DoomHotel's comments

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

Peter Watts covered the possibility of "zombie" intelligences pretty well in his novel Blindsight. One thing I took from it is that such an intelligence could not possibly behave exactly like a human being, because a lot of what we do as humans involves interaction with other humans where we have a mental model of their consciousness being much like our own. Expressing sympathy toward another person, for example, would be inconceivable without consciousness.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Generating JSON Directly from Postgres

Postgres (>11) also implements the SQL/JSON path language that lets you extract table data from JSON.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: TypeScript's Type System Is Turing Complete (2017)

Using the type system to implement a Natural Numbers Object[1] is pretty clever. Doing math with it is not exactly efficient, but it does prove it works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_numbers_object

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: PostgreSQL, Memory and the Cloud

The kernel uses the sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure to determine whether to evict cache vs. process memory.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Being Poor (2005)

Sam Vimes's $10 boots have become the 800 dollar cars in that article.

But cars are optional if you live somewhere with working mass transportation.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Ampere switching to in-house CPU designs

RISC-V International's plan to give away 1,000 boards to developers seems like a good idea. I like some of the products I've seen but the cheap ones are just toys and the decent ones are way overpriced.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: U.S. has almost 500k job openings in cybersecurity

The US government's official numbers for 2019 [1] only show 131k jobs for "information security analysts" and they project 171k by 2029. The total for computer, network and database administrators is only around 500k.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Getting Started with Org Mode (2016)

Nobody likes Monty Python references?

I guess I shoulda known, my Simpsons one got downvoted too. Well, lessons learned, I guess.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Getting Started with Org Mode (2016)

I think it'd be more appropriate if the post bore a great red label: 'WARNING: EMACS!!!'

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Overcoming Tab Overload

Yes, same here. "Close Tabs to the Right" gets used a lot. If there's anything I want to keep I either pin it or drag it all the way to the left first.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Would you rather work 4 days per week for 80% salary?

I negotiated a deal at a former employer where I worked 4 x 9.5 hour days with Wednesdays off. I took a 5% pay cut and lost a proportional amount of vacation time. I kept my benefits but had to pay a slightly higher share for my contribution to the health care plan. It worked out very well—I especially liked having Wednesdays to run errands when government offices and banks etc. were open.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: EU citizens arriving in UK being locked up and expelled

> unrestricted immigration

I'm in the USA and this polemical strawman is standard fare on Murdoch's Fox News. It's just a lazy way of dismissing the issue without real discussion.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: EU citizens arriving in UK being locked up and expelled

You should be very glad you did not move to the UK. The Home Office has a backlog of 320,000 unprocessed applications for residency status, according to a recent Guardian article. [1] These people will be in legal limbo with no right to remain in the UK after June 30th if the backlog is not cleared.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/10/eu-citizens...

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: EU citizens arriving in UK being locked up and expelled

This week's Brexit & Beyond [1] mentioned this and I forgot to follow up on the link, so thank you. Performative cruelty for the masses while the Government talks up the great and wonderful success that is Brexit is only to be expected, I guess.

[1] https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/parallel-un...

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Vulnerability allows cross-browser tracking in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Tor

Wow, it didn't work at all on my desktop. It thinks I have 23 apps from its list installed, on both Firefox and Chrome. Pretty funny seeing that on a Linux box running CentOS 7. Even better, it detects a different app on each as the only one missing: on Firefox it says I don't have Skype installed, while on Chrome it says I don't have Hotspot Shield installed.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: A pair of memory-allocation improvements in Linux 5.13

The Sun RPC code had a loop where it allocated one page at a time and filled an array with the returned pointers. The article says there was a 500% performance improvement after replacing the loop with a single call to the batch allocator. (While RPC can be thought of as networking code, it is more than just network packet flow.)

There are probably other places where this will help. Now that the interface is available, developers can start trying it.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over (2020)

Do you hate your feelings and try to run away from them?

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

My inherent cynicism leads me to believe the real reason they shut down the pipeline was because the attackers took down the accounting system.

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: No, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto

Is this title trying to riff on "No, it is the children who are wrong"?

DoomHotel | 4 years ago | on: No, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto

Figure 2 in that article, illustrating a constant-width figure with three sides (a Reuleaux triangle), reminded me of a science fiction story from long ago. I finally found the title: it's "The Three-Cornered Wheel" by Poul Anderson. A spaceship crew on an alien planet needs to transport something heavy but the natives worship circles and won't let them use cylindrical rollers. They eventually find a solution that satisfies everyone.