> But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk
Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills).
> We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
> Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation
There are many reasons folks have no kids or only one kid. I don't think opining for a larger family 'for the chance' of having a family member with similar tastes is really... compelling.
> Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism (esp. in governments not just private entities) rather than endorse or perpetuate it.
> In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism
The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see.
> Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
From my experience family members have some sort of obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or no to any request purely based on convenience.
Your experience is typical only for your region, I'll just say that.
> The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see.
You are advocating for fairness - but for it to be fair - you need to be allowed special treatment and that treatment (positive mostly, from your stance) to be applied only to family members. E.g., "It's only fair I hire my brother. So I can enrich my family. He may not be qualified, but I'm the founder."
But then in the same breath, you say it is unfair to bolster nepotism and cast aspersions on the vast majority of workers who feel opposite of you.
Your argument is flawed and flimsy, with all due respect.
You may have a business that works but no one outside your family would want to work with you and especially working with inept family members. At least no one I know.
I'll edit to add:
I think it's a sad state of affairs you see friends as just a convenience. Nothing more. Sure seems like there's no investment in relationships outside families which seems very exclusionary.
> The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see.
Really? Endless? Everywhere? “I can see” is doing a lot of work there.
> From my experience family members have some sort of obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or no to any request purely based on convenience.
Ostensibly the United States is a meritocracy.
Nepotism is a form of corruption. It’s fine to help your family and peers with their career development but it’s not ok to hire them based purely on your relationship.
I don’t think that’s really fair. Nepotism has a lot of negatives, but also positives. It’s a form of management and hiring, not a form of corruption. It can be bad for a business, but it also can be good, especially once you take the owners’ goals for the business into account.
It's actually considered a form of political corruption. Not necessarily illegal corruption but corruption in the "normal" sense of decision making and dealings of the organization.
It’s somewhat intrusive to suggest that my business should run according to your principles. Are you familiar with the strongest form of business, the family firm?
By whose measure is it the 'strongest'? That suggests it's somehow more effective.
Counterpoint: It's intrusive to a worker's life, career prospects and their family if you decide to hire a family member over someone who (and I'm adding this in purposely) - objectively more qualified - than the family member.
I love my siblings and they are intelligent successful people but I wouldn’t want them as coworkers because they don’t have the necessary skills and experience to do what I do.
Slavery is legal in the US in the case of prison labor.
I’m sure someone exists who would employ minors given the opportunity.
I have yet to see any of this purported meritocracy. I see lots of nepotism (as well as adjacent behaviors similar to nepotism) and things typically associated with oligarchy, even in the world of business.
Who you know and your background have so much to do with success that outliers are rounding errors for a reason. It has nothing to do with ability or any accepted definition of merit as related to meritocracy.
> Really? Endless? Everywhere? “I can see” is doing a lot of work there.
You seem to think it is just rhetoric. But ensuring fairness is one of the core job of bureaucracy. After all they are not supposed to be related to people they are serving or rulers/politicians they work for to ensure fairness. It is growing because people want fairness in more and more aspects of life.
You've provided a definition of nepotism not solution.
Well I see it in schools, universities, hospitals, government offices, public companies and so on. Small businesses have full discretion on how to do things so they don't need it.
Also I don't see it is the only reason but one of the core reason.
Your claims just don’t align with my experiences, anecdotes, or information.
My mayor hired his niece to run a department. My cousin hired my nephews at a school district. I worked at a hospital where the IT director and the network admin were married. My dad worked at a family owned car dealership that’s in the third generation of ownership. I don’t think any of those cases were corrupt.
Meanwhile “the bureaucracy” in the form of OIG has an excellent track record of eliminating waste. The mayor of my hometown has personally visited each department to ensure they are operating responsibly and uncovered and eliminated widespread waste.
The author used Nepotism tongue in cheek. It's clear he was pretty talented. He was just saying his family was also talented and knew people in Silicon Valley.
In this case, the Lyons were not providing each other jobs. But they shared insights into which companies had cool tech. And they inspired each other with the nice work stations! Much different. And not really 'nepotism'.
This is a great write up about a pull-style volcano SQL engine.
The IR I've used is the Calcite implementation, this looks very concept adjacent enough that it makes sense on the first read.
> tmp2/test-branch> explain plan select count() from xy join uv on x = u;
One of the helpful things we did was to build a graphviz dot export for the explains plans, which saved us days and years of work when trying to explain an optimization problem between the physical and logical layers.
My version would end up displayed as SVG like this
The 32x virtual memory to physical memory ratio plays into relocation and colored pointers (i.e pointers where some bits serve as flag bits).
Putting the actual data layouts in 44 bits out of 64 is a neat trick which relies on the allocator being aware of the mappings between physical and virtual addresses.
In the beginning of the 32 bit revolution, when the future was here but unevenly distributed, there was a lot of talk about how 32 bit pointers would fundamentally change how people wrote code. Among other things it got rid of a bunch of odd bookkeeping, and if you don’t have to do the bookkeeping you don’t have to write the code in a way that supports it, so you can do other things.
Not too long after someone asked what sort of interesting changes 64 bit will bring. And I’ve been keeping that question in the back of my mind ever since.
Aliasing memory multiple times in order to do read or write barriers and make GC much cheaper is a pretty good one. But another one I know of is that one of the secrets of the L4 microkernel is that its IPC speed comes substantially from reducing the amount of TLB work that needs to be done to switch to another process running in a different address space. They use the same address space and only swap out the access rights which cuts the call overhead in half. It’s pretty easy to put a bunch of processes into a 64 bit address space and just throw each one a randomly located 4GB slice of RAM.
Yeah, would love to see the CPU vendors invent some primitives to let user code pull those kinds of privilege isolation tricks within a single process and address space.
Something like: “From now on, code on these pages can only access data on these pages, and only return to/call into other code through these gates…”
I've had some ideas about avoiding format validation in IPC receivers if the data is encoded by trusted code, which is also the only code that has rights to send the IPC data / to connect to the receiver.
I can't really think of an important problem that it would solve, though. DBus always validates received data, but it's not really meant or very suitable for large amounts of data anyway.
What I’m looking for is a way for a process to de/re-escalate its privileges to access memory, without an expensive context switch being required at the transition. The CPU would simply enforce different rules based on (say) the high-order bits of the instruction pointer.
Imagine a server process that wants to run some elaborate third-party content parser. It’d be great to be sure that no matter how buggy or malicious that code, it can’t leak the TLS keys.
Today, high-security architectures must use process isolation to achieve this kind of architectural guarantee, but even finely tuned IPC like L4’s is an order of magnitude slower than a predictable jump.
I don’t think MPK’s will fit the need I have. Simply: Run some arbitrary, untrusted, non-sandboxed code in the same thread with assurance it can’t read page X. When that code completes and I’m back in code I trust, X is readable again.
Is that something MPK makes possible? The doc I’ve read suggests either your process can flip permission bits or it can’t. Great for avoiding out-of-sandbox reads. But if there’s arbitrary execution happening, why can’t that code flip
the access to secrets back on?
When your comment and the article refer to “physical” addresses, those are physical in the context of the JVM, right? To the OS they’re virtual addresses in the JVM process space?
This is not a takedown of that statement, but the reason we've trouble with this idea is that it works in the lab and not always in real life.
To set up a clean experiment, you have define what success looks like before you conduct the experiment - that the output variable is defined.
Once you know what to measure ahead of time to determine success, then statistical models tend to not be as random as a group of humans in achieving that target.
The variance is bad in an experiment, but variance jitter is needed in an ever changing world even if most variants are worse off.
For example, if you can predict someone's earning potential from their birth zipcode, it is not wrong and often more right than otherwise.
And then if you base student loans and business loan interest rates on the basis of birth zipcodes, the original prediction does become more right.
The experimental version that's a win, but in real life that's a terrible loss to society.
Ah yes, the self fulfilling prophecies or hallucinations based on models trained on models.
Overfitting. Ending up in an evolutionary dead end...
Type 4 error of not asking a question one should also exists.
So thing is, suppose you're handling the common cases right - you have software that's say 95% correct.
The important bit is how critical the remaining 5% failures are.
If one of them happens to be "I give up my computer and data to the exploit" or "everything is destroyed" or "a lot of people die", then the extra 1% better average is no good to any inside observer.
It so happens that a lot of people believe themselves to be outside observers, especially rich.
(What's the success bonus for someone getting treated nicely?)
THANK YOU. It's mildly infuriating how often people forget that one of the things most human experts are good at is knowing when they are looking at something that is likely in distribution vs. out of distribution (and thus, updating their priors).
Look for a Flash game called Punk-o-Matic. You can make songs with it, lots of different songs.
It's essentially a sampler, locked in a single chord progression. It can be used as "an instrument". It is very simple and intuitive to use.
If it had free chord choice, it would br harder and less intuitive. However, it would make the user think about what chord progressions really are. Closer to what an estabilished instrument that stood the test of time is.
Can you have both? A simple intuitive instrument that can play all that a "hard" instrument can, requiring no practice or cognition? (rethorical)
My comment deals on this kind of treshold. An instrument that both a "born talented musician" and "someone who tried very hard" can play in equal terms is a very good sweet spot in terms of inclusion and equality.
Thanks to MIDI, a boor like me can easily hear the same tones played by different instruments, something otherwise inaccessible to me. (Granted, MIDI is insufficient. Other software is required too.)
> what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor
The problem is mostly that it does the battery draw when parked.
Solid electrolytes are coming some day soon, so that we can let it freeze without killing the cells.
Right now, the Tesla is hard to use in a winter sport season unless where you're driving has a charger or underground parking near a plug point.
I can drive up hill to a nice ski resort, spend 3+ days taking the bus with all your shoes on without touching the car.
With the batteries, they'll just run down when parked, so I cannot park it for a whole week outdoors like I can do with my Subaru.
And with the low battery + low temps, it will not charge back up going downhill so the expected range drops massively by the time you're downhill.
Once you navigate to a charger, the car starts running the heater and driving down range further.
Watching the car battery eating its own range while driving to "Donner pass road" on your way out of Tahoe or Reno feels rather appropriately horrific.
I can't speak for a modern subaru, but I've not owned a single ICE vehicle that would work in this scenario. The battery would be dead. An electric one has the option to be plugged in and avoid the problem. Just because we haven't put the infrastructure in place for it doesn't mean we can't. We should do so, just like we did for gasoline.
If your ICE car battery was dead after sitting a week in the cold you had a bad battery. I drive my car once every couple weeks and it regularly gets to -20 here in the winter and have never had an issue because the battery in my ICE vehicle is good.
What kind of clunkers have you been using that lose charge on the 12 volt after just 3 days in the cold? I've occasionally left my ICE car out in the cold for a week without using it and it never once even crossed my mind to worry about whether it would start after that; I've never had that issue on any car built in the last 15 years.
> Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge work.
This is Jevon's paradox.
> So the number of workers required might actually increase.
The increased demand for work turning into new jobs for existing workers, that is where the question is more complex.
This has gone the other way too in matters of muscle - people who wouldn't have been employed before can now be hired to do an existing task.
When you go from pulling shopping carts to an electrical machine that pulls carts for you, now you can hire a 60 year old to pull carts in the parking lot where previously that job would be filled by teens.
This is all a toss-up right now.
In an ideal world, I will be paying less for the same amount of knowledge work in the future, but as a worker I might get paid more for the same hours I spend at work.
My hours are limited, but my output is less limited than before.
It’s actually the Jevons paradox, non possessive, named for William Stanley Jevons. I thought it was possessive too because many people write it that way.
> some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
For me that is the bit which stands out, I'm switching languages to TypeScript and JSX right now.
Getting copilot (+ claude) to do things is much easier when I know exactly what I want, but not here and not in this framework (PHP is more my speed). There's a bunch of stuff you're supposed to know as boilerplate and there's no time to learn it all.
I am not learning a thing though, other than how to steer the AI. I don't even know what SCSS is, but I can get by.
The UI hires are in the pipeline & they should throwaway everything I build, but right now it feels like I'm making something they should imitate in functionality/style better than a document, but not in cleanliness.
> During the times when you aren’t on a high-visibility project, I recommend carving out your own lab days or 20% time. (Maybe start with 10% time and work your way up.) This is a great way to rack up quick, bullet-point wins that can go on a promo packet or a resume.
Working for extrinsic incentives often fail to keep up - it is very hard to be motivated to do something because it will go on a promo packet after the first year when a packet doesn't happen.
Doing things for fun is great & that's what I do, also usually a step removed from my core expertise where I can do less damage in general.
But fun tends to have its own "flow" which might insulate you from other signs of organizational stress.
I've had these sort of "fun side quest" blow up in my face because I didn't realize there was a spotlight on me.
If you can't observe the spotlight coming down high on up, the same quirky day jaunt into some old code can be seen as "hard to direct".
This was also a side-effect of being a remote worker in 2005, because if I was in office I might have noticed there is a shift in tone.
> that branch prediction got better in the ‘10s and a bunch of techniques that didn’t work before do now.
They got better than they had any right to be, but then we found out that Spectre & Meltdown were vulnerabilities rather than optimizations.
For example, a switch based interpreter was fast as a CGOTO one for a brief period between 2012 and 2018, but suddenly got slower again as the CPUs could no longer rely on branch prediction to do prefetching.
While better predictors allow the speculation window to be larger on average, the the real culprit is that large speculation window. Even if the branch predictor weren't very smart, it will still do well on a program with stable, predictable branches, thus allowing a large speculation window to open up. The vulnerability is that some of those branches guard really important things, like not going out-of-bounds of an array. So a Spectre attack, which works by exploiting a mispredicted branch, is a constructive attack where the gadget is tuned for the branch predictor anyway. The other part of an attack, the windowing gadget, just relies on making a really slow input into a branch. Neither of them would be particularly harder with a dumb predictor.
Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills).
> We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
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