Makes me think of all the algorithms we specify in proof languages and then hand-implement in production languages - this setup could maybe let you just specify the proof of an algorithm and then let LLMs derive efficient implementations with the (slow) proof as an oracle

My beef is with database systems that use the argument you made further up thread to skip fsync to juice their performance numbers. Data is not “durable” if turning off the machines storing it means it’s lost, that’s a category difference, not a pure probability difference as you are claiming.

It is of course totally fine to not store data to durable media and say the risk of devops doing a coordinated reboot is as low as the risk of raid disk data loss, but then don’t use the word “durable”.

If you’re building a data storage system and are using the term “durable” to mean “it’s in RAM on three virtual machines”, for example, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that you are lying to your customers, because you are intentionally misusing a well-established term.

Various certifications require this, I guess because they were written before hyper scalers and the assumed attack vector was that someone would literally steal a hard drive.

A running machine is not “at rest”, just like you can read files on your encrypted Mac HDD, the running program has decrypted access to the hard drive.

As for the last part not being true, can you clarify? The majority of the earths population lives between the 20th and 40th latitude, the band around the earth approximately between Madrid and the Sahara desert. Sure you can’t run a poorly insulated home in northern Michigan on solar year around without considerable expense, but that’s nowhere near where the majority of humanity lives.

For solar powered homes specifically though, multi-story buildings are much harder to run solar powered from the simple ratios - even if you reduce energy use 75%, at 4 stories you are break-even in roof-ratio-to-energy-need. I’ve worked in this space a while, and it’s now pretty straight forward to run single-family homes 24/7/367 on solar in most of the world, but multi story buildings are much harder.

Nothing is ever simple or one-dimensional :)

The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.

FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.

Taleb does the math as well IIRC, assuming there are x hundred thousand extreme risk takers, and outlier “correct bets” are y% chance, then you will have a surprisingly high number of people with a long series of “correct” bets behind them looking like business geniuses, from pure chance & basic statistics.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210188

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

You also need to choose optimal instruction encoding, and you need to understand how relocs work - which things can you resolve now vs which require you to encode info for the linker to fill in once the program is launched, etc etc.

Not sure why I'm on this little micro-rant about this; I'm sure Claude could write a workable assembler. I'm more like.. I've written one assembler and many, many parsers, and the parsers where way simpler, yet this thread is littered with people that seem to think assemblers are just lookup tables from ascii to machine code with a loop slapped on top of them.

What you are doing is kinda serialising a self-referential graph structure of machine code entries that reference each others addresses, but you don’t know the addresses because the (x86) instructions are variable-length, so you can’t know them until you generate the machine code, chicken-and-egg problem.

Personally I find writing parsers much much simpler than writing assemblers.

Googling this turned up a presentation from Waymo saying they do exactly this: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1kyapix/waymo_detect...

Stopped buses similarly, people get off the bus, whip around the front of them and straight into the streets, so many times I’ve spotted someone’s feet under the front before they come around and into the street.

Not to take away from Waymo here, agree with thread sentiment that they seem to have acted exemplary

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779878

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

If you then also spend the taxes on some form of offsets (if we pretend for the sake of argument that those work) you would have reduced emissions twice. One time seems plenty to say they are doing their job.