e63f67dd-065b (u/e63f67dd-065b)

e63f67dd-065b commented on LumoSQL lumosql.org/src/lumosql/d... · Posted by u/smartmic

Lio · 7 months ago

I'd say the most interesting thing on that site is the Not-Forking idea[1].

1. https://lumosql.org/src/not-forking/doc/trunk/README.md

Don't we just call these out-of-tree patches? Lots of those for Linux lying about, it's not a new idea. I guess the difference is that they have multiple upstreams, so really they're more of a new project that consists of:

- A set of sqlite patches,

- Other upstreams and patches?

- A custom toolchain to build all the above together into one artefact

e63f67dd-065b commented on You can't git clone a team virtualize.sh/blog/you-ca... · Posted by u/plam503711

e63f67dd-065b · 7 months ago

This kind of talent is ... not rare at all? And pretty easy to find too, just wander around the hallways at a major academic systems conference or hang around the kernel mailing lists, you'll meet most of the people working at the cutting edge of these things and get connected to those working on critical systems components. And yes, most of them work for FAANG or are funded by them.

Seriously, book a plane ticket to ATC/OSDI, EuroSys, etc and talk to all the people there. The good ones are already hired by one of the big established players (FAANG, Red Hat, Intel, etc), which is why you need to offer competitive compensation to lure them away.

e63f67dd-065b commented on Reverse geocoding is hard shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/04/... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

ryandrake · 8 months ago

You can call it perfectionism or you can call it "doing it right." I think this gets at a fundamental difference in philosophy among [software] engineers: We have a problem with a lot of edge cases, where a "good enough" solution can be done quickly. What do we do? There's a class of engineers who say 1. Do the "good enough" solution and ignore/error on the edge cases--we'll fix them later somehow (may or may not have an actual plan to do this). And there's a class of engineers who say 2. We cannot solve this problem correctly yet and need more research and better data.

Unfortunately (in my view), group #1 is making all the products and is responsible for the majority of applications of technology that get deployed. Obviously this is the case because they will take on projects that group #2 cannot, and have no compunction against shipping them. And we can see the results with our eyes. Terrible software that constantly underestimates the number and frequency of these "edge cases" and defects. Terrible software that still requires the user to do legwork in many cases because the developers made an incorrect assumption or had bad input data.

AI is making this problem even worse, because now we don't even know what the systems can and cannot do. LLMs nondeterministically fail in ways that sometimes can't even be directly corrected with code, and all engineering can do is stochastically fix defects by "training with better models."

I don't know how we get out of this: Every company is understandably biased towards "doing now" rather than "waiting" to research more and make a better product, and the doers outcompete the researchers.

e63f67dd-065b · 8 months ago

Engineering is about tradeoffs -- are the resources invested in improving a system worth the return of said improvement? We know full well how to build bridges that will last a thousand years, we just choose not to because it's not an effective use of public funds compared to a fifty year bridge.

The same applies to software engineering -- each additional edge case you handle increases cost but has diminishing returns. At some point you have to say good enough and ship. The cost of perfection is infinite -- you have finite resources, and a great part of engineering is deciding how to allocate them.

e63f67dd-065b commented on Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud restofworld.org/2025/aws-... · Posted by u/NDAjam

e63f67dd-065b · 10 months ago

> Besides the option to pay in naira, these companies allow Nigerians to store their data within the country — an advantage most of their Western rivals lack. Local servers give businesses the benefits of low latency and data localization at a time when the debate about who has access to a country’s data is heating up

Uhhh... all major cloud providers let you locate data manually? AWS surely has Nigerian datacenters too, that's not an advantage, that's the minimum.

I will grant the argument that random nigerian startups are not subject to foreign government interference, but saying that low latency is a benefit seems incorrect.

e63f67dd-065b commented on Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video] youtube.com/watch?v=BcmUZ... · Posted by u/RobinHirst11

e63f67dd-065b · a year ago

Character meshes were taking up 1GB? I wonder what surprising (to me, a non-gamedev) things are hiding in modern 100GB+ games...

e63f67dd-065b commented on Mistakes from building a model to scalp concert tickets datastream.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/racketracer

gwbas1c · a year ago

> Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.

No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100. There are a lot of reasons why someone will overpay to get a ticket; but don't delude yourself: If Taylor Swift decided to charge $1000 for each ticket, many less people would go. She might sell 1/10th of the tickets, and it would be a wash, she might sell 1/3rd of the tickets, and make more money, or she might sell 1/20th of the tickets, and make less money.

What drives the price of the tickets up is scarcity: Once the venue is sold out (or close to sold out,) it's useful to only sell the tickets to people who really, really want to pay.

Edit: I should add that, unless I really want to see an artist, I tend to buy my tickets shortly before the show, and only if they are a reasonable price.

For example, last summer Green Day & Smashing Pumpkins was $200 / ticket. I kinda wanted to go, but I didn't want to pay that much.

In contrast, Weezer was $70 a ticket and playing around the corner from my office. I went to Weezer. (And wished I bought a floor ticket sooner because the Flaming Lips were the opening band.)

Had Weezer charged $200, I never would have gone.

e63f67dd-065b · a year ago

"I would never buy a $200 ticket, therefore there does not exist a taylor swift ticket worth $200"

As you point out, different people have different price elasticities. Is it so hard to believe that some people really are willing to pay $5000 to attend?

You rightly point out that resale market prices are likely higher than the market clearing price compared to if there were a single-price auction for all the tickets, but saying that they're worth $100 is just flat out wrong.

e63f67dd-065b commented on M4 MacBook Pro apple.com/newsroom/2024/1... · Posted by u/tosh

e63f67dd-065b · a year ago

> MacBook Air with M2 and M3 comes standard with 16GB of unified memory, and is available in midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray, starting at $999 (U.S.) and $899 (U.S.) for education.

At long last, I can safely recommend the base model macbook air to my friends and family again. At $1000 ($900 with edu pricing on the m2 model) it really is an amazing package overall.

e63f67dd-065b commented on Recent BGP leak that redirected internet traffic through Russia kentik.com/blog/beyond-th... · Posted by u/vladyslavfox

e63f67dd-065b · a year ago

I don't work in networking, but seeing as most traffic is encrypted these days, does passing through unfriendly hardware matter as much as back in the days of plaintext everything? Sure they can drop packets, but they can't tamper/read it, or is there something I'm missing?