Man, that's pretty excellent!
I once built a demo-ish encrypted network boot system using similar initrd techniques. It's a fun hack working in the preboot environment.
Readit Newsconvivialdingo commented on Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk jyn.dev/remotely-unlockin... · Posted by u/janandonly
In these days of the Epstein mails, it's worth remembering one thing that's become clear: Epstein was an extremely nice guy. He seemed kind, sincere, interested in what you were doing, civilized etc.
But to quote Little Red Riding Hood in Stephen Sondheim's musical: Nice is different than good. It's hard to accept if people you really like do horrible things. It's tempting to not believe what you hear, or even what you see. And Epstein was good at getting you to really like him, if he wanted to.
That doesn't mean we should be suspicious of niceness. It just means that we should realize, again, nice is different than good.
Anyone who's grown up around the upper class social strata understands this to be true.
I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web.
The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.
Similar story for myself. It was long and tedious for my mental model to go from Basic, to Pascal, to C, and finally to ASM as a teen.
My recent experience is the opposite. With LLMs, I'm able to delve into the deepest parts of code and systems I never had time to learn. LLMs will get you to the 80% pretty quick - compiles and sometimes even runs.
convivialdingo commented on Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video · Posted by u/lcolucci
That's super impressive! Definitely one of the best quality conversational agents I've tried syncing A/V and response times.
The text processing is running Qwen / Alibaba?
That’s amazing effort - I am impressed.
Awesome to see more small teams making impressive leaps.
Impressive! The cloning and voice affect is great. Has a slight warble in the voice on long vowels, but not a huge issue. I'll definitely check it out - we could use voice generation for alerting on one of our projects (no GPUs on hardware).
convivialdingo commented on Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs pcgamer.com/hardware/dell... · Posted by u/mossTechnician
As someone who spent a year writing an SDK specifically for AI PCs, it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. Like watching dancers in bunny suits sell CPUs, if the consumer doesn't know the pain point you're fixing, they won't buy your product.
I spent a few months working on different edge compute NPUs (ARM mostly) with CNN models and it was really painful. A lot of impressive hardware, but I was always running into software fallbacks for models, custom half-baked NN formats, random caveats, and bad quantization.
In the end it was faster, cheaper, and more reliable to buy a fat server running our models and pay the bandwidth tax.
convivialdingo commented on xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure techcrunch.com/2025/05/19... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
It still seems to have the problems most other LLMs suffer with except Gemini: it loses context so quickly.
I asked it about a paper I was looking at (SLOG [0]) and it basically lost the context of what "slog" referred to after 3 prompts.
1. I asked for an example transaction illustrating the key advantages of the SLOG approach. It responded with some general DB transaction stuff.
2. I then said "no use slog like we were talking about" and then it gave me a golang example using the log/slog package
Even without the weird political things around Grok, it just isn't that good.
When I use the "think" mode it retains context for longer. I tested with 5k lines of c compiler code and I could 6 prompts in before it started forgetting or generalizing
I'll say that grok is really excellent at helping my understand the codebase, but some miss-named functions or variables will trip it up..
convivialdingo commented on Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire yeet.cx/blog/lock-free-ru... · Posted by u/r3tr0
I did a lock-free ABA-free bounded queue in c++ kind of an exercise. I work mostly with deferred reclamation schemes (e.g. refcounting, quiescent state based reclamation, and epoch based reclamation). A queue requiring deferred reclamation, like the Michael-Scott lock-free queue is going to perform terribly so you go with an array based ring buffer. It uses a double wide CAS to do the insert for the enqueue and a regular CAS to update the tail. Dequeue is just a regular CAS to update the head. That runs about 57 nsecs on my 10th gen i5 for single producer and consumer.
A lock-free queue by itself isn't very useful. You need a polling strategy that doesn't involve a busy loop. If you use mutexes and condvars, you've basically turned it into a lock based queue. Eventcounts work much better.
If I run more threads than CPUs and enough work so I get time slice ends, I get about 1160 nsecs avg enq/deq for mutex version, and about 146 nsecs for eventcount version.
Timings will vary based on how man threads you use and cpu affinity that takes your hw thread/core/cache layout into consideration. I have gen 13 i5 that runs this slower than my gen 10 i5 because of the former's efficiency cores even though it is supposedly faster.
And yes, a queue is a poster child for cache contention problems, une enfant terrible. I tried a back off strategy at one point but it didn't help any.
I tried replacing a DMA queue lock with lock-free CAS and it wasn't faster than a mutex or a standard rwlock.
I rewrote the entire queue with lock-free CAS to manage insertions/removals on the list and we finally got some better numbers. But not always! We found it worked best either as a single thread, or during massive contention. With a normal load it wasn't really much better.
But there's a bigger issue than just what software you're allowed to run on your own computer. What's really insidious is the combination of the corporate and government interest. If every server tracks how old you are, it's a short step to tracking more information. Eventually it's a mandatory collection of metadata on everyone that uses a computer (which is every human). Something both corporations and governments would love.
You were worried about a national ID? No need. We'll have national metadata. Just sign in with your Apple Store/Google Store credentials. Don't worry about not having it, you can't use a computer without it. Now that we have your national login, the government can track everything you do on a computer (as all that friendly "telemetry" will be sent to the corporate servers). Hope you didn't visit an anti-Republican forum, or you might get an unfortunate audit.