Not necessarily. When I worked at Yahoo, in Australia (what a glorious time that was) 25 years ago, I built servers in the datacenter using PXE. It was anything but slow.

Unbox a server, plug it into the PXE network, boot it. It boots to a miniscule FreeBSD distribution and you use a common user/pass to log in. Then, you type clone -h and it mounted an NFS share and installed packages and config files for that hostname. In three minutes or so your server shut down and you racked it up, plugged it into the production network and it started accepting work, or it notified the engineers in the US that it was ready for use and they’d add it to a pool, then it would start handling work.

It was extremely slick.

The build network was secure because you could only access it in secure areas which had the build network and a build server deployed to it. So security was not a problem.

Why can’t I set up Windows or MacOS like that? I know the answer I just find the answer annoying.

you get to any file by following the filesystem path whose bytes match the content you are looking for. There's no searching for the content you want.

if you're crawling the filesystem it will probably take you until the heat death of the universe to complete that crawl.

if you drill down into the right folders, it contains every possible text file up to a certain size. He uses a weird 70 character encoding scheme in order to optimize folder depth and width (he didn't want more than 5k objects in any folder) and to stay within maximum path length limitations.

it generates the text files on demand based on the path you're following and in each folder (along with other folders) is the text file represented by that path so far.

I might have a go writing something like this for my Mac.

no it doesn't, there's just no single measurement that will answer everyone's "which is better" question.

Go is better for some stuff. Rust is better for other stuff. Perl is better for other things.

"better" can mean anything, but if you define it, then it has definition, and you can measure it. So, you have multiple definitions of "better" and you use them all when you compare.

zero people have the same weights of the various definitions of "better", even among programming languages; look at how much javascript is written today. JS is not a better language in any measure that is based on rational thought, but for some people "this is javascript and nothing else is javascript" is enough for them to know that javascript is the better choice for their project.

throw the same prompt at multiple models and see how far each one gets. change the prompt used in the benchmark every day so models can't be optimized for that one prompt. use your vibe glands all you want, but don't issue model judgements without any ability to compare apples to apples.

(you remote into a system and part of your environment comes with you; that's very Plan9-like.)

No, not really. I just see it as a tool that normal people use to keep themselves happy. And that's not depressing, to me. It's kind of ... annoying that people are so fragile that they have to do that in order to have a "normal" day, but I can't fault anyone for doing things that make them happy. I wasn't given that opportunity; I was weird and if I didn't conform then I got in trouble. Yet normal people LOSE THEIR FLIPPING MINDS when asked to consider my behaviors normal and to consider my various physical movements as normal and tolerable. You have never seen such orchestrated and immediate pushback in your life, I promise. But I was forced to do what they refuse to do, which is to accommodate the other side. So, if anything, I'm angry about it all. Not depressed.

I don't need those platitudes to feel happy or normal, I need to be alone to feel happy, most of the time.

Praise given in private is usually legitimate. I value that. I feel that. Praise given in front of others (like ceremonies and ritual award reception stuff) are the fakest fake activity known to humanity. The ceremonies are for normal people. People like me can simply be privately told "well done" and given a piece of paper that they can look at, and maybe a raise, and that's enough. And maybe a mention during the ceremony that I will not be attending so that people know about it, if they're interested.

Small talk is all lies. Almost all praise is fake. And it all drives me insane. I can fit in at work just fine, I can appear joyful and excited to come to work, I have 30 years of practice with it. But I avoid it whenever possible because it is all lies.

Americans appear to oversell everything because people get mad if you don’t.

“Why can’t you just be positive?!”

Because I’m not going to lie. I can’t fake praise, and I won’t even try. Being positive while lying is immediately obvious and it undermines the positive attitude that you’ve painted on. If anything, I take a negative message when I see someone faking a positive manner of speech.

If you are describing someone that wants things to be done, then I agree with you.

If you are describing someone that wants to learn things and do the fixing themselves, then I don't understand how you could say that.

For a lot of us, the learning and the mistakes and the eventual fixing of a thing or completion of a project is the goal. Us doing the work is the reward function. AI strips that off and simply finishes the project, removing any and all incentive for the person involved, if they are this kind of person.

Again, simply having the effort completed is probably the goal if you simply want to have something completed that was not completed previously, but if you are someone that derives satisfaction or dopamine from doing the work yourself, then it is very clear that AI completely short-circuits this reward path for that person. Those are the people who don't like AI, and they have a very solid footing with that argument, I think.

input latency is a measure of latency between the human input and the computer receiving the input.

output latency measures the time between a computer commanding a certain pixel to change color on the screen and the color change actually taking place.

It's not my fault these terms are often used incorrectly.

Most of the time, what you see when you see someone test "input latency" is that person actually testing end-to-end latency, which is input latency + processing latency + output latency, as it is difficult (but not impossible) to test only one of these without special hardware. testing all three at once is easy.

A proper input latency test would be (for example) some external tool sending keypresses to a computer and measuring (via a hardware debugger or some other hardware-level tooling) how long it takes for the program you are interested in to receive that input.

As stated previously, output latency is the time between your program commanding something on the screen to change and that change actually happening.

there's a third latency in this stack, and that's your program itself. how long between the time it has received an input before it commands an output device to change its output. processing latency.

for the purposes of end-to-end latency testing hardware, the processing latency is effectively zero.

all three of those stack up to become "end-to-end latency" which is what most tooling available to end users measures.

It introduces output latency, not input latency.

But do we let ourselves loose awful people unto the world simply because they spread their genes as well as any well-behaved children? No we don’t. Society has rules and a lot of good people produce children which benefit society rather than are detrimental to it.

For a lot of people, the quality of their code is a reflection of their own quality as a programmer.

If you were alive in the 1980s and you were around to see how insanely fast a computer from 1988 could do things, and you compare that to how slow things are today, you would not be saying that code is a means to an end. Software is so horrible these days because too many people believe that it’s just “a means to an end”.

For some of us, the crafting of the code is the reward that we seek.

advertising really has gotten well out of control.

advertisers keep escalating, and i don't think that will ever stop. at some point the medium of television will be ruined, a lot like how mobile web browsing on ios is today.

it seems like it will be necessary to ban this kind of thing, if advertising itself isn't banned entirely. they will not stop until they must break the law to proceed, and even then i'd give it 50/50 on them stopping collecting personal data.

The problem is that they shrank the battery so windows has the same 2hr battery life. Dumbest decision ever, Dell. Dumbest decision ever.

That is silly.

Look at Plan 9, if you haven't. I can open a window, add/remove things from its environment (via mounting and unmounting files into that window's namespace) seal that environment to prevent changes, then launch a program.

The program can only see what is available to it via the file system. If it has no /net folder then it can't talk to the network. At all. If it has a truncated /env then it can only see a subset of the environment variables available to me, the user.

EVERYTHING being a file is ... weird. Unix has that, but Plan 9 takes about as far as it can go, which is pretty far. But that makes permissions to things quite easy, because file permissions are easy.

The other thing that Plan 9 does is that everything is a file, including your environment, mounting and unmounting things from/to your environment is how you gain/deny access to yourself and to programs.

If this permissions model was common, ransomware would have never been possible. No virus could infect your system, only its own environment (with caveats).

If you already know all of this, I apologize. If you don't, then you owe it to yourself to have a look at Plan 9. It's very weird, but once you wrap your head around it, you start seeing why some people really rave about it.

There's a channel on YouTube called "adventuresin9"[0] which has TONS of content about Plan9.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@adventuresin9