof and perfect, you still have the access holes all over.

And then there's the simple fact that other nations exist. Yes, mainstream sites will put up protections, but what about the sealand porn site? Unless the UK wants a great firewall (ala the chinese firewall), they simply aren't going to stop this problem. Even then, VPNs are common knowledge at this point due to streaming.

Bad law, bad effects, and a pointless fight.