hosh (u/hosh) - Readit News

hosh commented on Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr newsletter.squishy.comput... · Posted by u/fiatjaf

hosh · 4 days ago

It got me thinking:

- how well does such an ecosystem resist enshittification? Given some of the other comments, Nostr itself would not. However, is that true for every relay networks?

- does the Willow protocol have the same basic constraints? I know willow works with user-owned keys, but can it also organize as something similar to relays?

- local-first apps organized this way would be an interesting ecosystem

- how well would this work with keyhive? (Local first access control)

hosh commented on Autism should not be treated as a single condition economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

munificent · 16 days ago

Here are three separate metaphors:

1. A linear continuum (like wavelength for light) from "no autism" to "really bad autism".

2. A collection of disjoint sets (like individual named colors like "cyan" and "puce") for cases like "really into trains autism", "freaks out at parties autism", "non-verbal autism", etc.

3. A continuous mixture of different properties (like rgb(.1, .2, .05)) for symptoms like "10% social dysfunction", "20% repetitive behavior", "5% sensory overstimulation".

When people describe autism as a spectrum disorder, they generally mean the third metaphor. It's a mixture of different symptoms and different autistic people have different amounts of those symptoms but all people diagnosed with autism have a significant amount of them and their symptoms will have some amount of overlap with other autistic people.

hosh · 16 days ago

Number (3) has better explanatory powers than (1).

However, for the purpose of assessing social and family impact, it is rendered to (1). Both schools and state (US) programs use (1) to assess if a child qualifies for support. This is not always related to how to parent or educate the child.

Fortunately, the US school system with IEP (individualized educational plans) are developed along (3). (Source: two of my kids have ASD)

None of that necessarily helps in informal social contexts or in professional workplace settings. I think the American Disabilities Act covers reasonable accommodations for people with autism spectrum disorders, though I am not sure if it requires legal disabled status.

Lastly: I met a Native (Navajo) family with a child that seems to me, have some developmental disabilities — but I think they take a very different approach. For one, they don’t seem to have the usual social stigma associated with this, and are baffled why I would suggest getting state support for early childhood intervention. If anything, I would not be surprised if they thought I was, yet again, someone unthinkingly pushing a colonialist worldview.

hosh commented on AI agents break rules under everyday pressure spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agen... · Posted by u/pseudolus

hosh · 17 days ago

Humans do the same thing.

I have a friend who is a systems engineer, working at a construction company building datacenters. She tells me that someone has to absorb the risk and uncertainty in the global supply chain, and if there are contractual obligation to guarantee delivery, then the tendency is to start straying into unethical behavior, or practices that violate controls and policies.

This has as much to do with taking the slack out of the system. Something, somewhere is going to break. If you tell an agenic AI that it must complete the task by a deadline, and it cannot find a way to do that within ethical parameters, it starts searching beyond the bounds of ethical behavior. If you tell the AI it can push back, warn about slipping deadlines, that it is not worth taking ethical shortcuts to meet a deadline, then maybe it won’t.

hosh commented on Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023) pallais.scholars.harvard.... · Posted by u/delichon

stuffn · 18 days ago

Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app.

Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.

hosh · 18 days ago

I prefer heads down time. At my remote workplace, I found several channels where people ask for help. Combined with office hours, it is the main way I keep in touch with what is going on.

We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.

I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.

It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.

hosh commented on You want microservices, but do you need them? docker.com/blog/do-you-re... · Posted by u/tsenturk

awesome_dude · 19 days ago

I'm familiar with Whatsapp and its relationship with erlang (there's RabbitMQ as well, which I always forget when asked..)

But they're the only real case studies

If I were to say "Go", people can point to big projects like Docker, Kubernetes, etcd, Googles internal use, and a few others (Uber?)

Erlang just doesn't have that sort of buy in, which is concerning because it's been around longer than Go (as a FOSS language), heck it's been around longer than Python (but it was proprietary back then)

Speaking as someone that's never used it, that's got "don't bother unless you've got an academic interest in it" written all over it

hosh · 18 days ago

The ideas in Erlang keeps getting (poorly) reinvented.

So it remains a “secret” weapon and I am fine with that. Not everything have to be validated by popularity in order to be unreasonably effective.

hosh commented on You want microservices, but do you need them? docker.com/blog/do-you-re... · Posted by u/tsenturk

ants_everywhere · 19 days ago

That's a pretty extreme definition in my opinion.

Google played a role in popularizing the microservice approach.

When I was at Google, a microservice would often be worked on with teams of 10-30 people and take a few years to implement. A small team of 4-5 people could get a service started, but it would often take additional headcount to productionize the service and go to market.

I have a feeling people overestimate how small microservices are and underestimate how big monorepos are. About 9 times out of ten when I see something called a monorepo it's for a single project as opposed to a repo that spans multiple projects. I think the same is true of microservices. Many things that Amazon or Google considers microservices might be considered monoliths by the outside world.

hosh · 19 days ago

Kubernetes is a good example of a microservice architecture. It was designed in a way where each microservice work with other microservices in a way where the dependencies are not so coupled together.

For example, the API server only reads and writes resources to etcd. A separate microservice called the scheduler does the actual assignment of pods to nodes by watching for changes in the resource store against available nodes. And yet a different microservice that lives on each node accepts the assignment and boots up (or shuts down) pods assigned to its node. It is called the kublet. The API server does none of that.

You can run the kublet all on its own, or even replace it to change part of the architecture. Someone was building a kublet that uses systemd instead of docker, and Fly.io (who seems to hate kubernetes) wrote a kublet that could stand things up using their edge infrastructure.

The API server also does some validations, but it also allows for other microservices to insert itself into the validation chain through pod admission webhooks.

Other examples: deployment controllers, replicaset controllers, horizontal pod autoscalers, and cluster autoscalers to work independently of each other yet coordinated together to respond to changing circumstances. Operators are microservices that manage a specific application component, such as redis, rabbitmq, Postgresql, tailscale, etc.

One of the big benefits of this is that Kubernetes become very extensible. Third-party vendors can write custom microservices to work with their platform (for example, storage interfaces for GCP, AWS, Azure, or Ceph, etc). An organization implementing Kubernetes can tailor it to fit their needs, whether it is something minimal or something operating in highly regulated markets.

Ironically, Kubernetes is typically seen and understood by many to be a monolith. Kubernetes, and the domain it was designed to solve is complex, but incorrectly understanding Kubernetes as a monolith creates a lot of confusion for people working with it.

hosh commented on You want microservices, but do you need them? docker.com/blog/do-you-re... · Posted by u/tsenturk

rdtsc · 19 days ago

Yup, good point on the BEAM. The joke we used when microservices were hot was that the BEAM is already ahead with nano-services: a gen_server is a nice lightweight, isolated process. You can define a callback API wrapper for it and deploy millions of them on a cluster.

hosh · 19 days ago

Yeah, the isolation provides a fault tolerance not seen in wide use until Kubernetes.

Although it would be neat to implement some of the benefits of a service mesh for BEAM — for example, consistently applying network retry/circuit breaker policies, or dynamically scalable genservers.

hosh commented on You want microservices, but do you need them? docker.com/blog/do-you-re... · Posted by u/tsenturk

awesome_dude · 19 days ago

This is kind of why I've never bothered to look at it - everyone /says/ it's a wonderful thing, but... nobody uses it in production, or hobbies (apart from the diehard fans)

It might see the light of day at some point in the future, but if the past is anything to go by...

hosh · 19 days ago

I have worked in production Elixir. (Learning platform supporting realtime student-teacher classroom experience).

Whatsapp is implemented with Erlang.

It is a more robust platform for agentic AI, and I’d certainly start with a BEAM language for agentic AI.

hosh commented on You want microservices, but do you need them? docker.com/blog/do-you-re... · Posted by u/tsenturk

Nextgrid · 19 days ago

> The BEAM ecosystem (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc) can do distributed microservices within a monolith.

This ain't new. Any language supporting loading modules can give you the organization benefit of microservices (if you consider it a benefit that is - very few orgs actually benefit from the separation) while operating like a monolith. Java could do it 20+ years ago, just upload your .WAR files to an application server.

hosh · 19 days ago

What BEAM offers isn’t modularity, but concurrency. Every genserver is operating concurrently, all within the runtime. Up until actor models came to Java, and more recent Java with lightweight threads, Java was incapable of this. Java is still missing things that BEAM and OTP provides.

Besides: Erlang predates Java.

hosh commented on You want microservices, but do you need them? docker.com/blog/do-you-re... · Posted by u/tsenturk

hosh · 19 days ago

It is not so black and white.

The BEAM ecosystem (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc) can do distributed microservices within a monolith.

A single monolith can be deployed in different ways to handle different scalability requirements. For example, a distinct set of pods responding to endpoints for reports, another set for just websocket connections, and the remaining ones for the rest of the endpoints. Those can be independently scaled but released on the same cadence.

There was a long form article I once read that reasoned through this. Given M number of code sources, there are N number of deployables. It is the delivery system’s job to transform M -> N. M is based on how the engineering team(s) work on code, whether that is a monorepo, multiple repos, shared libraries, etc. N is what makes sense operationally . By making it the delivery system’s job to transform M -> N, then you can decouple M and N. I don’t remember the title of that article anymore. (Maybe someone on the internet remembers).