Note that this outage by itself, based on their chart, was kicking out errors over the span of about 8 hours. This one outage would have almost entirely blown their downtown allowance under 99.9% availability criteria.

If one big provider actually provided 99.9999%, that would be 30 seconds of all outages over a typical year. Not even long enough for people to generally be sure there was an ‘outage’ as a user. That wouldn’t be bad at all.

Problem is that it isn’t that simple. The general fact we do know is that the atmosphere will be more energetic and, on average, the globe will be hotter. The more energetic facet means more weather activity and changes to various currents. So local weather may be more impacted by a change in wind current temperature wise. The change in storm activity may be the bigger concern rather than temperatures. We don’t know how much viable agriculture will be possible or exactly where it will be. Also there’s the question of soil quality. It’s a dangerous gambit to assume a straightforward “Lots of snowy land now means lots of agriculture in a warmed globe”.

To be fair, it says “bubba” and the Clinton link is speculative.

The republicans have started trying to blame Obama for this years hikes…

It’s quite a leap, but they are trying to say ACA blew it all up, but it just took almost 20 years for the pain to hit.

It’s a narrative that really only works for the ride or die republicans, but it’s all they have to try, since they have no actual answer they want to propose…

One this is all speak to convince investors to throw money, so they’ll cheer pick their interpretation.

In this case I think they refer to already having the real estate, buildings, power and cooling. So “all” they have to do is rip out their rigs and dump a bunch of nVidia gear in. All they need is just a few hundred million from some lucky investors and they will be off…

Same way a lot of the “ai” companies make money, investors that have no idea but want to get in on the ground floor of the next nVidia or openai.

So he’s going to get Epsteined before that can happen …

I’m thinking this dog:

I get the sentiment, but the steam machine will have an x64 processor…

The VR headset won’t, but the PC will…

I doubt this one. It would require that Trump ever would care about the pleasure of anyone other than himself.

Well even with your observation, it could well be losing share to Mac and Linux. The Windows users are more likely to jump ship, and Mac and Linux users tend to stick with the platform more, mainly because it’s not actively working to piss them off. Even if zero jump to Mac or Linux, the share could still shift.

The upside of ‘just a machine to run a browser’ is that it’s easier than ever to live with Linux desktop, since that nagging application or two that keeps you on Windows has likely moved to browser hosted anyway. Downside of course being that it’s much more likely that app extracts a monthly fee from you instead of ‘just buying it’.

Currently for work I’m all Linux, precisely because work was forced to buy Office365 anyway, and the web versions work almost as well as the desktop versions for my purposes (I did have to boot Windows because I had to work on a Presentation and the weird ass “master slide” needed to be edited, and for whatever reason that is not allowed on the web). VSCode natively supports linux (well ‘native’, it’s a browser app disguised as a desktop app), but I would generally prefer Kate anyway (except work is now tracking our Github Copilot usage, and so I have to let Copilot throw suggestions at me to discard in VSCode or else get punished for failing to meet stupid objectives).

“Agentic” is the buzzword to distinguish “LLM will tell you how to do it” versus “LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right”.

Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM ‘how-to’ would still be tedious to walk through yourself.

Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn’t do what I want, I’m no where near the point where I’d trust “Agentic” approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can’t do anything that can’t trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the “jail” placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I’m not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.

My career is supporting business Linux users, and to be honest I can see why people might be reluctant to take on the Linux users.

“Hey, we implemented a standard partition scheme that allocates almost all our space to /usr and /var, your installer using ‘/opt’ doesn’t give us room to work with” versus “Hey, your software went into /usr/local, but clearly the Linux filesystem standard is for such software to go into /opt”. Good news is that Linux is flexible and sometimes you can point out “you can bind mount /opt to whatever you want” but then some of them will counter “that sounds like too much of a hack, change it the way we want”. Now this example by itself is mostly simple enough, make this facet configurable. But rinse and repeat for just an insane amount of possible choices. Another group at my company supports Linux, but just as a whole virtual machine provided by the company, the user doesn’t get to pick the distribution or even access bash on the thing, because they hate the concept of trying to support linux users.

Extra challenge, supporting an open source project with the Linux community. “I rewrote your database backend to force all reads to be aligned at 16k boundaries because I made a RAID of 4k disks and think 16k alignment would work really well with my storage setup, but ended up cramming up to 16k of garbage into some results and I’m going to complain about the data corruption and you won’t know about my modification until we screen share and you try to trace and see some seeks that don’t make sense”.

Oh dear god I think you are joking but I know people who seriously do LFS as their production setup and get pissy anytime people say they are doing it wrong if they want to work with anyone else in the industry.

I think a key difference is that firefox is a eternally evolving codebase that has to do new stuff frequently. It may have been painful but it’s worth it to bite the bullet for the sake of the large volume of ongoing changes.

For sudo/coreutils, I feel like those projects are more ‘settled’ and unlikely to need a lot of ongoing work, so the risk/benefit analysis cuts a different way.

It’s more like saying “why tear down that house and try to build one just like it in the same spot?”

So the conversation goes:

“when it was first built, it had asbestos and lead paint and all sorts of things we wouldn’t do today”

“but all that was already fixed 20 years ago, there’s nothing about it’s construction that’s really known to be problematic anymore”

“But maybe one day they’ll decide copper plumbing is bad for you, and boy it’ll be great that it was rebuilt with polybutylene plumbing!”

Then after the house is built it turns out that actually polybutylene was a problem, and copper was just fine".

If you had an ancient utility in assembly that did exactly what you wanted and no particular issues, then it would have been a dubious decision to rewrite in C.

Of course, the relative likelyhood of assembly code actually continuing to function across the evolution of processor instruction sets is lower than C, so the scenario is a bit trickier to show in that example.

However, there are two much more striking examples: COBOL continues to be used in a lot of applications. Because the COBOL implementations work and while it would be insane to choose COBOL for them now if they were to start today, it’s also insane to rewrite them and incur the risks when they work fine and will continue working.

Similarly, in scientific computing there’s still a good share of Fortran code. Again, an insane choice for a new project, but if the implementation is good, it’s a stupid idea to rewrite.

There’s not a lot of reason to criticisize the technical merits of Rust here, nor even to criticize people for choosing Rust as the path forward on their project. However the culture of ‘every thing must be rewritten in Rust’ is something worthy of criticism.

I think the criticism is more about deciding to try to re-implement a long standing facility in rust that has, by all accounts, been ‘finished’ for a long time.

About the only argument for those sorts of projects is the resistance to the sorts of bugs that can become security vulnerabilities, and this example highlights that rewrites in general (rust or otherwise) carry a risk of introducing all new security issues on their own, and that should be weighed against the presumed risks of not bothering to rewrite in the first place.

New projects, heavy feature development, ok, fine, Rust to make that easier. Trying to start over to get to the same place you already are, needs a bit more careful consideration, especially if the codebase in question has been scrutinized to death, even after an earlier reputation of worrisome CVEs that had since all been addressed.

I would argue a rewrite of sudo in rust is not necessarily a good thing.

Sure, if you are starting from scratch, Rust is likely to mitigate mistakes that C would make into vulnerabilities.

When you rewrite anything, there’s just a lot of various sorts of risks. For sudo and coreutils, I’m skeptical that there are sufficient unknown, unaddressed problems in the C codebases of such long lived, extremely scrutinized projects to be worth the risks of a rewrite.

A rust rewrite may be indicated for projects that are less well scrutinized due to no one bothering or not being that old anyway. Just the coreutils and sudo are in my mind the prime examples of bad ideas of rewrite just for the sake of rust rewrite.

Except he directly said just that.

Generally I agree that often he’ll make some flub and a bigger deal is made of it. Like with the ‘Miracle Mile’ vs. ‘Maginficent Mile’ thing, he said the wrong thing but that’s the least of the problems with that story and a fairly mundane and understandable mistake to make.

This time the statement is exactly as said, though real world consequences for it are similarly low.