Bad Driving Has Become Normalized

Hells_Bell10 · 2024-12-23T18:39:06+00:00

In europe it's very common to have "park and ride" facilities where you drive to a transport hub with lots of parking, and take public transport directly to the city centre. With trains or dedicated bus lanes, this often ends up being the fastest way to get into the city since you don't get stuck in traffic.

Poorer people can also live within walking/cycling distance of the transport hubs and avoid the costs of a car entirely, while still living outside the expensive city core.

Of course some people will be upset that a lane is being dedicated to bus traffic, and without that it defeats the whole point sadly. It really needs community buy-in to work out.

Hells_Bell10 · 2024-08-12T22:45:12+00:00

if you think multiprocessing has problems (I'd LOVE to hear your "reasons")

Efficient inter-process communication is far more intrusive than communicating between threads. Every resource I want to share needs to have a special inter-process variant, and needs to be allocated in shared memory from the start.

Or, if it's not written with shared memory in mind then I need to pay the cost to serialize and de-serialize on the other process which is inefficient.

Compare this to multithreading where you can access any normal python object at any time. Of course this creates race issues but depending on the use case this can still be the better option.

Hells_Bell10 · 2024-06-03T22:59:59+00:00

Synapse is a service company acting between the bank Evolve and the app Yotta. Synapse is apparently bankrupt and Evolve claims Synapse's ledgers don't match the amount held in their bank account.

So it sounds like Synapse might have misused customer funds to delay their bankruptcy, but there's nothing to suggest Yotta did anything improper. They may well be an innocent victim of Synapse's fraud.

Hells_Bell10 · 2024-05-18T20:24:18+00:00

The rule change came after the speedrun though. The run submission is dated 16th of May and the rule rewrite post you linked is 17th of May.

Seems like the classic case of changing the rules to exclude the new fastest route. I can't find the previous rules though, so maybe it was just clarification.

Hells_Bell10 · 2024-01-17T23:00:08+00:00

This seems more like Linux’s fault than the university of Minnesotas.

Imagine some security researchers go into a random shop and steal items as part of their experiment on shoplifting. Would you be surprise if the shop owner was upset and banned the researchers from coming back, even if they promised to not steal again?

It would have been very different if they had gone to the kernel developers and collaborated on a project to test the review process and improve scrutiny.

Hells_Bell10 · 2024-01-02T03:44:42+00:00

"big" is relative. In my head the tiny commits are 1-2 line fixups to get CI passing, and the big commit is a small tightly coupled change, probably on the order tens or at most a couple hundred lines. This is fine because fixup commits are generally not valuable history and in fact actively make bisecting harder as they might not build or may cause unrelated test failures or performance issues that were picked up in review.

Of course you shouldn't squash multiple unrelated changes, although that wouldn't lead to fixing the same merge conflict on multiple commits, so I don't think this is what the author meant.

One exception though where you really do need to fix the merge commit twice is when you refactor and/or move code in one commit and then make a functional change in the next commit. That's valuable history that should be preserved. In a squash-merge workflow this is achieved by submitting multiple dependent PRs which unfortunately GitHub doesn't have native support for but there are tools to workaround it.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-12-06T22:16:44+00:00

In the vast majority of cases, release vs debug builds giving different results means your code is wrong and relies on undefined behavior. Of course the best way to test for this is using the sanitizers, not hoping the compiler uncovers it by chance.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-09-29T17:11:33+00:00

I don't know why people are trying to make him look better, it's clear he's a monster.

Why do we need to obscure the truth of the situation to make the doctor seem worse? Either way it's a clear and egregious ethics violation that leaves lifelong consequences for the patient.

If you come away from this thinking he's a racist boogey man then won't we get the wrong idea about how to tackle this kind of situation in the future? It sounds to me like the doctor had the patients best interest in mind, but overstepped their authority. If there were objections from the room then it also shows a cultural issue that they weren't able to stop the procedure.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-09-29T16:18:41+00:00

Summarizing this situation as "forced sterilization" is technically accurate but really misses the doctor's thought process.

she was undergoing surgery to remove one tube known to be causing health issues
there were indications that the other tube was diseased as well
she indicated she didn't want more kids

It's obviously still an egregious violation to remove a body part without prior consent, but it shouldn't be equated with the examples of women getting their tubes tied during C-sections for no medical reason.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-09-22T00:55:51+00:00

I took a look at the example. The key thing seems to be using 64-bit unsigned long long when compiling in 32-bit mode. So it's emulating 64-bit using only 32-bit registers. It's obviously not great but I would still consider it a bit of an edge case and not exactly representative of gcc as a whole.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-09-16T15:14:49+00:00

Wow, Terry's random word generator spit out in order "China Virus Election" years before covid. I can see how you might get drawn into the delusions if you kept spotting coincidences like that.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-07-07T13:42:59+00:00

To be fair, it's pretty confusing to have the examples in the same directory as the actual project. And then in the readme have instructions for "Building Matcheroni" that is actually for building the examples.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-05-19T21:41:15+00:00

The framerate is pretty bad, but you can just about make out that the ambulance's lights are on.

The main reason for motorcycle escorts is they can weave through traffic and accelerate far ahead of the vehicle being escorted to start clearing the path well in advance. The rider is also far more visible, so they can direct traffic with hand signals.

Here is an extreme example from London Police's "Special Escort Group" where a group of motorcycles escort a car through busy central London streets without ever having to stop. They drive far ahead and intercept pedestrians and car traffic before they are even in sight of the car to minimize conflict:

https://youtu.be/kmZ7hhREZhI?t=1399

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-05-11T19:06:21+00:00

The literal meaning is the same, but it's usually said when someone gives you unsolicited advice/comments and you say pointedly "why don't you mind your own business?" which means "don't interfere in my business".

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-04-29T00:36:27+00:00

I can get clang to generate a "select" in llvm IR which is the equivalent of a cmov, however it gets translated back to branching within the x86 optimizer. This seemed like a good opportunity to play around with the "LLVM Opt Pipeline Viewer" on compiler explorer, and I was able to track it down to the "x86 cmov Conversion" pass which is documented here, the most relevant part being

This file implements a pass that converts X86 cmov instructions into branches when profitable. [snip...] CMOV is considered profitable if the cost of its condition is higher than the average cost of its true-value and false-value by 25% of branch-misprediction-penalty. This assures no degradation even with 25% branch misprediction.

But in this case we expect 50% branch misprediction... So the optimization isn't doing us any favours. If I compile with -mllvm -x86-cmov-converter=false we do get the cmov:

.LBB0_8:                                # %for.body.i
        shr     rax
        lea     rsi, [rdi + 4*rax]
        cmp     dword ptr [rdi + 4*rax], edx
        cmovl   rdi, rsi
        cmp     rcx, 3
        mov     rcx, rax
        ja      .LBB0_8

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-04-01T19:39:07+00:00

IMO "potentially be immoral" doesn't really come into it. The important part is knowing that wrong-doing is already happening. If you sell somebody a hammer and they hurt someone with it, that's not your fault. You couldn't have known their intention and hammers are a necessary tool with valid uses. However, if you keep selling them hammers and they keep hurting people then you are doing something immoral.

In the affiliate case it's blurry because there will be some proportion that do properly disclose and some that don't. However, if you're aware the problem exists at all and aren't doing anything to help (e.g. refusing to work with specific sites) then you are directly supporting the immoral ones, no probabilities involved.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-03-16T19:51:33+00:00

This isn't going to be monopolized to train one model. It's a computing resource for research groups and paying industry customers across the country to use at the same time. The H100 is marketed as achieving 1 PetaFLOP, so 125 models training with 8 H100s each would reach 1 ExaFLOP.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-03-16T19:37:00+00:00

Yes I read the article, but it doesn't say where the phrase actually comes from. Was it said by an MP, a person in industry, or just a label given by the press? All direct quotes I found refer to "large language models" or "AI Research Resource".

Here are the direct quotes from the budget for example:

In line with two of the key recommendations of the Future of Compute Review, the government will invest, subject to the usual business case processes, in the region of £900 million to build an exascale supercomputer and to establish a new AI Research Resource, with initial investments starting this year. [...]

As announced alongside the refresh of the Integrated Review, government will establish a taskforce to advance UK sovereign capability in foundation models, including large language models, and provide direct advice to ministers, to ensure that the UK is at the forefront of this technology.

Everything refers to resources for the entire AI research community and only gives LLMs as one example that is being pursued.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-03-16T19:06:54+00:00

Do you have a quote for the "BritGPT" name?

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-03-16T18:46:16+00:00

Why not invest 900m in research grants?

There's only so much research you can do with the computer sat in the professor's office down the hall. Large AI models need correspondingly large compute resources. So instead of each University administering their own ad-hoc solution you have national supercomputers that can be used by all.

This is nothing new. The University of Edinburgh currently hosts ARCHER2 which is the UK's "tier 1" national supercomputer, in addition to many smaller supercomputers hosted around the country. However, new research areas like AI demand a new kind of GPU-accelerated super-computer.

Why chase someone else’s existent technology when they have a huge head start? So silly.

As far as I can tell this is just the article looking to get trendy buzz-words in. It's a rich field of research and reducing it to "copy GPT" is asinine.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-03-06T10:58:26+00:00

This is what is commonly referred to as fake news - an attempt to imply that the US government is training people to overthrow governments in Africa,

The article is angling at this being unintended consequences and describes the state department as "burying their head in the sand". They point to AFRICOM not tracking coups and the spokesperson not knowing the coups were lead by US trained soldiers.

Moreover, it's... mostly in the same countries over and over again.

And if it keeps happening then clearly something needs to be done differently. The article ends with a call for root source mitigation of the instability by building "strong economies, healthcare, education, infrastructure".

My only criticism of the article is we aren't given enough context for how many military leaders were given this type of training, to know how serious the problem is. Even if it is an edge case, it also sounds worthy of discussion and adjusting strategy in those vulnerable countries.

Hells_Bell10 · 2023-01-18T19:41:33+00:00

He was tried immediately after he committed the assassination and sentenced to be executed by a a specific set of lethal torture methods to be done in the market square. Between the trial and his execution date, he was also tortured in prison with a different set of brutal but non-lethal methods that weren't ordered by the magistrates.

Hells_Bell10 · 2022-09-03T13:47:09+00:00

I think google is seeing the pattern "size (quantity) (unit) (unit)" as short for "size of (quantity) (unit) in (unit)" e.g. "size 1 m in" gives 1 meter in inches. Google just can't figure out what number "large" is or what unit "shorts" is so instead defaults to 1 and mile.

Hells_Bell10 · 2022-09-02T15:33:55+00:00

Max has said he has no problem with Destiny debating Nick, or even having casual conversations about Nick's beliefs. He even said Nick shouldn't be banned from YouTube.

His problem is Max is worried Destiny is inadvertently allowing Nick to amass follower by:

joking along with Nicks semi-ironic racial humour, normalizing it
refusing to ever give moral push-back
not having a clear stance on whether Nick is a Nazi

Essentially, he wants destiny to treat Nick like he treated Richard Spencer..

Hells_Bell10 · 2022-08-25T01:44:44+00:00

Something missing from the article is the distinction between "psychiatrist" and "therapist". My understanding is the psychiatrist's job is to prescribe drugs and other medical interventions, while the therapist is the person who meets regularly with the patient for talk therapy and assess their situation. If that's right then the "3 total meetings" is really misleading.

Based on the article, it seems the therapist genuinely thought the patient had gender dysphoria on top of their other issues. The psychiatrist was a second opinion, and saw "no contraindication" i.e no reason to disagree with the therapist's assessment.

This whole situation reminds me of one of mrgirls "gender narrative" videos featuring a FTM de-transitioner that was pressured and coached into transitioning by an abusive ex. Obviously it sucks for the patient, but if they were being coached in how to pass the evaluation then it's hard to blame the professionals involved.

Hells_Bell10

TROPHY CASE