30 November 2022
Preview of 'Tales of the M1 GPU'

Tales of the M1 GPU

"Half the comments here are talking about the vtuber herself. Who cares. It's been talked before. Just imagine if half the thread is discussing what gender she is. What I am interested in is the claims here https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/#rust-is-.... (what is it called if it comes with a proof?).The resident C/C++ experts here would have you believe that the same is possible in C/C++. Is that true?"

"watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen! it's easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive."

"The fact so much hardware these days is running a full real-time OS all the time annoys me. I know it is normal and understandable but everything is such a black box and it has already caused headaches (looking at you, Intel)."

Preview of 'Goodbye, data science'

Goodbye, data science

"> Nobody knew or even cared what the difference was between good and bad data science work. Meaning you could absolutely suck at your job or be incredible at it and you’d get nearly the same regards in either case.In my experience it's even a little bit worse than that. Approaches that are wrong from a statistics point of view are more likely to generate impressive seeming results. But the flaws are often subtle.A common one I've seen quite many times is people using a flawed validation strategy (e.g. one which rewards the model for using data "leaked" from the future), or to rely on in-sample results too much in other ways.Because these issues are subtle, management will often not pick up on them or not be aware that this kind of thing can go wrong. With a short-term focus they also won't really care, because they can still put these results in marketing materials and impress most outsiders as well."

"In a recent past life, I was a HPC (high performance computing) administrator for a mid size company (just barely S&P400) who was in the transportation industry, so I had a lot of interactions with the "data science" team and it was just a fascinating delusion to watch.Our CTO did the "Quick, this is the future! I'll be fired if I don't hop on this trend" panic thing and picked up a handful of recent grads and gave them an obscene budget by our company's standard.The main problem they were expected to solve - forecasting future sales - was functionally equivalent to "predict the next 20 years of ~25% of the world economy". Somehow these 4 guys with a handful of GPUs were expected to out-predict the entirety of the financial sector.The amazing part was they knew it was crap. All of their stakeholders knew it was crap. Everyone else who heard about it knew it was crap. But our CTO kept paying them a fortune and giving them more hardware every year with almost no expectation of results or performance. It was a common joke (behind the scenes) that if they actually got it right, we'd shut down our original business and becomes the world's largest bank overnight.At least it finally gave the physics modelers access to some decent GPUs which led to some breakthrough products, as they finally were able to sneak onto some modern hardware."

"Unfortunately it seemed pretty clear from the start that this is what data science would turn into. Data science effectively rebranded statistics but removed the requirement of deep statistical knowledge to allow people to get by with a cursory understanding of how to get some python library to spit out a result. For research and analysis data scientists must have a strong understanding of underlying statistical theory and at least a decent ability write passable code. With regard to engineering ability, certainly people exists with both skill sets, but its an awfully high bar. It is similar in my field (quant finance), the number of people that understand financial theory, valuation, etc and have the ability to design and implement robust production systems are few and you need to pay them. I don't see data science openings paying anywhere near what you would need to pay a "unicorn", you can't really expect the folks that fill those roles to perform at that level."

Preview of 'JSON Hero: Enhanced JSON structure visualization'

JSON Hero: Enhanced JSON structure visualization

"My number one requirement for a tool like this is that the JSON content never leaves the machine it's on.I can only imagine the kind of personal information or proprietary internal data that has been unwittingly transmitted due to tools like this.If my objective was to gain the secrets of various worldwide entities, one of the first things I would do is set up seemingly innocent Pastebins, JSON checkers, online file format convertors and permanently retain all submitted data."

"If anyone wants to try it out, but doesn't want to send them your Json, here's an example of some real world data https://jsonhero.io/j/t0Vp6NafO2p2For me, this is harder to use than reading the JSON in a colour text editor such as VSCode. I'm getting less information on the page, and its harder to scan, but that might be because I'm used to reading JSON."

"Tried it out on some REST response from a local test server.And, well, as much as I applaud the effort, I also think that I'll stick to my text editor for browsing JSON data and to jq for extracting data from it.My text editor because it's easy to perfom free text search and to fold sections, and that's all that I need to get an overview.Jq because it's such a brilliantly sharp knife for carving out the exact data that out want. Say I had to iterate a JSON array of company departments, each with a nested array of employees, and collect everyone's email. A navigational tool doesn't help a whole lot but it's a jq one liner. Jq scales to large data structures in a way that no navigational tool would ever do.Also, there is the security issue of pasting potentially sensitive data into a website."

Preview of 'Show HN: Trading cards made with e-ink displays'

Show HN: Trading cards made with e-ink displays

"This is absolutely awesome! I've had (terrible quality) 3-color e-ink displays and some associated electronics sitting in my office cupboard for a few years because I wanted to prototype this project, but I never did. I'm so glad you did this!Since I just want this to come to fruition, I'll explain what my intended launch strategy was. I'm a developer (just a contractor, not owner) of Tabletop Simulator and do some stuff in that community where there's an overlap between physical tabletop and digital. My plan was to launch a card game (largely designed) and the e-ink cards simultaneously via Kickstarter. However, before that, a digital implementation of the game on TTS. Basically as much as I love this idea, I couldn't see it being monetisable on its own unless you can bring the cost down significantly. It also didn't seem like a defensible business on its own. But if the product is a game that uses said functionality, well, that'd be just swell.Anyway, congrats, this is awesome!"

"This is very cool. I think you'll have a hard time finding a traditional board game publisher willing to put money into this (there might be one or two out there, but most will see this as prohibitively expensive for them), but you might be able to pull off a successful Kickstarter for them on your own.Kind of like the Blinks game system, these little hexes with colored lights in them that each have a separate game in them and can 'teach' the other hexes they connect to.One of the Blinks Kickstarters: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/move38/blinks-smart-boa..."

"Can I load up whatever images I want? The dream would be proxying Magic cards for playtesting. If you could load net-decks and shuffle via an app over NFC somehow, that'd be amazing as well!Lots of possibilities here!"

Preview of 'Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries'

Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

"https://archive.ph/wB2s4"

"I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.)One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.> Some say the slowdown in sales is a product of food inflation, as consumers trade pricier plant-based meat for less-expensive animal meat.Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat."

"This post is crowded with responses from people explaining why they hate Beyond meatFWIW, I've always liked Beyond Meat as a "good enough" substitution for a beef burger that's easy to prepare that is close in texture to a real burger - if you use a burger sauce and cheese like most recipes for non-vegans do, it tastes pretty close. I even liked it so much I'd order it at restaurants wherever available and bought a few shares since I figured they'd do well.I've tried Impossible Burgers too (both prepared by others and myself), and I don't like that it has hemoglobin in it and for some reason it's more in the uncanny valley than Beyond meat is for me - Beyond Meat is just different enough that it doesn't taste to me like moldy beef the way Impossible Burgers seem to.What _did_ eventually get me to stop making Beyond Burgers is that the fat and sodium content is as bad or worse than just plain regular beef. Reducing red meat consumption to once a month or so achieves basically the same benefits, and occasional red meat consumption + no more frequent beyond meat burgers is healthier in the long run than what I was doing before. I think an under-appreciated advantage to the veggie and black bean burger options out there is they tend to be way better w.r.t. fat and sodium, and taste just as good once you give up on the "almost beef" taste of these new-wave alternatives, but Beyond Meat _did_ work for a few people out there and just never tweaked their product enough to seriously compete with cheaper alternatives as inflation has gotten worse."

Preview of 'A collection of 88x31 pixel web buttons from the 1990s and 2000s'

A collection of 88x31 pixel web buttons from the 1990s and 2000s

"Oh, top nostalgia from the 1990s/2000s online. These buttons meant a lot to me. I think I said this on some of my old comments, but I learnt programming because I built a very popular website about a topic/fandom that I was very into back then.There were a lot of websites about that, but only a few were really popular. The structure was very basic: header, left sidebar with links, centered content, and right sidebar with small chatbox, polls, random quotes, and affiliates. The affiliates was simply that: a link to another website in exchange of a link to your website. They started using text links but they usually evolved to 88x31 buttons, first simply JPG then animated GIFs.Being in the affiliates section of the top websites (again, only for this subject) was the best. I remember spent hours and hours (translated into days adn weeks) designing my buttons in MS Paint (yeah, pixel by pixel) so I could convince the webmaster of the popular website to include mine, because a lot of the time they decided based n the button and not the website itself.Anyway, sorry for the long rant (maybe younger people will learn something today), but as a lot of people I miss the old internet and I could talk hours about this!"

"Great site, but is it finished? If not, perhaps it would benefit from a yellow and black flashing "Under Construction" banner."

"Here are even more of them: http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/"

Preview of 'WebTorrent'

WebTorrent

"I'm building a decentralized ai marketplace and guess what? This piece of software is the backbone of our off-chain file transfer protocol. It just works; however, its seeder (BitTorrent-tracker) depends on node-webrtc, and it is not an official node package for web-rtc. It has some weird issues. For example, when you seed the torrent through BitTorrent-tracker, and on the client side (chrome browser), I used chrome://webrtc-internals to debug rtc connections. First time in my life, I coined the term connection leakage. A bug in the WebRTC handshake leads to too many connections (300+) for even 1kb torrents.I hope it gets solved very soon.I also attach my node profiling output. Looking for some advise if you have any..[C++]: ticks total nonlib name 5511 16.9% 43.2% epoll_pwait 692 2.1% 5.4% __pthread_cond_timedwait 682 2.1% 5.3% __lll_lock_wait 413 1.3% 3.2% __GI___pthread_mutex_lock 338 1.0% 2.6% __GI___pthread_mutex_unlock 128 0.4% 1.0% __write 84 0.3% 0.7% __pthread_cond_broadcast 83 0.3% 0.6% __lll_unlock_wake 62 0.2% 0.5% __mprotect [Summary]: ticks total nonlib name 153 0.5% 1.2% JavaScript 8206 25.2% 64.3% C++ 116 0.4% 0.9% GC 19811 60.8% Shared libraries 4411 13.5% Unaccounted [C++ entry points]: ticks cpp total name 692 27.3% 2.1% __pthread_cond_timedwait 679 26.8% 2.1% __lll_lock_wait 413 16.3% 1.3% __GI___pthread_mutex_lock 337 13.3% 1.0% __GI___pthread_mutex_unlock 100 3.9% 0.3% __write 84 3.3% 0.3% __pthread_cond_broadcast 82 3.2% 0.3% __lll_unlock_wake 52 2.1% 0.2% __mprotect"

"Besides being an amazing technical achievement, I find this very interesting legally, as it further blurs the line between passively viewing content hosted somewhere and redistributing/actively sharing content.Have there already been cases of websites making their visitors unwitting peers, similar to e.g. JavaScript cryptocurrency mining?"

"P2P connections over the web are usually not possible due to typical consumer router configurations and bad decisions in the design of WebRTC protocol.The vast majority of these P2P web projects, including WebTorrent, is actually using proxy servers to fake the illusion of P2P connectivity (to be specific, they are using TURN servers to proxy traffic).Here's a stackoverflow question I asked about this and burned a 100 bounty on it with no answers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70624649/webrtc-fails-to..."

Preview of 'Emacs 29 is nigh'

Emacs 29 is nigh

"I am loving all this emacs love lately (I am an emacsophile), but I do find all this attention it is getting suddenly a bit surprising. Is it just that "long lines, LSP, fast syntax hightlighting" is making new people interested, or is it just us neckbeards coming out of the woods? I mean, many of these things are just a package-install away right now. I seldom see vim put in the same lime-light, for instance.Or maybe I am just more attentive to the coverage now?"

"Wow, Eglot/Treesitter/better package support in 29 make me want to try Emacs again.> Install packages from source with package.elEmacs users updating to 29: do you plan to use this instead of Straight now? If not, can you help me to understand what more Straight provides?Emacs on macOS users: do you generally compile new versions of Emacs from source, or wait for ports like Mitsuharu Yamamoto's one[1] to update?[1] https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/, used by https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport"

"Its great to see both eglot and tree-sitter being merged. However, I am unhappy about the state of 'emacs configurations/distributions' right now. I have been using Doom Emacs, but the development is pretty much stalled there [0], and I don't think there is any distribution that is keeping up with these cutting-edge features (compared to the NeoVim ecosystem, let's say). Somehow it feels like I was seeing a lot more activity about Emacs configurations two-three years ago.> Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of timeOoh, this is interesting. Hoping to see a derivation in https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay soon.[0] I am not complaining though as Doom was the main author's personal config from the get-go. I am just pointing out a void."

Preview of 'Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline'

Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline

"Friends if you dont know: you can add readline support to LOTS of things, especially custom scripts and tools with a prompt by just calling the program with rlwrap.> rlwrap is a 'readline wrapper', a small utility that uses the GNU Readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any command.https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap"

"I'm using bash (and thus GNU readline) all day every day at work, and by far the most useful shortcut for me is Ctrl-r (reverse history search).I also sometimes use Ctrl-a (start of line, if the keyboard doesn't have a convenient Home key) and Ctrl-e (end of line, in lieu of End key).Btw the post disses Ctrl-s / Ctrl-q for pausing/resuming terminal output, but it can be useful when you're outputting a lot of text (for example tailing a logfile)."

""Shame, then, that even serious command line hackers never bother learning about its capabilities, as they can supercharge your command line productivity."Because it is really confusing if you are not an emacs user."

Preview of 'An extensive tutorial on how to setup a Pi-Hole'

An extensive tutorial on how to setup a Pi-Hole

"No one mentioned AdGuardHome yet?AdGuardHome is far better than PiHole. It's a single Go binary and I think UI is better. It won't break if you upgrade your system. You don't need docker or LAMP stack. Just pull binary and run it. It will even generate systemd service file for you if you need.Edit: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome"

"I used a Pi-Hole for all devices in my house, including my work MacBook. They manage their MacBooks with JamF, so most things are pretty locked down (including DNS settings in System Preferences). Sudo access is only possible if you open up the Self Service app, login, and issue yourself sudo/admin access for 6 hours. Once it expires, you have to issue yourself admin/sudo access again. No sudo = no changing DNS.I set it and forgot it, until I went to Estes Park, Colorado over the Christmas holidays one year. I travelled with my MacBook just in case anything popped off... and it did. I logged into my MacBook, but quickly realised although I could connect to WiFi as normal, no DNS would resolve (it was pointed to 192.168.1.100 of my home network), and I couldn't connect to anything - including logging in the Self Service app to re-issue sudo access, to change the DNS. I had to walk a new colleague how to handle the scandal over the phone, driving through the mountains... thank goodness for good cell service!"

"I think the best way to set pihole up is to use the docker image, https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole/. run it on a pi or any other computer with docker. Upgrades are painless."

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