Badabinski

If you’d like to learn more about Bash itself, this is an amazing resource: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

Probably the ONLY place on the internet that will teach you to write safe shell scripts. Most shit on StackOverflow (and consequently, most shell generated by LLMs) is dangerous garbage.

Open source can be enshittified. FOSS with many contributors should be basically proof against being fucked with.

Yeah, I think it’d be a pretty silly thing for us to ever try to do. My goal was to take their stupid idea, provide a slightly less stupid idea, and then say “or just don’t do space power at all and keep everything terrestrial.” Orbital solar power stations were lots of fun in science fiction, but panels are cheap, there’s plenty of land, and giant death masers that cook any birds flying into the beam are, uh, suboptimal.

We’ve had the template for this for decades. Put the solar panels in space where the thick soupy gunky spunky atmosphere doesn’t stop the little energy things from the sun. Collect the power in orbit. You just do that up there up in orbit okay? And then you fucking beam the power down to the surface you numpty fucks. Use a maser to send the power down to the surface and you can pick a frequency that isn’t affected by the gunky spunky and then the receivers on the ground can pick it up and they send the power through these things called wires to a building that uses the power and the building can use this neat little thing called CONVECTION to more efficiently remove the heat from the things using the electricity wow.

Or just, y’know, use less power and make use of ground based solar. We don’t need fucking AI data centers in space. Don’t get me wrong, I think it might be useful to, say, have some compute up in geostationary orbit that other satellites could punt some data to for computation. You could have an evenly spaced ring of the fuckers so the users up there can get some data crunching done with a RTT of like 50ms instead of 700ms. That seems like a hard sell, but it at least seems a bit tenable if you needed to reduce the data you’re sending back to the earth down to a more manageable amount with some preprocessing. That is still not fuckass gigawatt AI data centers. Fuck

The No Kings protest in Utah ended tragically because armed “peacekeepers” (aka armed civilians) shot at a protester who was open-carrying an AR-15 at the protest. The protester had no ill intentions, but the peacekeepers didn’t know that. The peacekeepers missed and killed a bystander.

That’s why you don’t open carry at protests. The untrained “good guy with a gun” is likely to shoot you. Carry concealed if you’re going to carry, or don’t bring a gun at all.

Oh god, please don’t use it for Bash. LLM-generated Bash is such a fucking pot of horse shit bad practices. Regular people have a hard enough time writing good Bash, and something trained on all the fucking crap on StackOverflow and GitHub is inevitably going to be so bad…

Signed, a senior dev who is the “Bash guy” for a very large team.

I’ve listened to most of the Culture series and I really liked it all. Look To Windward was especially good imo.

I love The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. The audiobook is narrated by Peter Kenny and he does such a good job with it.

it was a form from Google soliciting feedback on the thing.

Lovely, thank you for this. I’ve left my feedback, and I hope many, many other people do as well.

I’ll agree that list comprehensions can be a bit annoying to write because your IDE can’t help you until the basic loop is done, but you solve that by just doing [thing for thing in things] and then add whatever conditions and attr access/function calls you need.

Do you have any sources for the 10x memory thing? I’ve seen people who have made memory usage claims, but I haven’t seen benchmarks demonstrating this.

EDIT: glibc-based images wouldn’t be using service managers either. PID 1 is your application.

EDIT: In response to this:

There’s a reason a huge portion of docker images are alpine-based.

After months of research, my company pushed thousands and thousands of containers away from alpine for operational and performance reasons. You can get small images using glibc-based distros. Just look at chainguard if you want an example. We saved money (many many dollars a month) and had fewer tickets once we finished banning alpine containers. I haven’t seen a compelling reason to switch back, and I just don’t see much to recommend Alpine outside of embedded systems where disk space is actually a problem. I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong for using it, but my experience has basically been a series of events telling me to avoid it. Also, I fucking hate the person that decided it wasn’t going to do search domains properly or DNS over TCP.

Debian is superior for server tasks. musl is designed to optimize for smaller binaries on disk. Memory is a secondary goal, and cpu time is a non-goal. musl isn’t meant to be fast, it’s meant to be small and easily embedded. Those are great things if you need to run in a network/disk constrained environment, but for a server? Why waste CPU cycles using a libc that is, by design, less time efficient?

EDIT: I had to fight this fight at my job. We had hundreds of thousands of Alpine containers running, and switching them to glibc-based containers resulted in quantifiable cloud spend savings. I’m not saying musl (or alpine) is bad, just that you have horses for courses.

Is it? I thought the thing that musl optimized for was disk usage, not memory usage or CPU time. It’s been my experience that alpine containers are worse than their glibc counterparts because glibc is damn good. It’s definitely faster in many cases. I think this is fixed now, but I remember when musl made the python interpreter run like 50-100x slower.

EDIT: musl is good at what it tries to be good at. It’s not trying to be the fastest, it’s trying to be small on disk or over the network.

The one where every LLM-generated shell script I read is another deep splinter in my fingernail quick that I have to rip out and destroy because it’s a godfucked mess of bad practices that we can never ever ever ever EVER train out of an LLM at this point.

I think a new GPL needs to be created to account for this. Like, “any generative system using this as an input which can ever replicate this code base (even in part), must be bound to this license.” People could then run overfitting analysis to see if they ever get their copyleft code out of the model. If they do, then they have grounds to sue. I’m fine with an LLM being trained on my code, but I want the four freedoms to be preserved if it is.

Caffeine pills are the way.

True! I just wonder how much energy they’d realistically be able to store for a given amount of resources. Like, does this have the same issues as Lifted Weight Storage? Where the energy density just doesn’t really make sense once you get right down to it. I don’t know the relevant math to determine how much water and at what pressures might be required to scale this up to the 500MWh/1GWh range. It might be perfectly fine.

EDIT: fuck man I’m not writing well today. edited to make me sound like less of a cretin

I wonder if this suffers from the same power density issue as most alternatives to pumped hydro systems. It’s REALLY hard to do better than megatons of water pumped 500 meters up a hill.

here you go

https://archive.ph/GUjLJ