whbboyd's recent activity
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Comment on Reddit won't allow me to delete my comments in ~tech
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Comment on Radxa X4 low-cost, credit card-sized Intel N100 SBC goes for $60 and up in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentTrying to run proprietary software on it, probably. To be a bit more charitable, a number of these devices (especially the cheaper, less popular ones) rely on custom kernels with changes that...Trying to run proprietary software on it, probably.
To be a bit more charitable, a number of these devices (especially the cheaper, less popular ones) rely on custom kernels with changes that never get upstreamed, so you're stuck running an out-of-date vendor kernel with all its security vulnerabilities and incompatibilities with modern distros. But yeah, for more popular, better-supported devices like the Pis, I've never had an issue with Linux distro builds.
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Comment on CrowdStrike code update bricking Windows machines around the world in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentLinux absolutely does allow this kind of access. Writing a broken kernel module that consistently panics the kernel when loaded is a rite of passage for budding kernel devs. In this case, however,...Linux absolutely does allow this kind of access. Writing a broken kernel module that consistently panics the kernel when loaded is a rite of passage for budding kernel devs. In this case, however, Linux provides a separate, safer interface (eBPF) which Crowdstrike uses, rather than a full-privilege kernel module.
(More generally, most Linux systems in the enterprise are not being operated by non-technical end users, so the need for heuristic security software like antivirus is a lot lower; John from sales isn't going to blindly open email attachments on the server.)
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Comment on eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee in ~comp
whbboyd LinkSome additional context: A tale of 132 e's and the [E]nd of eeeee. A highlight (I didn't exhaustively scan the repo) is definitely e.c.Some additional context: A tale of 132 e's and the [E]nd of eeeee.
A highlight (I didn't exhaustively scan the repo) is definitely e.c.
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eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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Comment on Doctors try a controversial technique to reduce the transplant organ shortage in ~health
whbboyd Link ParentYes. I mean, kind of. It takes time for the brain to proceed from "no longer being perfused with oxygenated blood" to "so degraded as to be incapable of consciousness". If you wait that long after...Do they come back to life or something?
Yes.
I mean, kind of. It takes time for the brain to proceed from "no longer being perfused with oxygenated blood" to "so degraded as to be incapable of consciousness". If you wait that long after cardiac death, the other organs you'd like to harvest for transplant are also degrading. (The brain is by far the body's biggest oxygen hog, so you can get away with a degree of that, but it's not ideal.) It's tough to guarantee that if you introduce mechanical circulation shortly after cardiac death, the brain isn't sufficiently undegraded to "wake up", a condition you really, really don't want to be eviscerating a person in.
If this prompts you to ask "wait, couldn't you do this for someone you didn't want to remain dead", the answer is yes, you can use ECMO for resuscitation, and we sometimes do. The equipment and expertise to do so is rare and expensive, though, and as a general rule, people so deep in asystole that a traditional hospital resuscitation cannot bring them back do not make very good recoveries.
Ultimately, there's a debate here because we have two different sets of criteria for death ("cardiac" and "brain"), they're highly-correlated but not identical (being brain-dead but cardiac-alive being the way more sustainable scenario, as seen from very sad cases that make the news from time to time), and the benchmark set for both isn't truly irreversible in all cases (cardiac death being far more reversible than brain death). In that zone in between, depending on who you ask, a person might be either alive or dead, and the might come out of it (i.e. "be resurrected") under some circumstances.
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Comment on Google’s greenhouse gas emissions jump 48% in five years in ~enviro
whbboyd Link ParentI wouldn't assume this. If you ran a model for years and years, sure; but there's an arms race going on now, and training the models is stupefyingly more expensive than just running them (which is...I'd expect them to be almost nothing when amortized over the hardware & model life of billions of responses generated
I wouldn't assume this. If you ran a model for years and years, sure; but there's an arms race going on now, and training the models is stupefyingly more expensive than just running them (which is "just" a matrix multiplication, albeit a very, very large one).
Consider, as a very flawed but maybe illustrative metaphor, the difference between running a render farm for a week to generate a CG image, and using a CPU to decompress that image and display it on a screen. The former uses CPU-years; the latter a few hundred CPU-microseconds. While you only have to do the former once, you would need hundreds of millions of occurrences of the latter to equal the CPU time, let alone dominate it.
(All of which is not to say that you should assume the training dominates, either. Without some actual data—which I did not try to look up, and the GNN vendors may try to keep close to their chest—it's not at all obvious which side of the equation dominates.)
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Comment on Ghosting isn't as cold-hearted as it seems, say psychologists — but people still hate it in ~life
whbboyd Link ParentI don't think anyone thinks it's not hurtful at all. But surely it's not outlandish to consider whether ghosting might be less hurtful than point-blank saying "I don't want to talk to you...I don't think anyone thinks it's not hurtful at all. But surely it's not outlandish to consider whether ghosting might be less hurtful than point-blank saying "I don't want to talk to you anymore"?
That's leaving aside that the ghost-er might have a reasonable belief that the ghost-ee would take the breakup poorly, in which case I'm not really going to judge them for skipping out on a final burst of abuse from a relationship they are, by definition, already done with.
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Comment on All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second in ~comp
whbboyd LinkOh lord, I hope not. If the mad lads at IERS actually do it, it will break so much shit. Honestly, we should just drop UT1 altogether. It doesn't solve any real problem. UTC already isn't coupled...Oh lord, I hope not. If the mad lads at IERS actually do it, it will break so much shit.
Honestly, we should just drop UT1 altogether. It doesn't solve any real problem. UTC already isn't coupled to any useful property of the Earth's rotation across 23/24ths of its surface; Iceland can complain, I guess, but the worst credible outcome of abandoning the Earth's rotation as the world's largest pendulum clock is that, in a thousand years or so, some countries get to contemplate skipping a DST transition (because that abomination will definitely outlast human civilization) to put their local clock time in better sync with their local solar time.
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Comment on Japan's mini kei truck sales surge in US despite safety concerns in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentOh, yes, of course. Crumpling everything except the passenger compartment is ideal. This is the canonical illustrative video, which most people have probably seen at this point. There are two...Oh, yes, of course. Crumpling everything except the passenger compartment is ideal.
This is the canonical illustrative video, which most people have probably seen at this point. There are two obvious observations: first, that '57 takes the impact like a baseball bat to a delicate glass vase, clearly demonstrating that older cars are not indestructible chunks of iron; and second, the force of the collision is basically concentrated into the driver's body.
(It's possible to quibble with the details of that specific crash test, but it's not really intended to be a compelling argument on its own, for all that it convinces a lot of people; it's a very dramatic illustration of the point made by car crash injury and death statistics, which are compelling. Modern cars are much, much safer than older ones.)
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Comment on Japan's mini kei truck sales surge in US despite safety concerns in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentI used to daydream about getting a '91 CRX. The problem with those cars, though, is that the body has roughly as much structural rigidity as an aluminum can. Any serious collision at all, and the...I used to daydream about getting a '91 CRX.
The problem with those cars, though, is that the body has roughly as much structural rigidity as an aluminum can. Any serious collision at all, and the passenger compartment will crumple up with you inside it. Add enough metal that the car is reasonably safe to crash, and it's no longer peppy at that power level, and no longer efficient if you soup it up.
(Just to be clear, the weight line for "reasonably safe" is far to the light side of modern cars, even discounting the absurd bloating due to physical dimensions. It would be great to see some enforced lightening of cars on American roads. But as long as I'm dreaming about unrealistic policy goals, I'd rather replace the whole lot of them with trains.)
Your car is very cute, I hope you had a good time with it. =)
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Comment on ChatGPT is bullshit in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThe conclusion is just 229 words and summarizes the, well, conclusion of the article concisely. But if even that is tl, the tl;dr is that "truthhood" is neither a design goal nor an actual...The conclusion is just 229 words and summarizes the, well, conclusion of the article concisely. But if even that is tl, the tl;dr is that "truthhood" is neither a design goal nor an actual property of LLMs, and the word we use for language produced without concern for the truth is "bullshit".
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Comment on ChatGPT is bullshit in ~tech
whbboyd LinkI've made the argument repeatedly that calling falsehoods output by an LLM "hallucinations" is a category error: the models don't have two modes, "normal" and "hallucinating"; they only have one...I've made the argument repeatedly that calling falsehoods output by an LLM "hallucinations" is a category error: the models don't have two modes, "normal" and "hallucinating"; they only have one mode, and they are hallucinating all the time. It just happens to be the case that sometimes the things they hallucinate are true, or at least have enough verisimilitude to pass a sniff test.
(In a sense, this shouldn't be surprising. An LLM isn't going to generate a phrase like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"¹, not because it doesn't mean anything, but because people don't say things like that—it's exactly the same reason it won't put adjectives on the wrong order, essentially a syntactic property of the training data. Stripping "stuff people don't say" from the set of all possible grammatical sentences heavily biases it towards true, or at least meaningful-seeming, statements, without actually taking any form of semantic truth into account.)
The way this article frames it is both clearer and more descriptive: LLMs bullshit, all the time. It's intuitively obvious to people that bullshitters often say true things, but that nevertheless you shouldn't take their word for anything.
¹ Though it obviously will generate that specific phrase, and expound upon it at length, because it already exists in the public discourse which is used as training data.
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ChatGPT is bullshit
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Comment on Database schema for project management app in ~comp
whbboyd LinkOther folks have already raised a lot of the things I see glancing at your schema definition: Everything which is its own "thing" should have its own table. Definitely tags, as discussed, but...Other folks have already raised a lot of the things I see glancing at your schema definition:
- Everything which is its own "thing" should have its own table. Definitely tags, as discussed, but probably also category and maybe status. ("Represent enum as scalar versus foreign key to an enum table" is definitely not a settled discussion; do whatever feels best to you.)
Additionally:
- SQLite's support for types in schemas is abysmal, and so it hasn't warned you that
DATETIMEisn't a real SQL column type. You probably want those to beTIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE. (Though my personal experience is that using any database time type sets you up for pain down the line as the database mangles your data, and you should sacrifice type safety for more certainty in how it will be handled: either anINTEGERepoch timestamp, or a consistent stringification in aTEXTcolumn, depending on usage and preference.) - Speaking of which, it's not immediately clear whether you intend your date columns to be dates ("2024-02-29") or instants in time ("2024-02-29T06:30-5"). The specificity of instants seems greater than necessary for the "project" level (and you've named the date columns "date"), and if you round them to the date level, the date will change based on timezone. Maybe that's okay for your use cases! But it's definitely something you should consider. (Fortunately, since you're just recording past times or projecting out a single fixed end time, you don't have to deal with any of the really weird time stuff, like "what do I do with a repeating event at 2:30AM when DST changes and that time happens zero or two times" and "when DST rules change, how do I make sure things are still at the right times".)
- @vord mentioned row locking and versioning. (The keywords you're looking for for more details on that are "optimistic locking".) I'm going to hit a related point: you're almost certainly eventually going to want to record history. (n.b. your schema includes time, so this will make your data model bitemporal, something you'll want to embrace rather than try to work around.) There are a wide variety of ways to do this (tombstones, lifetime windows, etc.); the approach I've found to work best is to store history on a separate table and establish triggers to copy the old version of a row out on
UPDATEorDELETE. The main tradeoff is having to keep schemas in sync and query a separate table for history, but it greatly simplifies queries over the "latest" table and saves you from the DB admin hassle of dealing with very large tables some of which are hot but most of which are very, very cold.
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Comment on At some point, JavaScript becomes indefensible in ~comp
whbboyd (edited )LinkJavascript isn't indefensible because it's a bad language (though it is) with a badly inadequate standard library (though that is as well) and an absolutely horrendous ecosystem (it is) which...Javascript isn't indefensible because it's a bad language (though it is) with a badly inadequate standard library (though that is as well) and an absolutely horrendous ecosystem (it is) which might as well just be a giant billboard saying "please supply chain attack me" (which, shocker, people do), or because the primary uses are apparently to turn text and media into an unspeakably inefficient, utterly inaccessible opaque executable blob (though they are).
Client-side Javascript is indefensible because, fundamentally and by definition, it is running untrusted code. It cannot be done securely. It couldn't be done before Spectre and Meltdown and Rowhammer, because sandboxing a nontrivial runtime is a practical impossibility, and it certainly can't be done after. And even if you handwave this or decide you don't care, there's no way to control what it does. Don't like Bitcoin? Too bad, there's no machine-distinguishable difference between a Bitcoin miner and a sufficiently-inefficient text-only webpage (and Javascript devs are on the forefront of probing heretofore undiscovered levels of inefficiency).
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Comment on Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentMany open source projects have just a single maintainer who is doing so as an individual. And I am not even slightly surprised when a working software developer decides to sell out the Internet...Many open source projects have just a single maintainer who is doing so as an individual. And I am not even slightly surprised when a working software developer decides to sell out the Internet for a few million dollars. I'm not even sure it's unethical.
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Comment on Astronauts stranded in space due to multiple issues with Boeing's Starliner — and the window for a return flight is closing in ~space
whbboyd Link ParentIt would be more accurate to say "McDonnell Douglass wasn't involved".It would be more accurate to say "McDonnell Douglass wasn't involved".
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
whbboyd LinkI have, for a few months now, been writing a feed reader web service: Russet. Mostly to scratch an itch, but also to give myself some Rust web service experience and build up an up-to-date...I have, for a few months now, been writing a feed reader web service: Russet. Mostly to scratch an itch, but also to give myself some Rust web service experience and build up an up-to-date portfolio item.
I'm pretty happy with it so far! I've been dogfooding it for a few months now, and I would definitely call it a "resounding success" on all intended fronts (even though one of those fronts is "fodder for complaints about async Rust", which it has provided in spades, lol… I'll dig into that another time, maybe).
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Comment on Should I go heat pump only? in ~life.home_improvement
whbboyd (edited )Link ParentThis is the video I was going to dig up and link. Tl;dw: yes, go full send on heat pumps. Consider supplemental resistive electric heating if you live in a place where it gets very cold at winter...This is the video I was going to dig up and link. Tl;dw: yes, go full send on heat pumps. Consider supplemental resistive electric heating if you live in a place where it gets very cold at winter (which OP does); it's a lot simpler and therefore more reliable than a combustion-based supplement.
Although note that they will be included in a data export, which you can then use to edit or delete them. The turnaround time is appalling (but, like, weeks, not months or years), but I did this when I nuked my account, and from pretty extensive spot-checking, everything (going back… uh… let's just say "an embarrassingly long time") has remained nuked.