Readit Newssubharmonicon commented on ACM Transitions to Full Open Access acm.org/publications/open... · Posted by u/pcvarmint
Cancelled my membership many years ago over their refusal to support open access.
Windows machine with NVIDIA CPU & 5070 class GPU?
subharmonicon commented on Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper probablydance.com/2025/06... · Posted by u/signa11
Love this paper and read it several times, most recently around 10 years ago when thinking about whether there were looping constructs missing from popular programming languages.
I have made the same point several times online and in person that the famous quote is misunderstood and often suggest people take the time to go back to the source and read it since it’s a wonderful read.
I recall the original post about Lungy.
Having had an incentive spirometer prescribed for post-surgical use after being on bypass, my experience was that it seemed boring and like a waste of time, so anything that makes breathing exercises more engaging and feel more worthwhile is a win.
Off topic, but the typesetting here looks top notch and I am curious if anyone can elaborate on the tooling used to render this for the web?
subharmonicon commented on The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment collegetowns.substack.com... · Posted by u/trevin
Everyone here should watch the Japanese TV series, Old Enough!. 2-4 year olds are sent out on their own to run errands, etc. Yes, really, 2-4 years old. And they succeed and are fine.
My dad grew up in 1930’s Detroit and would tell us about how when he was five his mother would give him a little money and have him walk a few blocks to the baker to get a loaf of bread.
I grew up in the 70’s where after maybe eight we had pretty much free rein. I rode my bike several blocks away and crossed two busy four lane roads to get candy at 7-11.
The world is no more dangerous now than it was then, and yet here we are, with parents being treated like criminals for letting their kids play in their own front yard.
subharmonicon commented on It is not a compiler error (2017) blog.plover.com/2017/11/1... · Posted by u/misonic
I’ve spent 30 years working on compilers.
They have bugs. Lots of them.
With that in mind, the article is correct that the vast majority of issues people think might be a compiler bug are in fact user errors and misunderstanding.
My experience actually working with users has been somewhat humorous in the past, including multiple instances of people completely freaking out when they report something that turns out to be a miscompile. I’ve seen people completely freaking out, to the point that they no longer felt that any code could be trusted since it could have been miscompiled in some way.
subharmonicon commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter
I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many “analysts” born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.
I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.
I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:
- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!
- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”
- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)
> But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.
I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.
What they found:
- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.
- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.
- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.