Posts by danluu@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AintbsoSd9lIV5jrPM by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-06-11T01:46:07Z
2 likes, 2 repeats
State of the art anti-cheat technique: Roblox detects if you have the string "x86dbg" in a window title (or window?), so kids are changing their display names and discord server names to x86dbg to get people kicked from Roblox.If you do a search for this, links to big discussions on Roblox forums return "Sorry that page is private", so I guess that's their solution to the problem?
(DIR) Post #Aj2nVvo2SS4AK0jimO by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-06-17T05:55:55Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
A discussion of discussions on AI bias:https://danluu.com/ai-bias/
(DIR) Post #AjdTlFxstW03HTSydE by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-07-05T23:16:04Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I feel like TeX is another example of https://x.com/danluu/status/1356056197963554816.People praise it for its simplicity and elegance, but then you look for how to do something simple like print a "~", and you get this horrible hack (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/9372/327326) which has been replaced by a "canonical answer" which is also a horrible hack that many people report doesn't work for them (https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/312/327326).This elegant canonical answer covers 3 cases (and doesn't work if you don't fall into one of the cases) and
(DIR) Post #AjdTlHYmxn78EDjxnE by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-07-05T23:21:01Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
for the common case of using Computer Modern, the canonical answer is to use the "textcomp" package and then write:\newcommand{\textapprox}{\raisebox{0.5ex}{\texttildelow}}So the answer is to use a "~" that's too low and then do this hackery which raises it to the right height, which only works for this specific font and also doesn't work if you have other (frequently necessary) hackery that conflicts with this?This is elegant like UNIX is elegant: https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/.
(DIR) Post #Ak6PYAJkoW56OlHc00 by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-07-19T21:50:11Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Will crowdstrike bricking all these computers have a significant long-term impact on the stock price?Or will this be like basically every other outage or breach, where "the market" quickly realizes that customers don't care and regulatory action isn't forthcoming, causing the stock to bounce back to its previous level?Context in reply because Mastodon doesn't let you include images and a poll in the same post.
(DIR) Post #Ak6PYBV8PgmM4LcDNQ by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-07-19T21:59:23Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
For people who haven't been following this, a Crowdstrike update has caused Windows boxes to persistently BSoD on boot. Some embedded devices don't have a nice remote recovery protocol and can't be recovered without basically sending the device to the factory or opening the device up and attempting to get some kind of unusual access that users aren't intended to have, which has caused problems for hospitals, factories, etc.There are some reports that repeated reboots may get past the BSoD.
(DIR) Post #AkHVtUclFKcJvIHlfU by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:08:11Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Since discourse employees are now dropping in to inform me that the Bing thing is fixed, with the implication that Bing was at fault because Bing fixed the issue.I know. The thing about the Bing issue is that, in response to Bing crawling at 0.5 QPS, leadership banned Bing and, in response to comments that this would cause problems, said things like "No, the nuclear option is what we want here."The justifications were that 0.5 QPS of crawler traffic was causing discourse to lose customers
(DIR) Post #AkHVtW31x9DyL3aGFk by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:12:25Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
because customers are charged so much for crawler traffic that they're leaving the platform.And also that if anyone wants to change it, it's trivial to change the defaults and Discourse has a lot of weight to throw around because people usually don't change defaults.Bing ended up fixing it because they were the adults in the room. When people pointed out that Discourse's change would cause problems for people, leadership responded with nonsensical angry comments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/handling-bingbot/84659/22.
(DIR) Post #AkHVtWNwhNxFNvMxqy by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:16:31Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Why not just not charge people for a trivial amount of crawler traffic? If the backend is decently fast, it should basically be free to eat the load and not charge customers for it (and yes, I know the 0.5 QPS was for one site and it will add up; even so). My CDN doesn't charge me for getting DDoS'd because that traffic isn't really "my fault" and that could easily be orders of magnitude more traffic than all crawler traffic for all crawlers across every discourse instance.
(DIR) Post #AkHVtX20IRztOA6xI8 by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:25:59Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Anyway, the same thing that fundamentally concerns me about the Bing issue is what concerns me about the responses from the founder about Android performance where, in response to comments about performance being bad on many Android phones, the founder has numerous rants about how the real problem is that Qualcomm sucks. He sometimes says the engineers are terrible at their jobs and deserve to lose their jobs.I did a quick Bing search to find some examples and he's still doing this in 2023.
(DIR) Post #AkHVtXdE43ltFbWgJE by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:35:35Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
The Apple CPU org has, along with DEC in the StrongARM & Alpha era, one of the best executing CPU design teams ever assembled (and not coincidentally, they share a lineage via DEC->SiByte->PA Semi->Apple) and Qualcomm is at, what, maybe 75%-95% of the single-core performance?If only managing to get to 75% to 95% of the performance of an all-time-great team makes you a clown you deserves to lose their job, man, I have news for you.Of course I don't agree with this —
(DIR) Post #AkHVtYFrkOgDBRbXXM by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:41:07Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I've repeatedly pushed back against Casey's rants on how the developers of X are bad because they don't produce code that's as fast his code. There are often reasonable reasons for slow codeBut if you're ranting about how people who are 75%-95% keeping up with an all time great team should lose their jobs while you're making slowest-in-class software, maybe 0.0001% of optimal, come on dudeIn response to customer issues, Discourse leadership has repeatedly written angry rants about a "vendor"
(DIR) Post #AkHVtYnBkVKoqnC9Tc by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T18:50:11Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Yeah, the Bing issue is fixed because Bing came from the Microsoft lineage/culture of fixing issues that impact end users even if the problem is obviously a technical or product issue that comes from outside of Microsoft.But in other cases, the "vendor" being ranted at either can't or won't fix the issue and end user gets stuck with the problem, although they do get some nice rants about how Qualcomm engineers deserve to lose their jobs, so at least there's that.
(DIR) Post #AkHVtZQBPWWinjRIG0 by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T19:08:31Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
BTW, the rants from Discourse leadership about how Qualcomm engineers are clowns who deserve to lose their jobs for not keeping up with Apple are a red herring.I find Discourse unusably slow on fast machines, like the massive workstation I used to do log analysis across all Twitter host logs.Discourse hijacks ctrl+F and its custom search is too slow to use on a fast dev box. Even if Qualcomm produced world-class workstation performance on mobile, that wouldn't be fast enough for Discourse.
(DIR) Post #AkHVtaFaKPdxN9ULNQ by danluu@mastodon.social
2023-09-14T21:35:11Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
A response from a co-founder and CTO of Discourse. CoolSure, everyone has a threshold for how much traffic is an attack. For easily cached traffic like this, maybe I'd start wondering about it at 10kQPS? 100k? If your threshold is 500/day = 0.006QPS or 1QPS, fine.But how does one reconcile this with the other founder's opinion that engineers who produce 75% of the performance of an all-time-great performance team are "brutally bad", "terrible at their jobs", and deserve to lose their jobs?
(DIR) Post #AkIeVVeQs04Mu5fLfs by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-07-25T06:58:48Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
What's up with execs complaining that people are using their website at objectively low rates?We previously discussed the CTO & CEO of Discourse ($21M raised) getting mad at 0.5 QPS, calling this "an attack", etc. : https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111064835112616061.Now, the CEO of iFixit (supposedly ~$50M/yr revenue) calls 11 QPS, "abuse", saying "you're tying up our devops resources", implying it's reasonable for a $50M/yr regularly viral web property to need significant intervention if traffic increases by 11 QPS.
(DIR) Post #AkIeVXlb0KzJSt267M by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-07-25T07:13:51Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I guess this is the flip side of those ads you see at the airport which say something like "We TWO MILLION transactions per day", as if it's inherently impressive that some random company can handle 20 QPS.BTW, I find the 2nd complaint the guy has at least potentially defensible (maybe the courts will decide if it's legally valid or not), but the most viral complaint is ONE MEEEELION hits a day. Which just isn't a lot.
(DIR) Post #Akw9uWaDDVBmmGXMbw by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-08-13T21:33:44Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
A former Apple engineer discusses their Google culture shock experience:> My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ... several internal sites would ask you to file [a bug report] on why you switched to chrome [if you used chrome]. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices
(DIR) Post #AlARqLpHmrbje4Bbyy by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-08-20T19:10:22Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Is there a document / post out there that describes engineering levels with archetypes like "Fixer", "Generalist", "Specialist", etc.I thought, at one point, I saw one from Slack that seemed inspired by the Facebook levelling system, but I can't seem to find it. Am I misremembering where I saw this or what I saw or something?
(DIR) Post #AoTB3HurWHlQhQgtsW by danluu@mastodon.social
2024-11-22T22:41:22Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption, which eventually causes you to lose: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=135463.In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to move down and to the left so I couldn't stop other missiles.