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V0ldek V0ldek @awful.systems
Posts 8
Comments 781
Lol. Lmao even. "DeepSeek R1 reproduced for $30: Berkeley researchers replicate DeepSeek R1 for $30—casting doubt on H100 claims and controversy"
  • This is a really weird comment. Assembly is not faster than C, that's a nonsensical statement, C compiles down to assembly. LLVM's optimizations will most likely outperform or directly match whatever hand-crafted assembly you write. Why would BEQ 1000 be "considerably faster" than if (x == y) goto L_1000;? This collapses even further if you consider any application larger than a few hundred lines of code, any sensible compiler is going to beat you on optimizations if you try to write hand-crafted assembly. Try loading up assembly code and manually performing intraprocedural optimizations, lol, there's a reason every compiled language goes through an intermediate representation.

    Saying that C# is slower than C is also nonsensical, especially now that C# has built-in PGO it's very likely it could outperform an application written in C. C#'s JIT compiler is not somehow slower because it's flexible in terms of hardware, if anything that's what makes it fast. For example you can write a vectorized loop that will be JIT-compiled to the ideal fastest instruction set available on the CPU running the program, whereas in C or assembly you'd have to manually write a version for each. There's no reason to think that manual implementation would be faster than what the JIT comes up with at runtime, though, especially with PGO.

    It's kinda like you're saying that a V12 engine is faster than a Ferrari and that they are both faster than a spaceship because the spaceship doesn't have wheels.

    I know you're trying to explain this to a non-technical person but what you said is so terribly misleading I cannot see educational value in it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • AGI is coming, we're already at the "dumb guy who doesn't understand math but thinks he's smart" level

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • as it’s apparently no longer safe for trans people or C++ developers

    Sorry but Rust knowledge is now a hard requirement for visas so you better hit the book

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.

    Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.

    Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I don't fucking think so.

    We're unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldn't you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after you're gone? If you can't spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then that's a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.

    And I don't think there's a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my "ORACLE = NAZIS" tshirt

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It's a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called "LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL"

    I didn't have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy

    We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.

    (Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)

    Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.

    I'd also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate "DATABASES AND ML" session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.

  • Musk presses H twice to perform the Nazi salute twice on stage at inauguration.
  • What, no, a vocal AfD supporter is a nazi? No waaay

    Surprised Pikachu, sarcastically surprised Kirk, etc.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • Imagine going on the Pilgrimage and all you bring back is an MBA and some motivational quotes, instant exile

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • But also, wtf how are they expecting this to stay secret and there being no backlash?

    No, they bet on it not mattering and they've been completely right thus far.

  • Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”
  • That's just the plot of the next Fast&Furious, only they're grilling instead of picnicking

    Furious Rex or something

  • Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”
  • I said "basic management skills", like you might get to run a school board or something.

    You're aiming for Secretary of Transportation? Your rail network better be fucking immaculate

  • Could can openers feel pain? How about AIs? Google researchers ask the leading questions
  • Could pain help test AI for sentience?

    This question has far too many hypotheticals to even make sense as a question.

    You might think that question has far too many hypotheticals to even make sense as a question.

    Wow! That's exactly what I was thinking!

    But there’s AI hype to propagate.

    Ah, alas then

  • Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”
  • and it looks like a shared account, maybe with his kids or something,

    The idea that his kids would like to spend time with him in any capacity, much less sharing an account with a 50 yo dude who has already proven can't build a character for shit is laughable at best

  • Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”
  • At least PoE builds are a real thing that exists

  • Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”
  • Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

    Hard to believe a game with that title could suck lol

  • Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”
  • Every serious political candidate should prove they can build an 100 SPM (at least!) base in Factorio and keep it running for some time before I even consider putting them in office, that's just basic management skills

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems
  • I never thought I'd say this but... don't slander category theory like that, compared to LLMs it's downright useful

  • People don’t enjoy making music, says AI music CEO being sued for stealing music
  • This is true, but also importantly this only works if you carefully redefine productivity to mean something else than a craftsman would consider productivity. You need a simple metric that's easily cheated.

    For example, a software engineer who cares about what he does would define productivity fuzzily, as general growth of functionality for the consumer of the application, with the implied "actual working well-crafted functionality". If you're an idiot who wants to hack productivity, you define it as something straightforward and stupid, e.g. lines of code added. Suddenly you can claim that an "AI software engineer" is more productive than a human.

    This exists even in something seemingly all about quality, such as research. One of the many problems with the current state of academia is the obsession with "number of papers published" to the disregard of rigor, and so you'll get people who are more interested in hacking the metric than actual research. Hence the seemingly annual scandal where someone is caught completely fabricating data, or the even more frequent sham experiments in psychology that never replicate. The replication crisis falls into the same category -- it's good science to replicate, but journals are not interested so it doesn't grow the sacred metric by which every academician is judged.

    Unfortunately we're in an age of hacked productivity. The productivity metric for our markets is line going up, which has long been disconnected from actual productivity, as in providing a product to customers that willingly buy it. It's hard to keep focus on actual productivity when seemingly everyone around you, and especially everyone hierarchichally above you, cares only about the hacked metrics. Art is one of the few mainstays where you alone can be the judge of your own productivity and whether you're happy with your output, since at the core the only metric that matters in art is "does it feel right to me". This must be untenable to promptfondlers because they never experienced actual artistic fulfillment, so instead they need a hacked metric to feel good about improving -- how many images can we churn? how long of a video can Sora output before killing itself? how many seconds of "music" can our box generate?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems
  • xD oh what a delight, the one thing missing from the complete gobshite of a "database" that Mongo is was an AI to mangle your queries

  • Give me your best software engineer blogs

    I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

    What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

    I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

    Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

    5

    None of those words are in the Bible 2.0 (Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs — Ludicity)

    An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

    First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

    A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

    Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

    Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

    15

    Devin, the obviously fake "AI Developer", turns out to be fake

    Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a small shell script large language model.

    !

    The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

    First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

    Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

    It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

    The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

    It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

    3

    Zuckerberg ordered Snapchat to literally man-in-the-middle attack customers

    arstechnica.com Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

    Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.

    Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

    I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

    In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

    > "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan. > > "Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

    Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

    I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

    4