Building a swap device at user level used to be one of those classic unsolvable problems, because what if your daemon needs to swap in a page in order to swap in a page? Or at least it was discussed at a reason why microkernels will never work. I’m not sure what the solution is here.

Your daemon can be smart enough to know which are its own pages and prevent them from being swapped out. The Linux kernel also prevents its own text pages from being swapped out, so the solution exists and I don’t see why it doesn’t apply to microkernel designs.

The general principle is that what is involved in paging should not be paged itself. Wiring the memory of that whole daemon is then a trivial solution to the problem.

There's a package to do this in Julia: https://juliaarrays.github.io/StructArrays.jl/stable/

There are still things you can't do with an open-weight model without the training data, like modifying the architecture and training from scratch. That's different from true open-source code, where you can do anything the authors could do.

Linux on Arm works great. I barely notice the difference except everything is a bit faster. Most SaaS companies can and should switch.

Yes, for example taking off or landing a rocket on the surface blasts particles of sand out sideways at 1000s of m/s. The particles can fly in the thin atmosphere for kilometers and sandblast everything. Our intuitions about how far and fast tiny things can fly are only true in an atmosphere of similar density.

Your intuition about how far sand particles can fly at high velocity in the Martian atmosphere is way off base…

While he is exaggerating a bit, the problem still remains - dust can be deadly to equipment because the grains will move way faster. You also have the problem of dust particles colliding and becoming charged with nothing to dump the charge to. A human habitat has to hold positive air pressure, which means that it has to generate its oxygen or get it from the atmosphere.

If we don't have the experience of buildings stuff on earth where we can test things, we sure as shit not gonna be able to do it on Mars.

But in fact no modern processor/OS executes this either. Pages are marked as executable or not, and static data is loaded as non-executable pages.

that is why it was not "static const char buf[]" ;) it was not an accident

executable stacks are still common (incl on windows with some settings), and sometimes they are required (eg for gcc nested functions)

That won't be located on the stack either. The underlying buffer will be a TU local - ie static and not rx

Good grief, what a useless argument. Isn't it obvious that this could trivially be converted to a non-static array if that's really what was needed?

If you are going to be pedantic, at least be fully pedantic.

I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay.

It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.

Yes, I noticed and appreciated the sloporific (great word!) quality, too :) I stopped midway for a sec to try and figure out an image, then eventually realized they were just getting more nonsensical on purpose.

Or even worse, it gets fed back into the AI slop machine

Yes, the entire field of software engineering ran aground on not being able to test how well people can write software.

But I'm more optimistic about testing programming models. You can run repeated tests, and compare median performance. You can run long tests, like hundreds of hours, while getting more than a few humans to complete half-day tests is a huge project. And you can do ablation testing, where you remove some feature of the environment or tools and see how much it helps/hurts.

Field termination is necessary when the connectors are too large to pull through a conduit. But if they were USB-C sized, you could just pull fully assembled cables.

It also comes in very handy when you need a 8m cable, but only can buy them in lengths of 5m and 10m, or when you’re wiring an entire building, and figuring out which lengths to order up front is a major pain in the ass, certainly compared to ordering a few hundred meters of cable, a few hundred connectors and tools to put the two together. And that’s ignoring the price difference.

As a person who has installed hundreds of miles of cabling of every description inside of buildings of every description:

Every single time someone has provided pre-terminated cabling for one of my jobs to "save time" or to "make it easier", this provision has done neither.

Instead, it has consistently multiplied both the time required and the installation difficulty. It has done these things while also producing an inferior end result.

It is my anecdotal observation that it's NFG.

I have no idea what kind of cable it was, but the bloke who installed the control panel for my ducted air conditioning got the cable snake stuck in the wall cavity. He had to cut it and use a different snake. So there's a dead snake in my wall, and your comment brought this to mind.

It’s also about managing length and slack.

except those assembled cables will always be the wrong length.

You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.