Viewing profile — jeff-davis

My friend once told me that physics formulas are like compression algorithms: a short theory can explain many data points that fit a pattern. If that's true, then perhaps AIs would…

Note that there are quite a few ways that crypto implementations can be insecure even if it's proven to be "correct" (in terms of inputs and outputs). For instance, it may leak inf…

Sincere question about communism: Let's say hypothetically that the distribution of stock ownership was more even across the population, and variance was largely (but not completel…

Longjmp is used by Postgres for transaction aborts. With C, there's not really a better option available.

"It is our responsibility to chose the right tool for the job." That perspective doesn't work well for database products, in my opinion. There is a huge pressure for databases to e…

Simon was one of the first people I met in the Postgres community, perhaps in 2007 at the first PGCon that I attended. We've attended many of the same conferences in places around …

What are the barriers to doing so?

"Plus, you don't give out your secrets to fabs, too." That's a perfect answer to my question, thank you. Also many other great answers in this thread, but I don't have much to add.…

What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?

It works. Bugs have been found, and some more bugs probably exist, but I think it meets a fairly high bar of quality.

Postgres is designed to recover on OOM in most cases.

Part of the theory is that abstract thought enables culture, and culture enables much faster adaptation than genetic evolution. But still far from instant. So maybe the abstract th…

I happen to be reading Sapiens right now. The author seems convinced that we genetically developed the ability for abstract thought (which he calls imaginary or fiction), and that …

Do you believe it was designed and standardized as a reasonably implementable feature?

It looks like Ada 2022 has a way to track at compile time whether functions block or not. Seems cool for async programming. http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22over/html/Ov22-2-2.h…

setjmp/longjmp exist in a lot of real world C code, so there is a lot of value in allowing rust to deal with longjmp in a defined way at least in some narrow cases. And I don't thi…

I'd be happy if there were a way to always unwind when a longjmp() happens, regardless of whether there are !Leak types on the stack.

The article addresses this: "However - and this is the big, enormous caveat of this section - this would rely on the compiler effectively implementing some kind of unbreakable fire…

Why do you say they'd have to be splattered over basically all rust code? The post compares them to Send and Sync, and I don't have to use those very frequently (though I don't wri…

The Leak trait could be interesting when it comes to C code that calls rust code that calls C code that might longjmp() over the rust code in the middle. Right now longjmp()ing ove…

Postgres has a free space map, which allows it to reuse the space of deleted tuples for new or updated tuples created in the same table. If no new/updated tuples are created in the…

What is the larger issue here? Why is this significant? It seems like a fine point within trademark law. It maybe sorta kinda has implications for parody speech? But even there, it…

"Enough profit they can fund efforts to tilt the system in their favor." That might explain things in the US, but worldwide? Why didn't some other country at some point run some st…

If you depend on the company making the chemical to do studies and be transparent about them, of course the reaction time will be bad. You need independent studies and environmenta…

If the chemicals are bad, and everywhere, we need a reaction time faster than 50 years. For new inventions (not well-known issues), it would be far better to be fast-reacting and n…