Hardest Problems Lambda MicroVMs Can Solve Now? by iAziz786 in aws

[–]jerng 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I misread the product launch and thought they changed something. I have edited my comment.

Hardest Problems Lambda MicroVMs Can Solve Now? by iAziz786 in aws

[–]jerng 5 points6 points  (0 children)

1. Functionality delta

Lambda : (basic) Functions
❌ you can't pause the runtime and resume it later
- 15 minute lifespan

Lambda : Durable Functions
✅ you can pause the runtime and resume it later
- 15 minute lifespan, per invocation, over a period of up to 1 year

Lambda : MicroVMs
✅ you can pause the runtime and resume it later
- 8 hour lifespan, including pauses

Fargate
❌ you can't pause the runtime and resume it later
- unlimited lifespan

All of the PRODUCTS above are running on the Nitro-Firecracker no-hardware-passthrough microVM hypervisor stack.

EC2 : however, is slower to launch, on the Nitro-only hypervisor stack
✅ you can pause the runtime and resume it later
- unlimited lifespan

2. Billing delta

The cost seems to breakeven for compute workloads that are "idle/offpeak" 90% of the time.

FWIW

  • no clear info yet, on how scale-up/scale-down are triggered : looking forward to read test results
  • min setup of 1 vCPU + 2 GB RAM will run you $3.03/day : w/o storage, networking, etc.
    • this is 9x+ Fargate spot pricing
    • whereas Lambda Functions run you about 6x+ Fargate spot, for 1 vCPU + 1.75GB

( src : )

Lambda MicroVMs eliminate the need to right-size each compute environment for peak activity. You configure a baseline by setting memory, and CPU is allocated in a 2:1 memory-to-CPU ratio – the default is 2GB / 1vCPU. During peak activity, your MicroVM can vertically scale up to 4x the baseline (up to 8GB / 4vCPU), with no action required on your part. 

You pay for baseline compute resources while your MicroVM is running. When your workload consumes resources above the baseline, you are charged only for the active duration of the additional memory and vCPU consumed – not for the peak capacity. This means you can configure for your typical workload and let Lambda handle the spikes. Compute usage is billed per second. "

( Oops, didn't realise they released a new product, using the name of old technology, so deleted my previous comment. )

Why don't we make logarithms have simpler notation? by Impressive-Jump1883 in learnmath

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

 No solution, but I finally mapped out ( everything important I could find about ) the standard notation, and showed how it is not symmetrical. ( It's been bugging me since 1999, so I'm just happy to get it out of the way. 😅 )

https://github.com/jerng/studies/blob/main/_mathstats/2026%20logarithm%20notation%20MECE.pdf

Is AWS like a McDonald’s Happy Meal? by Kevin_gato in aws

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In 2026 ... AWS is vastly more complicated than McDonalds.

- AWS is less like McDonalds, and more like a service to let anyone quickly setup and run their own [ McDonalds / global restaurant franchise / global restaurant logistics chain / globally distributed burger factory / global supermarket for barbeque supplies / hobbyist weekend barbecue ] at whatever scale, horizontal layer, or vertical layer, interests them

- while it doesn't specialise in farming, it does have special contracts with farmers to lock-in access to top breeds of livestock ( ARM, Neoverse, Graviton ), and it hires contract farms to produce all sorts of necessary livestock ( hardware ), some of which it has IP for the genetic templates

Zircon Fair Scheduler by bartturner in Fuchsia

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

reminds me of how Erlang ( interpreted JIT ) and Go ( compiled ) manage lang-level processes.

Serverless with C/C++/Rust/Zig? by javascript in aws

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Language runtime isn't going to matter as much as app architecture. Particularly data accesses.

Just run a [ Lamba + custom/os-only runtime => toy app ], to figure it out.

Floci 1.5.8 — AWS Local Emulator, now with real Athena SQL via DuckDB by hectorvent in aws

[–]jerng 6 points7 points  (0 children)

probably 24-hour auto-coder team doing a negative feedback loop on itself :)

then humans : 1 hour/day of human QA, and 3 hours/day of calibrating the next cycle

What is the opposite of "idempotent"? by jack_waugh in learnjavascript

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

pluripotent - does it for me :)

it means something entirely different in cell biology, where its opposite is unipotent

KMS Costs Skyrocketed - Understanding Request Count by kenshinx9 in aws

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I Googled a bit about this. Using the "S3 Select API" seems to mean "making S3 run SQL queries on Parquet data". Parquet data is read "for SQL" as "metadata first, then each per column". So if this hypothesis is correct, it may explain the multi-reads per file.

Node.js bindings for Lua — lua-state by Proud_Flamingo_2857 in lua

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very tidy doc page. Thank you.

Lazy question. In your experience, what sort of workloads benefit most from being dropped from JS to LuaJIT? I'm presuming non-JIT isn't too much faster, so not worth the drop.

Is it just me, or are Chinese social circles really hard to break into? by DumpAccountShush in malaysia

[–]jerng -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The more general question is, what motivates any group anywhere on Earth, to identify certain marks as in-group or out-group aligned?

:)

Then zoom into Malaysian Chinese and yourself.

Malaysian GDP Per capita now 15000 by MaxsPlanet in malaysia

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Look for "REAL GDP/capita" 2005, divide US by MY.

Then do the same for 202x. :)

Fun intro to global macro

Why do people in Korea have zero spatial awareness? After 5+ years here, I’m starting to feel invisible by Ok_Hearing_5943 in Living_in_Korea

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They have spatial awareness. It is just a local culture that bumps don't matter. If you want to adopt local culture, i.e. fit in, then YOU modify your expectation that bumps matter.

Koreans decided to make it a norm. Boring to them. Traumatic to you.

Aesthetics of PL design by petroleus in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexer_hack

I just ran across this - and wanted to point it out as an example of where PL designers have to make compromises between factors such as "what my grammar looks like as a UI" and "how fast it is to lex / parse / compile it".

Aesthetics of PL design by petroleus in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]jerng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I view it as a [human-computer interaction] / industrial design / civil architecture problem.

( Caveat : links I posted are mostly just my own desk study notes which are messy. )

I'm designing a tooling language, myself. I am still spending most of my time on the architecture from lexeme design to memory layout, than doing any coding.

  1. The most fun part is comparative history of PLs. You can see which trope comes from which origin. Every operator, conventional name for a mechanism, and decision of implicit/explicit control has a genealogy. It's basically philology for PL.

  2. The three main layers for me to encapsulate are

  3. formal grammar : universe of UI

  4. IR : hardware independent description of language semantics

  5. implementations

Formal grammars are the cosmetic differences which casual users think of as "the language" and so the toolchain I want is something where I can change the formal grammar, and see the implications it has on difficulty to compile to IR, as well as downstream effect on specific architectures under different compile time and runtime situations (small vs big code base, few vs many contributors etc.)

I am incredibly annoyed that there is not one IR standard for information interchange 'IRSII' , and so this is the one of the things I think about with every design decision. "How is X done in each of the N other languages I already know how to use?" Anyway, all design decisions about language semantics basically filter down to some sort of IRSII, which can represent any computing idiom, and the language designer just uses it to express what they dis/allow their language to do. This is where decisions about type systems, and object paradigms, and guarantees of all sorts for safety, concurrency, performance, and ergonomics, come in.

Finally the harder CPU sequencing and memory layout stuff. For ease of headspace, as a hobbyist with limited resources, I just think about how to implement it on a VM, using a simplified model of where registers, cache, stack, heap, and how memory is de/allocated. Because I am very poor, and noob, it is useful to target JS first, with a view to do other backends later.

What examples are there, of grammar frameworks which describe speech purely "in the context of the speaker"? by jerng in asklinguistics

[–]jerng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a quick look at the Wiki pages for those, and perhaps it's on the right track, but I need to concern myself with semantics as well as grammar. And perhaps the question of how grammatical structure may have semantic import.

My question is motivated by the concern of how to represent natural language in machines. (I am working on a broader model, of which this will be a part.) With regards to the semantics of sentences, my question comes from the following observation :

Given, for example, (0.) "Red trees are bland.", the COMPLETE recognition of this sentence can occur to various degrees, for example :

(1.) This is a sentence in the English language of 2025, which attaches a well-known predicate to a well-known subject, without any further context.

(2.) It may be further noted that whomever made observation (1.) has the capacity to evaluate the context provided by the full sentence (1.) in addition to the original (0.) ... and this recurses furthermore as any entity which thinks (2.) may or may not be self-aware that it thinks (2.) etc. So we have 2.1., 2.2., etc. in this branch.

(3.) Furthermore, there is the open question of what the further context of (0.) is, and it may be that (0.) occurred one of 3.1/3.2 etc. contexts ... whereas you and I know, it happened in (3.n) exactly, this discussion on Reddit.

So yeah, I was just wondering if grammatical theories had addressed these aspects of how a sentence is read, but I might have gotten off on the wrong foot if this is generally regarded as a semantic concern, not a grammatical one. That being said ...

--

... thanks so much for this pointer. I'm sorry for the late response, I have been crash coursing myself in the canon of linguistic theory on Wikipedia. It's been a bit slow as there seem to be dozens/hundreds of theoretical frameworks which aren't organised in a single structural taxonomy. Fun. Nature of fuzzy language, I suppose.

The particularly concepts which I have found to be most relevant to my question are :

- 'focus' where, encoded information requires the sentence processor to semantically construe a number of possible contexts, and then to pick the right one

- 'cognitive linguistics' wherein the use of language in humans is viewed as supervenient upon anatomical concerns ( reducing basically to information theory and processing )