ragnarsson (u/ragnarsson)

ragnarsson commented on When digital nomads come to town restofworld.org/2023/digi... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

When you write an article like this better mention hard numbers. Like what percentage of the population of the city is digital nomads. My guess - less than 1%. Its easy to blame all the problems of your city on outsiders than take responsibility.

P.S. I have never been a digital nomad.

ragnarsson commented on We will be shutting down neeva.com neeva.com/blog/may-announ... · Posted by u/oidar

jimsimmons · 3 years ago

Appreciate the honest retrospective.

This combined with the reports that Bing failed to cut into Google’s market show that Google is safe for a while.

I wonder if I’ll see disruption of Google’s core business in my lifetime. I really want it to happen but it’s a mighty quest

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

I have written crawlers for a while, most sites are unfriendly to anything other than Google (maybe they spare bing as well), some make it downright impossible without extensive work on evading their blocking techniques.

I expect (but can not confirm) this is the same reason why search engines like ddg and you.com also rely on bing's indexes.

Google's supremacy is here to stay. Only threat is bing or someone that comes with some excellent tech that bing incorporates (like openai) but actually works for search and is not just a LLM.

ragnarsson commented on Zig now has built-in HTTP server and client in std github.com/ziglang/zig/bl... · Posted by u/huydotnet

AndyKelley · 3 years ago

Many people are not aware that - currently - Zig completely rebuilds your entire application with every compilation - including any parts of the standard library you use. There is not yet any incremental compilation.

It takes a lot of time investment to make compilation fast, and we have gone all in on this investment. There was almost an entire year when not much happened besides the compiler rewrite (which is now done). Finally, we are starting to see some fruits of our labor. Some upcoming milestones that will affect compilation speed:

* x86 backend (90% complete) - eliminates the biggest compilation speed bottleneck, which is LLVM.

* our own self-hosted ELF linker - instead of relying on LLD, we tightly couple our linker directly with the compiler in order to speed up compilation.

* incremental compilation (in place binary patching) - after this Zig will only compile functions affected by changes since the last build.

* Interned types & values. Speed up Semantic Analysis which is the remaining bottleneck of the compiler

* Introduce a separate thread for linking / machine code generation, instead of ping-ponging between Semantic Analysis & linking/mcg

* Multi-threaded semantic analysis. Attack the last remaining bottleneck of the compiler with brute force

Anyway, I won't argue with cold hard performance facts if you have some to share, but I won't stand accused of failing to prioritize compilation speed.

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

Thanks Andrew, for me a big frustration with Rust is the compilation times coming from Go.

Based on your Milan presentation as well, I have a lot of hope that Zig is seriously pushing on this.

ragnarsson commented on Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says nytimes.com/2023/04/24/bu... · Posted by u/aarghh

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid, honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I felt my manager didn't do enough to create an environment where junior engineers could thrive in.

I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are always so busy they can't get any time to help you.

ragnarsson commented on Google DeepMind deepmind.com/blog/announc... · Posted by u/random_moonwalk

bugglebeetle · 3 years ago

Possibly. Or they could’ve also just paid a lot of people in Africa or wherever else to create the highest quality RLHF dataset out there.

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

They mentioned in the Technical paper of GPT-4 that the capabilities of the model were not from RLHF. https://youtu.be/2zW33LfffPc?t=842

ragnarsson commented on Google DeepMind deepmind.com/blog/announc... · Posted by u/random_moonwalk

bartwr · 3 years ago

Furthermore, Jeff is not a great (or even good...) manager/director/leader. There were a lot of internal and external dramas because of his leadership, that he failed to address. How often you hear about dramas about other Chef Scientists at other, comparably sized, companies?

He should stay a Fellow, in a "brilliant consultant" role.

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

He absolutely should have gotten rid of the troublemaker. Many folks used this publicity to leave for higher positions or higher pay (which is very common at google) but made it look like Jeff Dean was the problem.

ragnarsson commented on Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013) audioasylum.com/messages/... · Posted by u/Paul_S

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

I used to own 20$ headphones for few years, I upgraded to 50$ ones for the next couple of years and finally to 200$ ones. I have felt big differences each time. I don't see whats funny about that. If I upgrade now (I can't quite afford to considering the diminishing returns and my income) but still I expect to get upgrade in sound quality, comfort, build quality, etc.

ragnarsson commented on Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud onvoard.com/blog/our-prod... · Posted by u/ayewo

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

I got a bill on GC that was less than a cent and my bank couldn't process that. GC closed my project (free tier) and then I paid the minimum amount that my bank allowed.

ragnarsson commented on Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud onvoard.com/blog/our-prod... · Posted by u/ayewo

Mizoguchi · 3 years ago

Make sure your decision to migrate to AWS is not an emotional one.

I had my own feud with AWS over a $60,000 bill and an enormous amount of hours spent by my team fighting crypto hackers after they took over one of our accounts and use very advanced scripts to create hundreds of large instances.

AWS has become very complicated to manage and at the same time the attacks to their infrastructure have increased exponentially.

If your company doesn't have a dedicated team to stay on top of AWS you'll be vulnerable to attacks like the one I experienced.

You simply can't count on the baseline configuration of your account and instances provided by AMS, you need advanced knowledge on how to secure your resources beyond basic stuff like MFA and monitoring.

And if you think AWS will have your back when shit hits the fan, lol good luck with that.

They will try to collect the bills while providing absolutely no support, reminding you about their Shared Responsibility Agreement.

They also expect you to fight the attacks.

I ended up spending months of work securing my services and cleaning my debt with AWS billing, to the point we almost went to court.

So again, you may have good reasons to migrate, just beware that AWS won't come free of hassle.

ragnarsson · 3 years ago

> You simply can't count on the baseline configuration of your account and instances provided by AMS, you need advanced knowledge on how to secure your resources beyond basic stuff like MFA and monitoring.

What advanced knowledge are we talking about here?