miniblog.

An introduction to the world's largest CRM, the importance of allowing users to build custom logic, and a discussion of providing a programmable AWS Lambda style platform: https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/

Playing with perf today! It's really interesting to see low-level details of where compute time is going. Branch prediction works well most of the time! (At least for this workload.) Based on https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/05/13/profiling-with-perf/ and

Playing with perf today! It's really interesting to see low-level details of where compute time is going. Branch prediction works well most of the time! (At least for this workload.) Based on https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/05/13/profiling-with-perf/ and

The dominance of statistical models in AI, our bias towards embedding human knowledge, and the effectiveness of large, generic compute: https://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

@cwebber@octodon.social Yep, ever since I read 'Intel x86 considered harmful' I've been amazed by how many CPUs exist inside a modern computer. Any could have bugs. There have been some verification efforts for RISC-V, and the ISA seems to have a bright future, so I'm hopeful there. I hope it's economically viable though. I loved the OpenMoko project but it wasn't commercially successful. I understand that companies wanting strong guarantees do custom, verified, single-purpose hardware (e.g. with Galois).

@kensanata@octodon.social Wow! Thanks, I will bear that in mind. (This is a problem that's been solved in newer IRC competitors I suppose.)

@cstanhope In theory it's not giving them much more data: I already have to give the company meter readings. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/six-reasons-say-no-smart-meter/ and https://www.the-ambient.com/explainers/smart-meters-2020-uk-guide-explainer-2153/ persuaded me against getting a smart meter though. The former link suggests I won't save money or escape confusing bills, and the latter suggests the early standards haven't won. It'll probably win eventually, for better or worse.

@srol Ooh, excellent example! I think that the reuse is a little friendlier than "copy your friend's CSS", so there are some good themes out there.

Other programmers using your code is often a high compliment. Making something from scratch is fun, but learning someone else's API is work. Rather than the common "I built one, you should use it", I try to ask "what would persuade you to use this?".

Scarcity versus abundance mindsets in software design, and shipping rough prototypes early:

What's the threshold for politely pasting text in IRC channels? I pasted two lines and my client sternly warned me and mentioned pastebins.

An Experimental Evaluation of the Assumption of Independence in Multi-Version Programming, by John Knight and Nancy Leveson https://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/nver-tse.pdf If you take bunch of programs written independently, are you more likely to reduce bugs by taking the most common output?

Excellent discussion of a Unison meetup, discussing their design (globally consistent content-addressed codebases!), type system, and tooling: https://unisonweb.org/2019-04-04/first-meetup.html#post-start It's really impressive how much they've achieved.

Friday's xkcd is blunt but fair: it's very hard to secure any part of a modern computer stack, and we depend on all of it:

Apparently you can buy smart power sockets now, e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lightwave-L42-Smart-Socket-Stainess/dp/B075XT62RC Whilst a consumer might enjoy the remote control, these devices also monitor power consumption. I imagine this would be particularly useful in a commercial property context.