Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author was also asking for money to buy a house in SF and travel on private planes like a few days ago..the donation must have really showed up if they are using 20k machines at home.
Do you have a link?
Restartable Sequences
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: Restartable Sequences
#22Maybe I'm just getting old but the "if you don't spend $20,000 on a workstation you're going to be left behind like a dinosaur" at the top of this article is a huge turn off to reading any further. And I say that as someone who owns a workstation with more cores than the author's.
The author was also asking for money to buy a house in SF and travel on private planes like a few days ago..the donation must have really showed up if they are using 20k machines at home.
> I have nothing against this person.
Your bad faith reading of that article says otherwise. It's bleedingly obvious that it's satire. Do you think people seriously ask for donations to fund a private airplane?
$20K of gear isn't that much if you're an independent developer, and if you're working for others as such in the US, and you're not a financial basket case, it's doable. She even says "It put me in the poor house for a few months" so she made sacrifices to get there. You can too, if you want to. Why the envy?
To the contrary, so you really seem to have a problem with her.
[references https://web.archive.org/web/20260529122658/https://justine.l... ]
Re: Restartable Sequences
#23Maybe I'm just getting old but the "if you don't spend $20,000 on a workstation you're going to be left behind like a dinosaur" at the top of this article is a huge turn off to reading any further. And I say that as someone who owns a workstation with more cores than the author's.
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Re: Restartable Sequences
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're being overly generous, they're saying you need at least a raspberry pi? You can see a 3x improvement there, which shows the pattern works, and that's good enough for a dinosaur (this interpretation is easier to justify if you just skim the article... Which I did the first time) But agreeing with you, I've done big optimization stuff for multicore servers (not as many cores, but same kind of work) and my work…
Yeah, you can rent an equivalent workstation from AWS for under $10/hour (and that's the on demand price) so I don't think cost is a huge barrier to doing this sort of work. The language and listing the prices of the workstations down to the penny just strikes me as a rather unprofessional way to communicate.
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Re: Restartable Sequences
#25Maybe I'm just getting old but the "if you don't spend $20,000 on a workstation you're going to be left behind like a dinosaur" at the top of this article is a huge turn off to reading any further. And I say that as someone who owns a workstation with more cores than the author's.
Go to the end. Those machines were provided by the companies discounted so she could continue her llm research. She's not saying "anyone who's anyone" has a 1024-core workstation these days.
Re: Restartable Sequences
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't really explain it though, IMO. IIUC, it's a sequence of instructions that either runs to completion atomically or doesn't. If it is interrupted by anything the kernel jumps you to the abort/retry vector you set with a guarantee that the last instruction in the sequence was not executed. (Based on my reading of the LWN article rwmj posted).
Yes, the API contract isn't "don't interrupt me during this critical section" it's "if you have to interrupt me during this critical section, go to this recovery/restart code". There is a time-slice extension feature in the works that's roughly "please let me finish this critical section before you interrupt me". But a hard guarantee that userspace code won't be interrupted is probably untenable in a preemptive multi…
Something not completely dissimilar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLSRing then?
Re: Restartable Sequences
#27If you had no idea what a restorable sequence is the takeaway is about halfway down the OP: “This is why Linux now provides rseq() which is a much more enlightened solution. With restartable sequences, you actually can get rid of both the mutex and atomics, while the OS continues to fully abstract scheduling. The way it works is you advise the kernel whenever your program enters a critical section of code that you do…
That doesn't really explain it though, IMO. IIUC, it's a sequence of instructions that either runs to completion atomically or doesn't. If it is interrupted by anything the kernel jumps you to the abort/retry vector you set with a guarantee that the last instruction in the sequence was not executed. (Based on my reading of the LWN article rwmj posted).
> it's a sequence of instructions that either runs to completion atomically or doesn't
The way I read it, it either runs to completion in one go, or gets restarted from the beginning. This means the sequence as a whole isn't executed atomically, as the already-executed instructions during an interrupt aren't rolled back.
It can be used to build atomic actions, but it is up to the developer to create a sequence of instructions where the very last instruction "commits" the entire operation, with the side-effects of partial execution being harmless.
Re: Restartable Sequences
#28Re: Restartable Sequences
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author was also asking for money to buy a house in SF and travel on private planes like a few days ago..the donation must have really showed up if they are using 20k machines at home.
> I have nothing against this person. Your bad faith reading of that article says otherwise. It's bleedingly obvious that it's satire. Do you think people seriously ask for donations to fund a private airplane? $20K of gear isn't that much if you're an independent developer, and if you're working for others as such in the US, and you're not a financial basket case, it's doable. She even says "It put me in the poor ho…
> $20K of gear isn't that much if you're an independent developer
Perhaps in the USA if you have a well-paid job at a MAMAA company ...
Re: Restartable Sequences
#30Maybe I'm just getting old but the "if you don't spend $20,000 on a workstation you're going to be left behind like a dinosaur" at the top of this article is a huge turn off to reading any further. And I say that as someone who owns a workstation with more cores than the author's.
The author was also asking for money to buy a house in SF and travel on private planes like a few days ago..the donation must have really showed up if they are using 20k machines at home.
She bought the workstation at a discount (see bottom of TFA).
Also, it was pre-2025 (before she got her job at Gradient Canopy), so long before asking for donations.
Finally, if you read the actual donation request, you can see she is trying to make a living doing open source, and is being honest about what the money is going to. Why is that an issue?