Accident Forgiveness
Image by Annie Ruygt Public cloud billing is terrifying. The premise of a public cloud — what sets it apart from a hosting provider — is 8,760 hours/year of on-tap deployable compute, storage, and networking. Cloud resources are “elastic”: they’re acquired and released as needed; in the “cloud-iest” apps, without human intervention. Public cloud resources […]
Turnstyle – An esoteric, graphical functional language
An esoteric, graphical functional languagePublished on August 21, 2024 under the tag haskell I am delighted and horrified to announce a new graphical programming language called Turnstyle. You can see an example below (click to run). In the time leading up to ZuriHac 2024 earlier this year, I had been thinking about Piet a little. […]
Duck Typing (Horror) in Go
If you say Go supports “duck typing” online, you’ll probably get some pushback. The Go community often points out that Go doesn’t support duck typing because it’s statically typed, and duck typing is a feature of dynamically typed languages. Rather, Go has “structural typing” where interfaces are still implicitly implemented, but still checked at compile […]
Launch HN: Outerport (YC S24) – Instant hot-swapping for AI model weights
Hi HN! We’re Towaki and Allen, and we’re building Outerport (https://outerport.com), a distribution network for AI model weights that enables ‘hot-swapping’ of AI models to save on GPU costs. ‘Hot-swapping’ lets you serve different models on the same GPU machine with only ~2 second swap times (~150x faster than baseline). You can see this in […]
Code Review Antipatterns
Code review antipatterns [Simon Tatham, 2024-08-21] Introduction Code review seems like a great idea, right? Two developers looking at the same code means two chances to spot problems; it spreads understanding of the way the project is evolving; the reviewer can learn useful tricks from reading the author’s code in detail, or spot opportunities to […]
U.S. Added 818,000 Fewer Jobs Than Reported Earlier
The Labor Department issued revised figures for the 12 months through March that point to greater economic fragility. The U.S. economy added far fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than previously reported, a sign that cracks in the labor market are more severe — and began forming earlier — than initially believed. On Wednesday, […]
Techniques for safe garbage collection in Rust
2024-01-13 This will be the first in a series of posts describing different design decisions made writing two Rust crates: gc-arena – A system for safely fitting Rust with incremental garbage collection, used by Ruffle. piccolo – A stackless Lua runtime written in safe Rust with a focus on safe sandboxing. The goal of this […]
We don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad
TL;DR: Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone’s job for them. See also: […]
Mimalloc Cigarette: Losing one week of my life catching a memory leak (Rust)
One of applications at my work has always been RAM-bound – it’s a pricing engine that basically loads tons of hotels, builds some in-memory indices and then allows you to issue queries like find me the cheapest hotel in berlin, pronto. A pricing engine’s main purpose is to price engines hotels, but in order to […]
The UX of HTML (2023)
by Vasilis van Gemert published on Dec 01, 2023 Recently when I gave a coding assignment — an art directed web page about a font — a student asked: does it have to be semantic and shit? The whole class looked up, curious about the answer — please let it be no! I answered that no, it doesn’t have to be […]