lovidico

A trend at the moment is to just hope for the best in cubesats and other small satellites in LEO. If you’re below the radiation belt it’s apparently tenable. I worked somewhere designing satellite hardware for LEO and we simply opted to use consumer ARM hardware with a special OS with core level redundancy / consensus to manage bit flips. Obviously some problems will present for AI there… but there are arguably bigger problems with AI data centres like the fact that they offer almost no benefit with respects to the costs of putting and maintaining stuff in space!

Further to this, you can trivially observe two further LLM weaknesses: 1. that LLMs are bad at weird syntax even with a complete description. E.g. writing StandardML and similar languages, or any esolangs. 2. Even with lots of training data, LLMs cannot generalise their output to a shape that doesn’t resemble their training. E.g. ask the LLM to write any nontrivial assembler code like an OS bootstrap.

LLMs aren’t a “superior intelligence” because every abstract concept they “learn” is done so emergently. They understand programming concepts within the scope of languages and tasks that easily map back to those things, and due to finite quantisation they can’t generalise those concepts from first principles. I.e. it can map python to programming concepts, but it can’t map programming concepts to an esoteric language with any amount of reliability. Try doing some prompting and this becomes agonisingly apparent!

How can a language both be human-unfriendly and also sanely auditable? The types of issues that require human intervention in LLM output are overwhelmingly things where the LLM depends on the human to detect things it cannot. Seems to break the loop if the human can’t understand well

Strings are u8 arrays only? Gulp. Who needs Unicode right?

“C is a low level language” … sigh.

Rust is supported by the [seL4 Microkit](https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/rust/), which is the core framework enabling LionsOS. LionsOS can currently run components written in Rust, and there are some WIP drivers written in Rust in the seL4 Device Development framework (judging from pull requests).

From their verification roadmap, it sure seems generous to refer to this as “formally verified”. They don’t prove anything important about the kernel clearly at all. Seems very disingenuous to describe it as they do since it lacks any of the merits of other formally verified kernels like seL4 and Tock.

Standards sure have dropped. I saw a new iPad mini in store, on display, and it simply couldn’t run the home screen without stuttering and visible frame rate drops! At least in my mind, this seems like a transgression from Apple’s former standards and that’s before the accessibility and visual challenges new iOS has.

Definitely a microbenchmark and probably wouldn’t be generally representative of performance. This page gives pretty good standards for OS benchmarking practic, although admittedly geared more for academia https://gernot-heiser.org/benchmarking-crimes.html

Fair enough, I’m not familiar with the rules.

My experience comes from actually writing the ports as opposed to using it in other places. I’ve gotten issues like the UDP checksum generation breaking in the raw API at higher speeds or DHCP packets managing to come out corrupted, and in both cases I fixed it by just replacing the code that’s responsible. I’m not claiming this is representative of anything in general however, these are all for somewhat esoteric networking analysis in an academic setting. It definitely works well when you just use it as intended on microcontrollers however and I’ve never had issues when I’m not doing awful things to it :)

What’s the news value of this? LWIP is the most popular embedded network stack and has been around for ages. It also is awful to use and riddled with undocumented issues (in my experience, anyway)

The author of this article evidently is ignorant to the current state of the world. Simply having the existence of a group become no longer illegal doesn't mean that rights are guaranteed at all. Groups advocating for women's and LGBTQI rights have continued to exist despite advances because groups working to undo everything they have achieved also continue to exist. There is obvious evidence of this - women's and LGBTQIA rights have gone backwards definitively both in the US and UK and are unambiguously in a much worse state than they were 10 years ago.

This is quasi-intellectual bullshit written by a contrarian who fails to identify that social systems are dynamic, and evidently has a bias informing this (cough cough, certain pejorative terms throughout). This is spun as some sort of centrist triumph, but this is really the true voice of regression - if we stop advocating for the rights of groups who actively have their rights under attack by others, they will simply lose whatever has been achieved.

It is a somewhat interesting point w.r.t. the Dimes syndrome itself in whatever limited cases it might actually apply, however I would argue that this article is working overtime to misappropriate the term to advocate for silencing progress (while not ever implying that anti-rights groups should be seen the same).