diroussel (u/diroussel)

diroussel commented on 7-Zip 25.00 github.com/ip7z/7zip/rele... · Posted by u/pentagrama

deaddodo · 2 months ago

While technically true, the term has been largely co-opted by the A/V realm. It’s pretty rare to hear outside of the context.

diroussel · 2 months ago

Rare for people who don't deal with encoding and decoding maybe.

To be clear the codec implements the compression (or other encoding) algorithm. So when talking about codec's we mean the implementation. But when talking about the algorithm, we are talking about the standard of encoding the encoder or decoder implements.

diroussel commented on Long Covid destroys teenage lungs in ways doctors never saw rollingout.com/2025/06/03... · Posted by u/lnyan

TimorousBestie · 3 months ago

I caught it early, before vaccines were available in my area.

I got vaccinated when I could and got yearly updates, though I understand the US is clamping down on boosters now? Not sure what I’m going to do this year.

diroussel · 3 months ago

The vaccines were all made for early varients. Once the omicron varient came along, it had so many changes from the original strain that the effect of the vaccines were essentially unproven.

The vaccines were definately useful, and had a big impact, but unfortunately corona viruses change too quickly.

diroussel commented on Behind the scenes: Redpanda Cloud's response to the GCP outage redpanda.com/blog/gcp-out... · Posted by u/eatonphil

diroussel · 3 months ago

> Modern computer systems are complex systems — and complex systems are characterized by their non-linear nature, which means that observed changes in an output are not proportional to the change in the input. This concept is also known in chaos theory as the butterfly effect,

This isn't quite right. Linear systems can also be complex, and linear dynamic systems can also exhibit the butterfly effect.

That is why the butterfly effect is so interesting.

Of course non-linear systems can have a large change in output based on a small input, because they allow step changes, and many other non-linear processes.

diroussel commented on S5cmd: Parallel S3 and local filesystem execution tool github.com/peak/s5cmd... · Posted by u/polyrand

Galanwe · 3 months ago

> For downloads, s5cmd can saturate a 40Gbps link (~4.3 GB/s)

I'm surprised by these claims. I have worked pretty intimately with S3 for almost 10 years now, developed high performance tools to retrieve data from it, as well as used dedicated third party tools for performant file download tailored for S3.

My experience is that individual S3 connections are capped over the board at ~80MB/s, and the throughput of 1 file is capped at 1.6GB/s (at least per ec2 instance). At least I have never managed myself nor seen any tool capable of going beyond that.

My understanding is then that this benchmark's claims of 4.3GB/s are across multiple files, but then it would be rather meaningless, as it's free concurrency basically.

diroussel · 3 months ago

The S3 API allows requests to read a byte range of the file (sorry , object). So you could have multiple connections each reading a different byte range. Then the ranges would need to be written to the target local file using a random access pattern.

diroussel commented on How University Students Use Claude anthropic.com/news/anthro... · Posted by u/pseudolus

lisper · 5 months ago

> pre-planned plans

Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?

diroussel · 5 months ago

Learning from others doesn’t mean you are not learning.

diroussel commented on The April Fools joke that might have got me fired oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/... · Posted by u/goldenskye

simmons · 5 months ago

> In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. > ...Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST

You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing. (But maybe there was some integration between the two after my experience with Netware, who knows.)

I mainly wanted to say, as someone who used/abused a Netware network in high school, I disassembled the SEND program and discovered that the username included in the message is not authenticated at all -- the IPX (or NETX, I forget which) software interrupt just took a string, and the SEND executable formatted the username into this string. So by crafting your own SEND program that used the software interrupt directly, you could easily forge any username you wanted. So you could very easily send a message from "ADMIN". :)

This should not be construed as a confession of any network shenanigans that may or may not have occurred at my high school. ;) :D :)

diroussel · 5 months ago

I believe that Netware had NET SEND before Microsoft had any networking at all. But maybe I’m wrong. Certainly NT had a netware compatible stack, but this was way after netware blazed the trail.

diroussel commented on You Need Subtyping blog.polybdenum.com/2025/... · Posted by u/speckx

kllrnohj · 5 months ago

> Most modern languages are multi-paradigm. [..] And modern Java.

Modern Java is still very definitely OOP and not multi-paradigm. Other JVM languages, like Scala or Kotlin, add more multi-paradigm features to that ecosystem, but modern Java doesn't.

diroussel · 5 months ago

It tries to be OOP, but you can still implement a program with int, int[] and static methods.

And you can’t subtype those.

Other JVM languages, like scala, are more OO than Java.

diroussel commented on In S3 simplicity is table stakes allthingsdistributed.com/... · Posted by u/riv991

diroussel · 6 months ago

It's great that they added iceberg support I guess, but it's a shame that they also removed S3 Select. S3 Select wasn't perfect. For instance the performance was no where near as good as using DuckDB to scan a parquet file, since duck is smart, and S3 Select does a full table scan.

But S3 Select is nearly way cheaper that the new iceberg support. So if your needs are only for reading one parquet snapshot, we no need to do updates, then this change is not welcome.

Great article though, and I was pleased to see this at the end:

> We’ve invested in a collaboration with DuckDB to accelerate Iceberg support in Duck,

diroussel commented on C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us edgedb.com/blog/c-stdlib-... · Posted by u/msully4321

eqvinox · 8 months ago

I have a different perspective: the underlying problem is calling setenv(). As far as I'm concerned, the environment is a read-only input parameter set on process creation like argv. It's not a mechanism for exchanging information within a process, as used here with SSL_CERT_FILE.

And remember that the exec* family of calls has a version with an envp argument, which is what should be used if a child process is to be started with a different environment — build a completely new structure, don't touch the existing one. Same for posix_spawn.

And, lastly, compatibility with ancient systems strikes again: the environment is also accessible through this:

   extern char **environ;

Which is, of course, best described as bullshit.

diroussel · 8 months ago

Indeed, environment variables should be used to configure child processes, not to configure the current process, for non-shell programs, IMHO.

Note that Java, and the JVM, doesn't allow changing environment variables. It was the right choice, even if painful at times.

diroussel commented on Octopus overtakes British Gas as Britain's largest household energy supplier theguardian.com/business/... · Posted by u/doener

4ndrewl · 8 months ago

Tech angle: They have an API customers can use to monitor prices and usage https://developer.octopus.energy/

diroussel · 8 months ago

So the story goes (I'm probably just regurgitating some marketing)...

The founder has a software background, and built out a software service to track energy usage and deliver data-driven pricing plans. But when he tried to sell it to the energy companies, it didn't find much demand for the software. So they setup their own energy supplier to prove how good it was. They now sell their software in mulitple countries.

As a customer, not only can I get an API key and retrive usage data. But I can also use an API to see what other pricing plans are available. And in the mobile app I get to the minute usage reporting.