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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#421

Post by cryptonector »

pulse7 wrote: post #56

How is information in this blog related to Wikipedia article on DTrace [1] where one can read "DTrace is ... originally created by Sun Microsystems" and "Original author(s): Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro (Sun Microsystems)"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace

Bryan, Adam, and Mike created DTrace.

Brendan was the most amazing and prolific user of DTrace, from very early on. Brendan did not create DTrace, but in a sense he "made DTrace" what it is. And not just DTrace, but eBPF.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#422

Post by cryptonector »

nailer wrote: post #301

> It was something I and my consulting colleagues had run into before: The belief at Sun that only Sun could make good use of its own technologies, and anything created outside of Sun was trash. Yep. See Sun's response to the Linux SPARC maintainers technical critique of Solaris for SPARC. Meanwhile at Red Hat we started hiring all the ex-Sun people that had been pushing for x86 internally at Sun and gotten frustrate…

A lot of us at Sun in the Solaris org had no love for SPARC. Sun made a very typical and terrible mistake: it sat on its laurels. Sun created some awesome things then tried to lock-in and milk customers. Sun (and later Oracle) did this with SPARC and J2ME, among others. All the products they did this with are as good as dead today in terms of market share -- surprise!

Vendor lock-in is not great for the customer, but when you try to milk the customers, you end up risking taking them to the FYO point [0], and that is catastrophic for the vendor, and the vendor never sees it coming and can't help themselves.

Sitting on your laurels is not good. Don't do it. Innovate. Then innovate some more. Then never stop innovating.

  [0] Let me google that for ya: https://www.google.com/search?q=fyo+point

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#423

Post by harshalizee »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #360
TimPC wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your favourite question has some cultural gaps as in many countries in interview settings people downplay weaknesses and flaws. It’s why a lot of weakness questions are often ineffective. Unless you are acutely aware of when a person is doing this BECAUSE it’s an interview you’re going to get some answers that might lead you to reject good candidates.

Amazon thinks otherwise. This is their Earn Trust Leadership Principal: "Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best." [1] [1] https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

Amazon's "principles" is also just that, corporate shpiel. 100% of Amazon employees, including Jeff Bezos, would fail if they were actually tested against their own dogma.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#424

Post by brendangregg »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #383
brendangregg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. There was a time when many observability products were adding latency heat maps, and at one conference expo floor there were three companies with latency heat maps on their screen at the same time, pitching them as a flagship feature. If I walked near them they'd start trying to explain them to me, and I never figured out an appropriate response. If I said "hey, great to see you added them, I invented these b…

> If I said "hey, great to see you added them, I invented these back at Sun" I'd get funny looks. I don't understand. What kind of funny looks were they? Disbelief? Distrust? Fear of your mental health? Realization of having been lied to by their bosses (oops it wasn't really an internal tool)? Also, what were the impact of those funny looks? How did they make you feel? Was there any longer term consequences of telli…

Disbelief and suspicion. And fear of my mental health I guess: What's wrong with this person?

Maybe I just don't look or dress or sound like what one would expect. But there's context here too: At the time it's when these things are flagship features and on the booth monitors, and the booth staff are explaining the virtues of these features to everyone they meet. They are making it a big deal of it at the time, so maybe that makes it even more unbelievable that the inventor would wander by at that moment.

Now imagine what would happen if companies had a thanks page along with the other boilerplate pages (contact us, about us) on their website. If you're making millions from a thing, thank the original person for that thing. (I put thanks pages at the end of my slide decks, it's not hard.) These interactions would go a lot better -- "my name is on your company website" -- and could lead to fruitful discussions and collaboration instead of weird looks.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#425

Post by scrollaway »

cperciva wrote: post #49

Reminds me of when Apple started providing "smaller size updates" to OS X. I was curious about the details since my doctorate had touched on the topic, so I worked my contacts (I had a few in Apple engineering from the FreeBSD / OS X relationship) and after a few months I got back as answer: "We're using a tool called bsdiff, are you familiar with it?" I was indeed, since I was the author of said tool. (Just to be cl…

I first encountered bsdiff when working on reverse engineering Blizzard MPQs (their proprietary packaging format, long abandoned now in favour of other stuff). They started using it for mpq patches some time in … 2007 I want to say? I was 16, had just started to code.

10-ish years later, I'm doing other stuff but still working with Blizzard-related tooling sometimes. I was talking to a Battle.net engineer about their latest-and-greatest game update protocols. He tells me they're thinking of adopting this great thing called bsdiff for the next version. I giggled a bit.

Anyway, hi! I implemented a version of your algorithm when I still barely knew wtf I was doing. https://github.com/jleclanche/python-ptch

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#426

Post by wst_ »

Could anyone, please, share some light on the "low-key" introduction issue mentioned in the article?

I work quite a few years in IT and never, during any interview or meeting, I've been introduced as anything more than just an engineer. This must be cultural gap, no doubt, but I'd feel weird if someone would detailed my career in front of other participants. Of course I have nothing against filling some details in by myself but only if applicable in given situation. Truth to be told I've never worked in Australia or US, but I did some job in two EU countries and in Japan and, as said, never encountered detailed introduction.

Is this still a thing?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#427

Post by nix23 »

kbelder wrote: post #399
nix23 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some places only require one party (you the recorder) to consent Some places...nord Korea? You the recorder have to consent?? I consent to myself that i record others without their knowledge?

Oregon.

Oregon...Australia...that says everything...

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#428

Post by nix23 »

cge wrote: post #314
nix23 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some places only require one party (you the recorder) to consent Some places...nord Korea? You the recorder have to consent?? I consent to myself that i record others without their knowledge?

Laws around recording typically also cover cases where an outside person, who isn't a party in the conversation, is recording. The idea is that there are three possibilities: all parties in the conversation consent to recording, one of the parties consents (almost certainly the person who wants the recording), and none of the parties consent (ie, someone is spying on the conversation). One-party consent is legal in a…

That's not what he said...if everyone consent that's called a interview.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#429

Post by yuppiemephisto »

cperciva wrote: post #345
yuppiemephisto wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with that phrasing. A lot of people on that thread seemed sure cperciva was some arrogant dickhead bound for failure, but tarsnap is going a lot stronger than many of them are. Also people in the thread were amazingly rude to him, while he seemed pretty polite to me.

I think you're giving cperciva too much credit. He was just as arrogant as people thought, and he was definitely defensive.

TIL. Sounded reasonable to me, so quite likely I'm arrogant too.

Tarsnap's still there though, so I'd say that's a good defense.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#430

Post by mewse »

maccard wrote: post #192
mewse wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. Instead, we just pack the uncompressed files together (frequently using normal zip in a no-compression mode) so that we can avoid needing to ask the OS to open and close files for us or examining the contents of a directory, both of which can be kind of startlingly slow (by video game standards) on some common OSes. I…

> We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. _You_ mightn't but the last three AAA games I worked on do/did. PS5 expectes compressed files, and does HW decompression (ahem, mostly) on the fly.

Oh, definitely! I haven’t worked on anything targetting a console past the PS3 generation and it completely slipped my mind that the latest gen consoles are architected specifically for streaming compressed data.

On the Windows/Mac/Linux title I’m working on now, I definitely measure a sizeable improvement to performance when loading from an uncompressed zip rather than from a compressed one. But even that could be down to the particular set of libraries I’m using to handle it.

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