garbre's comments

garbre | 6 years ago | on: The Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure

I've tried OOM killers and thrash-protect. I've tried numerous tweaks to the vm and swap setting. Nothing works. Memory use gets into the 90%s and the system freezes, hard.

Nonetheless, I'm surprised someone is calling this a bug. Let's face it, Linux is just not a desktop operating system. It's a server operating system, and it expects that it will be professionally administered and tightly controlled to prevent OOM situations. That OOM situations occur on servers too is beside the point. There are reasons for the linux memory system to work as it does, reasons Linus will yell at you about if you complain.

garbre | 6 years ago | on: Simple RPC framework in 300 lines of Go

I haven't studied this extensively but it looks like a great bit of sample code for someone who wants to see how to do some networking in Go. I echo the other comments that find the use of a custom transport interesting, since writing a transport is one of those things that I've always been glad I haven't had to learn how to do, especially since I'm usually just using HTTP for which Go is very much batteries-included.

This whole thing raises the question though, is this hard to do in other languages?

garbre | 6 years ago | on: What Stress Does to the Brain

So they stimulated norepinephrine release in rats in an fMRI machine and they found it increased "activity" in sensory processing and the amygdala. Presumably it would increase "activity" in "higher" regions of the brain, except those only exist to a limited extent in rats.

For most humans, the question about stress is, "what is the effect of chronic stress?" which this paper did not answer. I'm sure it was still a good study, largely because it's demonstrating concrete mechanisms for things we think are happening anyway, but I can't confirm that because it's behind a paywall, like most publicly-funded research.

garbre | 6 years ago | on: How we built the Waifu Vending Machine

Frankly, I refuse to believe so many people on HN have the kind of scruples about or lack of exposure to this part of AmerOtaku culture. As such, I believe many of the comments are simply 2nd-degree trolling.

Also, the post title is misspelled. It's "building", not "builing".

garbre | 6 years ago | on: “10x engineers”: Stereotypes and research

Sad that people downvote without bothering to reply. To me, it sounds like you either don't like your product team in general, or they ignore your ideas for reasons of territoriality, or you're doing a bad job expressing your concerns to them.

Frankly, I don't see why an engineer would know what the customer wants better than a product manager. I do see how an engineer would know the kind of corners they most want to cut, and of course how any human would want to present their self-interest as the group's interest, but I don't know anyone's specific circumstances.

garbre | 6 years ago | on: Seattle Faces Backlash After Easing on Crimes Involving Mental Illness

This says a lot about a certain space within our current politics...

  Homelessness is a product of mental illness and shouldn't be criminalized... but let's not actually bother to treat these peoples' mental illness, either
I don't know if this is just wishful thinking or a product of shortsightedness and unthinking hostility towards "criminalization" and all it entails, but yes, this is where we end up.

To be clear, mental illness shouldn't be criminalized, but a lot of these people need either intense, voluntary support or in some cases to just be committed for their own good and the safety of others, especially when their mental illness is making them violent.

garbre | 6 years ago | on: How much bandwidth does the spinal cord have?

I reject the premise that the nervous system has "bandwidth" in a sense comparable to digital communications. Yes, nerves fire in discrete action potentials, but every step of nervous transmission also involves a processing step. Let's not forget: a huge benefit of neural nets is dimensionality reduction, which is at once compression but also the extraction and abstraction of salient information. Does this represent the gain or loss of information? It's a basically meaningless question; the question is how does the system as a whole work, and how well?

Nor is it clear what the endpoint of a communication is. This is another issue. Does information get counted twice if it's used by both unconsciously by the brainstem as well as rising into awareness and is used by the neocortex? The list of questions can go on.

This bandwidth thing is one of the questions I find frustrating, on par with people wondering if a simulated piece of brain has feelings (the answer is NO). Why is left as an exercise for the reader.

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