Posts by WayneS

Y Combinator, startups funnily enough aren't fans of draft California AI safety law

Trying to avoid another industry shifting to New Mexico?

The last world changing invention shifted house from Berkley to Los Alamos, and maybe too many capitalists of CA missed out on that one because it shifted. They don't want a repeat and miss out on this one?

At least the Los Alamos mob had the somewhat noble goal of winning a war. This letter seems more around the unconstrained capitalism outcome of those already having more than enough, having even more. Not exactly noble and given how 'world-changing' its being touted as, potentially equally destructive to humanity as what came out of Los Alamos.

IMF boss warns of AI 'tsunami' coming for world's jobs

Its not an AI issue...

To be clear, it would seem the tsunami is related to the ADOPTION of this tech to replace humans is the issue - not that it exists. That it exists in the first place, and the creators doing the usual technologist 'Pontius Pilate handwashing' of the effects of their creation, is another aspect of humanities penchant for giving up a sense of personal agency. The technologist says 'it is new and exciting to me, how it gets used is not my problem' - flacid much?

Sometimes it seems we give up the effect of human agency in the adoption of technology.

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

Re: And another one today

Given the way railways run around here I'm pretty sure they're more likely given to us - not by God, but by the 'opposition'.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Re: Do not want!

IMO you are correct that we need both temporary and persistent storage. Temporary storage for data structures that you want to disappear on restart. After all the system may be gone for an indeterminate timeframe between shutdown and init, and the environment around the system has moved on, rendering many data structures invalid.

The challenges are significant with regards persistent storage and issues like memory versioning, recovery/safe modes, RDMA/DMA, resilience and durability. A single NV-DIMM is not good enough for persistent storage - its a change in media and access method, not storage attributes we demand of persistent stores. Pretty quickly things devolves into a multi-node global shared NV-DIMM, and distributed memory lock manager OS requirement also, to achieve levels of resilience and durability needed.

Basically, we need to establish new extra OS page types - persistent text and persistent data. Then develop OS memory management to handle them correctly, re-educate ourselves, and develop operational processes to protect the pages we want protected (backup/restore/snapshot/ransomware protect etc). Not a trivial ask!

To get the benefits of nearly-as-fast-as-SDRAM we cant dodge these bullets. And the advantages of not doing the slow bits of all the memory copying malarky we do now would seem worthwhile in the long term.

Winklevoss twins back in hot water after NY AG sues over $1B cryptocurrency fraud

Re: Crypto Currency

Fiat currencies are backed by only by trust in the fiat economy - there is no real 'backing value' for a fiat currency. The reserve bank creates currency to buy some kind of bond - often from government treasury, but equally from financial institutions. There is no 'backing' value per se - other than the future promise expressed in a bond.

The problem is people still think in the original currency value terms - how many <insert currency here> for my crypto-coin? Until we can live a real life, in the real world, using crypto as the value exchange mechanism, this mindset of crypto not having its own inherent usefulness will persist. And people will get burnt as they ride the wild waves of unregulated currency supplies and dependence on exchange rates.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Contract wording?

"All a contractor has to do is drive around at the speed limit".

Whats the speed limit of the car with that contraption on the roof? At 100 mph was he just doing his contracted job? I doubt it'd have gone much faster.

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

Re: My home cable modem...

As someone with a 4G, 40 Mbps aggregate link to home - last mile has never been the bottleneck for multi-user streaming / Teams / Zoom / VPN etc. Doing some speedtests using various targets show any constraint is usual somewhere in a backhaul / backbone / far-end. Focussing on the speed of the last mile seems to miss the real problem(s).

Sure, there will be many here that do lots of large storage moves - but this is far from a typical Internet user use case. And I suspect even then constrained more by upstream resources than the last mile.