papageek (u/papageek)

papageek commented on Bitcoin miners say fee drought poses existential threat to network dlnews.com/articles/marke... · Posted by u/toss1

toss1 · 7 days ago

For sure! Tho it seems the original BTC design expected huge transaction volumes and transaction fees to take over providing income for miners as mining fees repeatedly halved.

But they didn't anticipate that people are not using BTC to buy pizza and a million other things, the great bulk of BTC is being stashed in financial vehicles like ETFs, generating fewer and fewer transactions.

Seems like a doom cycle. Fewer transactions, less profit, fewer miners, slower transactions, less value.....

papageek · 7 days ago

Wealth always ends up in the hands of a few.

papageek commented on 93-year-old YouTuber back in business after being kicked off platform cbc.ca/news/canada/toront... · Posted by u/fbelzile

qmarchi · 9 months ago

Disclaimer: Former Technical Solutions Engineer for GCP, aka Support for Customers. Also Former Engineer on YouTube Caching.

To get it out of the way, I do not agree that it should've taken a journalist to get involved to have this situation solved.

However, I'd like to prompt Hacker News with how would you handle receiving support requests from a product that has >2.7B users. Almost all of which are non-directly revenue generating, across hundreds of different languages, in every conceivable location in the world.

It's an extremely hard problem to solve, but I don't think anyone has got it right. I'll be playing devil's advocate in the comments. Keep me busy for my flights.

papageek · 9 months ago

All the services are revenue generating. Advertisers pay for eyeballs.

papageek commented on Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/nobody9999

rsynnott · a year ago

I just saw a post on a financial forum where someone was asking advice on investing in individual stocks vs ETFs vs investment trusts (a type of closed-end fund); the context is that tax treatment of ETFs in Ireland is weird.

Someone responded with a long post showing scenarios with each, looked superficially authoritative... but on closer inspection, the tax treatment was wrong, the numbers were wrong, and it was comparing a gain from stocks held for 20 years with ETFs held for 8 years. When someone pointed out that they'd written a page of bullshit, the poster replied that they'd asked ChatGPT, and then started going on about how it was the future.

It's totally baffling to me that people are willing to see a question that they don't know the answer to, and then post a bunch of machine-generated rubbish as a reply. This all feels terribly dangerous; whatever about on forums like this, where there's at least some scepticism, a lot of laypeople are treating the output from these things as if it is correct.

papageek · a year ago

this is corporate life.

papageek commented on Cox (was) bragging about listening to user mics techdirt.com/2024/08/29/c... · Posted by u/lowestdecks

howard941 · a year ago

You're getting too far into the weeds with the IOT and smartphones. TFA talks about mics in the cable boxes and smart tvs. I wouldn't put it past them to monitor mics in cable boxes.

papageek · a year ago

Set-Top Boxes and Remotes have had mics.

papageek commented on Fake insects – Find the AI generated insect huggingface.co/spaces/vic... · Posted by u/diwank

sundaeofshock · a year ago

I love beta testing for free!

papageek · a year ago

s/beta testing/training/

papageek commented on The Magical Mystery Merge Or Why we run FreeBSD-current at Netflix (2023) [pdf] people.freebsd.org/~galla... · Posted by u/ksec

toast0 · a year ago

> When netflix was founded the only viable commercial linux vendor was rhel and the support contract would have been about the same as just hiring the fbsd core team at salary.

AFAIK, currently, Netflix only uses FreeBSD for their CDN appliances; their user facing frontend and apis live (or lived) in AWS on Linux. I don't know what they were running on before they moved to the cloud.

I don't think they started doing streaming video until 2007 and they didn't start deploying CDN nodes until 2011 [1]. They started off with commercial CDNs for video distribution. I don't know what the linux vendor marketplace looked like in 2007-2011, but I'm sure it wasn't as niche as in 1997 when Netflix was founded. I think they may have been using Linux for production at the time that they decided to use FreeBSD for CDN appliances.

> Hiring foss devs and putting them under NDA for everything they write that doesn't get upstreamed is an excellent way to get nearly everything upstreamed aswell, and the cost of competitors then porting these merged upstream changes back down into their linux is not nothing, so this gives a competitive moat advantage.

I don't think Netflix is particularly interested in a software moat; or they wouldn't be public about what they do and how, and they wouldn't spend so much time upstreaming their code into FreeBSD. There's an argument to be made that upstreaming reduces their total effort, but that's less true the less often you merge. Apple almost never merges in upstream changes from FreeBSD back into mac os; so not bothering to upstream their changes saves them a lot of collaborative work at the cost of making an every 10 years process a little bit longer.

At WhatsApp, I don't think we ever had more than 10 active patches to FreeBSD, and they were almost all tiny; it wasn't a lot of effort to port those forward when we needed to, and certainly less effort than sending and following up on getting changes upstream. We did get a few things upstreamed though (nothing terribly significant IMHO; I can remember some networking things like fixing a syncookie bug that got accidentally introduced and tweaking the response for icmp needs frag to not respond when the requested mtu was at or bigger than the current value; nothing groundbreaking like async sendfile or kTLS).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121021050251/https://signup.ne...

papageek · a year ago

The only patch to FreeBSD I maintained was hacking up FreeBSD 2.x to embed Hughes mSQL to back getpwnam etc and radius/tacass. I also needed to exceed the uid limit and came up with hacky uid for the customer and gid as the account letting each customer have the 30k or whatever account ids. I shared the idea with friends at Teleport ISP in Portland who ended up doing something similar with Oracle I think. I think the same sort of thing lead to vservers that best.net used with BSDi and eventually FreeBSD jails was developed and significantly better than my hack job so I migrated the isp over to using jails.

papageek commented on The Magical Mystery Merge Or Why we run FreeBSD-current at Netflix (2023) [pdf] people.freebsd.org/~galla... · Posted by u/ksec

davidw · a year ago

> There's a reason it's the core of Juniper routers, Isilon and Netapp storage heads, every Playstation 3/4/5, and got mashed into NeXTSTEP to spawn macOS.

Licensing?

FreeBSD is a fine OS that surely has some advantages here and there, but I'm also inclined to think that big companies can make stuff work if they want to.

PHP at Meta seems like a pretty good example of this.

papageek · a year ago

FreeBSD or Linux management plane on routers/switches is mostly irrelevant. The majority of the data simply flows through the asics untouched.

papageek commented on The Magical Mystery Merge Or Why we run FreeBSD-current at Netflix (2023) [pdf] people.freebsd.org/~galla... · Posted by u/ksec

ksec · a year ago

I posted the Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [1] in 2022. For those who are unaware of the context you may want to read the previous PDF and thread. Now we have some update; quote

> Important Performance Milestones:

2022: First 800Gb/s CDN server 2x AMD 7713, NIC kTLS offload

2023: First 100Gb/s CDN server consuming only 100W of power, Nvidia Bluefield-3, NIC kTLS offload

My immediate question is if the 2x AMD 7713 actually consumes more than 800W of power. i.e More Watts / Gbps. Even if it does, it is based on 7nm Zen 3 and DDR4 came out in 2021. Would a Zen 5 DDR5 outperforms Bluefield in Watts / Gbps?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881

papageek · a year ago

Another observation, using the host cpu to manage the nvme storage for vod content is also a bottleneck. You can use the liqid 8x nvme pcie cards and address them directly from the bluefield3 arm processes using nvme-of. You are then just limited by pcie 5 switch capacity among the 10-20 shared nvme/bluefield3 cards.

papageek commented on The Magical Mystery Merge Or Why we run FreeBSD-current at Netflix (2023) [pdf] people.freebsd.org/~galla... · Posted by u/ksec

ksec · a year ago

I posted the Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [1] in 2022. For those who are unaware of the context you may want to read the previous PDF and thread. Now we have some update; quote

> Important Performance Milestones:

2022: First 800Gb/s CDN server 2x AMD 7713, NIC kTLS offload

2023: First 100Gb/s CDN server consuming only 100W of power, Nvidia Bluefield-3, NIC kTLS offload

My immediate question is if the 2x AMD 7713 actually consumes more than 800W of power. i.e More Watts / Gbps. Even if it does, it is based on 7nm Zen 3 and DDR4 came out in 2021. Would a Zen 5 DDR5 outperforms Bluefield in Watts / Gbps?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881

papageek · a year ago

I haven’t read post yet but I used to work in this space @cable. The nice bit with bluefield3 is you can run nginx on the on-board arm cores which have sufficient ram for live hls usecase. You can use liqid pcie fabric and support 20 bluefield nics off a single cpu 1u box. You essentially turn the 1u box into a mid-tier cache for the nics. Doing this I was able to generate 120 gig off each nic off a 1u hp + the pcie fabric/cards. I worked with liqid and hp lab here in Colorado prototyping it. Edit: I ran the cdn edge directly on nic using yocto linix.

papageek commented on Compuserve compuserve.com/... · Posted by u/bane

icedchai · 2 years ago

I worked on a web site about 20 years ago where the form sent a PGP encrypted email. The credit card was then processed by hand. I'm guessing this isn't PCI compliant. ;)

In the 90's, we had something similar at another company. Except there, the email wasn't even encrypted. (Don't worry, the site used SSL.)

papageek · 2 years ago

Seattle? Serenet? Do I know you? :)