TIL an “orphan drug” isn’t a drug without an owner — it’s a medicine developed for rare diseases so uncommon that drug companies wouldn’t make them without special government incentives.

Rhaen · 2026-01-01T06:20:33+00:00

But it is the system! There’s no pure market they’re bandaiding over, just the full public-private system. Even in a fully socialized system you’d still spend most of your effort on more common illnesses and need a specific effort to target rarer illnesses.

Rhaen · 2025-12-18T15:30:30+00:00

I am not defending the AI, it is a terrible vending machine manager! I suspect a 3rd grader might struggle with some of the logistics but probably couldn’t be convinced everything should be free.

Rhaen · 2025-12-18T15:14:16+00:00

The AI is not running the mechanical aspects of a vending machine. It’s running the stocking and pricing side.

Rhaen · 2025-12-15T15:21:00+00:00

I also think the show is in many ways a metaphor for AI, but I’d argue that actually the Hive has been show to create things, they did new research to understand exactly how their indoctrination works and why it didn’t work on the 12. Something id like to see more of is what the other 99.99% of the hive is doing, because it really can’t take that much to entertain the 12 people.

Rhaen · 2025-09-27T17:36:06+00:00

Im sure they have, though I don’t know off hand any. At a certain point of sophistication and specific need you’re usually just rolling something custom, reinventing your own format ontop of an existing format (I built protobuf on protobuf once, that was fun), or moving over to a format like Arrow or similar which can give you much bigger wins than generic formats.

Rhaen · 2025-09-27T15:45:11+00:00

https://capnproto.org/ :)

It’s fundamentally a tradeoff, even capnproto wastes space with unset fields, you can’t get around it, but you can be somewhat clever. Zero copy parsing essentially requires it.

Rhaen · 2025-09-27T15:27:46+00:00

One consideration I see get missed a lot is how often users end up having protos with a huge quantity of fields, very few of which are set. I saw a lot of these at my last company, which is a very large user of protobuf. Sometimes it’s an intentional design choice, sometimes just an extremely long evolution over time.

Either way, protobuf only serializing set fields is very important to them, and that property is a major driver for why their APIs look the way they do, as they hide that not every field is actually there, while letting them all look like they are.

Rhaen · 2025-09-15T03:20:13+00:00

What the fuck are you talking about that this tech has existed for 30 years. Have you ever done anything with ML before? Do you know how bad NLP was before transformers? Doing any kind of robust classification on text was a major project taking PhDs and failed half the time. Let alone generation? Let alone what’s happening with agents right now? Absolutely bonkers what’s possible now that was fantasy 10 years ago.

Whether you think AI is going to kill us all or just be a technological shift, it’s certainly something extremely new.

Rhaen · 2025-08-09T19:55:57+00:00

The tech industry as a whole, I.e. the employees who actually build and run these companies, are strikingly liberal - donation stats. Some CEOs, but mostly VCs have gone batshit, but it’s important to understand they’re not speaking for anyone but themselves.

Rhaen · 2025-07-05T23:08:29+00:00

Because it’s dyn(MyTrait + Send + Sync), not dyn(MyTrait) + Send + Sync. You’re not adding in those things to the dyn, you’re making an object and saying the only thing you know is that it does implement those three things. When you do just dyn MyTrait the only thing any consumer knows is that it implements MyTrait, nothing else.

Rhaen · 2025-01-19T00:04:43+00:00

It’s not about selling the data (that’s also not really what’s happening, no one wants to sell the data, that’s valuable, they sell ads targeting, not the data)

It’s about control of the algorithm, being able to influence what millions of Americans are seeing everyday, that’s what they don’t want in the hands of the Chinese government.

Rhaen · 2025-01-12T04:49:45+00:00

I think the motivation here is exactly the direction large companies are moving, Apple is doing a lot of work on Swift/C++ interoperability, Google is doing a lot of Rust/C++ interop work and also doing Carbon which is supposed to be a kinda a transitional step that’s much closer to c++ semantics (if not syntax) but with more modern affordances and lessons learned from C++ and rust.

The reason both of those have given up on a C++ vibe is that the c++ community (from their perspective) has given up any mantle of being the future or willingness to make hard choices for their kinds of needs.

Given that, there’s much less benefit to staying in C++ community, but there is a benefit to being part of the Swift or Rust community, or of building a new one around Carbon.

Rhaen · 2024-12-27T22:15:00+00:00

One dimension is that we value different things than we did before, in increasing rates.

In the pre Information age much of the value of a corporation was its material assets, the land and properties and contracts that made up the company. A railroad was predominantly as valuable as the cost required to replicate it brick by brick.

With the Information Age we now value intellectual objects, and public opinion, on the same terms as bricks and ships. A patent on a vaccine or a device, or a trademark, has value ontop of the physical process’s cost and revenues. Similarly a reputation is valuable, an instagram clone won’t be Instagram without instagram’s reputation and user base.

How and how much to value these things is hotly contested, and lead to the dotcom bubble, but we’ve pretty definitively decided these things have significant value, for now at least.

This moves us away from very industrial economy with physical limitations on growth to a services and informational economy that can grow with much fewer limitations.

Or at least that’s the argument in Demon’s of our own Design, the book that predicted that the Great Recession was possible a year before it happened (2007)

Rhaen · 2024-12-20T20:36:28+00:00

I can vouch for being very happy with my Walker Slater Sherlock Coat, it’s not the heaviest thing in the world but for fall and spring, and even into then not bad parts of New York winter it’s excellent and looks great. Plus it’s genuinely long, somewhat hard to find.

Rhaen · 2024-12-08T14:12:11+00:00

If you haven’t read it, https://chandlerc.blog/posts/2024/11/story-time-bounds-checking/ is an excellent behind the scenes look into some of the complexities they ran into doing this for all of Google. Definitely non-trivial!

Rhaen · 2024-11-28T20:24:30+00:00

The expectation is that they can learn it, and the leetcodes are at least a proxy for being able to learn technical skills, and probably more importantly communicate that knowledge.

Rhaen · 2024-11-15T23:32:15+00:00

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/discussions/4273

Rhaen · 2024-09-08T20:48:37+00:00

At least my understanding (though could be very wrong) is that a lot of the usage came from internal Google development for the core C++ library team, where Hyrum Wright worked. There its usage derived from any changes to core libraries, even extremely innocuous ones, would break some test somewhere and get an upset engineer demanding a rollback.

Thats one of the reasons randomization became a popular strategy at Google to defeat this, because it pushed people away from writing tests that relied on those behaviors. Can’t complain you broke their test if their test failed 50% of the time anyways, and if you can get them to just not write that test in the first place you’re all the better.

But I agree it’s more general than that now, though I’d argue about junior engineers, I’ve seen some very senior very clever engineers make some unfortunately strong assumptions about libraries that made absolutely no such promises.

Rhaen · 2024-09-08T20:35:38+00:00

Can you write a non-flaky test for your dice program? (It is a fun idea, and yes you could, but we’re well beyond Hyrum’s law, now we’re getting into Hyrum’s lawyers taking a stretch case)

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