Viewing profile — natnat

What a depressing outcome. This could have powered hundreds of thousands of households, cheaply, without adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.

It's the severance cost, mostly.

This really isn't true. You should use different parameters (specifically, you can reduce the random_page_cost to a little over 1) on a SSD but there isn't a really compelling reas…

Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to…

I think this has a lot to do with the mechanism of RoPE attention, where physical closeness in the code is a signal of relevance.

This reminds me of the "Natural engagement pattern" sketch that Mark Zuckerberg made about facebook content back in 2018: https://www.facebook.com/notes/751449002072082/ Content ge…

I remember software working really badly in the early 2000s, when Microsoft had an unassailable monopoly over everything. Then there were a bunch of changes: Windows started gettin…

Can someone link to a real source for this? Like, a paper or something? This seems very interesting and important and I'd prefer to look at something less sketchy than venturebeat.…

> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but …

You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really…

Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.

I don't honestly think that technology is meaningfully downstream of money. A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. Most o…

Starlark is nice but Google also has GCL...

Nuclear is really terrible at peak loads; it's a very reliable base load. It's basically impossible to quickly increase or decrease the output of a nuclear plant.

The PISA scores are below average in 2022 but not significantly so. Most countries have had a pretty bad decline in test scores due to covid, but that's (hopefully) a one-time prob…

I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US scho…

In what world is the US education worse-than-third-world? The US has universal literacy, phenomenal higher education institutions, and primary and secondary schools that are compar…

This is insane conspiratorial thinking? How would being the only host that happens to get DDOSed constantly be a good business proposition?

We use a kind of funky BigQuery setup at my shop to reduce our spend, and I think it's based on a quirk in BigQuery pricing that Google doesn't explicitly recommend. BigQuery has t…

If you don't want to do very much, you can try adsense. If nothing else you'll get a good sense of what the floor is.

PAPERCLIP

There was a really good episode of the Odd Lots podcast where they discussed this. Arizona is a very favorable location for semiconductor fabs because there's a very low risk for n…

As an xoogler, I don't agree at all. Google has a ton of problems, but a reluctance to think deeply about and fix tech debt isn't one of them. In fact, I think the eagerness to fix…

Completely! I'm not trying to disparage the progress that's being made. This is a great start, I just wanted to make it clear that there's a long way to go :)

This is great, but keep in mind this is like a third derivative metric. North America is way behind China in number of batteries owned, batteries produced, and factories being buil…