luddy

I was very fortunate to have worked on Arvind's Monsoon project as a contractor for Motorola. He was the very model of what a professor ought to be: an active and outgoing researcher, an natural educator, a good organizer, and a lively, witty, and gracious man in public. What a loss.

The last time I saw him, at a dinner in Champaign IL around 2005, he told this joke, apropos of MIT's reputation for arrogance:

Someone called a faculty meeting at MIT and said, guys, we have a problem. People say that we're arrogant. We need to come up with some ideas for being less arrogant. Who has an idea?

One of the faculty members stood up and said, I know! I'll teach a course on humility!

The meeting organizer said that's a great idea! A course on humility is exactly what we need! And the meeting was adjourned.

At the end of the semester, a follow-up faculty meeting was called.

The organizer asked, so, what about our course on humility? Let's have a report about it.

The faculty member who taught the course stood up, and said:

We have the best g*d-damned course on humility!

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RIP Arvind.

rejecting for example Confucius Institutes at universities because they are promulgating an ideology that is diametrically opposed to the foundational principles of universities in the West -- open discussion without political interference -- is a principle and a principle that fits perfectly. Tsinghua would reject a program from the West that pushed principles that for example reject Maoism. It doesn't fit. Where's the mystery?

What you don't get (or try to spin away) is this:

- the money that China spends at Oxford and at US universities is an attempt to spread the ideology I describe

- inside China (I lived there for many years) there is ZERO ambiguity about the purpose of these soft power programs. it is only wumao working outside China who push the fiction that to object to propaganda programs that are focused on the West is to interfere in Chinese internal affairs.

- this has absolutely nothing to do with respecting the legacy of China inside its own borders. it is about a concerted "Unified Front" that is an open policy of the Chinese gov't and is being pursued using every manner of soft power or sometimes sharp power, but most especially money, outside the borders of China.

- block access to the (non-Chinese) internet - deny land ownership rights to everyone other than the gov't - routinely exercise this power by confiscating homes and plots of land - force the granting of CCP membership on corporate boards - penalize people for criticizing the government - including (sometimes permanent) house arrest - put an entire region of the country (Xinjiang) under permanent martial law

Look, chairman Xi isn't shy in saying that he regards Mao Zedong as his model, and that his goal is for ethnic Chinese inside and outside the mainland to line up single-mindedly behind Mao Zedong thought and, since he had it enshrined in foundational documents, Xi Jinping thought. You might not call that "dictatorship", but a lot of us do, and we don't welcome the concerted effort to export it to our countries. It's an aggressive and expansive ideology.

I know, I know: democracy and individual liberty is an aggressive and expansive ideology too. All that means is that the world is likely to square off over the distinction. As it should be.

That was a great compiler group. I had the privilege of doing a short internship there one summer. Remember Lisp/VM? Lots of good people there. And many great stories about Fran Allen as well.

>> Go has built-in mutable containers, and no const, yet they still use SSA.

Right, as you say, compilers are converging on SSA, and almost all languages have mutable containers. All it means is that there's a mismatch between the semantics of the IL and the semantics of the language. That's a fairly common situation; there are lots of semantics (like concurrency and associated memory consistency) that can't be captured in an IL as they occur in reality, in the language being compiled. It's just a thing that has to be worked around.

Yes, mutation of containers is definitely a problem. The natural semantics in SSA is something like container' = F(container, key, value). But of course this functional semantics straightaway diverges from the physical realization we expect as programmers, namely not a new thing called container', but the original container whose state has changed.

SSA is terribly overworked. It was a great formulation for certain compiler problems. To my mind, the problem for which it was perfectly suited was value numbering. Doing it in SSA form made it not only fast, but gave it a deeper power, as it became possible to easily "reach back" to deeper levels of input to an expression. But for a reason that's unclear to me, it was pushed into all kinds of applications where it's much less obvious that it's a good choice. Treating it as a programming language (lol) is, I guess, kind of the limit of wishful thinking about its universality.

It is a money laundering case. HSBC tipped off the US gov't to a transfer that was effectively made using a false identity, to a recipient that was on a sanctions list. The US has banking laws, just like China has. If Tim Cook goes to Bank of China on Nanjing Lu and lies to SAFE so that he can wire a lot of RMB out of China, then the Chinese authorities will apprehend him. It's not as mysterious as it is being made out to be. Maybe she will walk because she's a celebrity executive in China, and because her case has been spun to be all about competition between the US and China, but still: banking laws are banking laws, in the US, China, Hong Kong, Europe, you name it. If you don't want to be in danger of breaking them, don't use the banks in that country.

There are news reports suggesting that she was arrested for arranging bank transfers from banks in the US to Iran, using false identify for the sender of the funds. The further suggestion has been made that these transfers caused several US banks to be subjected to fines under the sanctions laws of the US. The timing makes it seems as though this is all about the trade war and Chinese technology, but it sounds to me as though it is a violation of US money laundering laws, and pertains to money transfers that originated on US soil. We will see, as details emerge.

This is great for SaaS startups. Auto-scaling of DynamoDB never really worked as well as one would like: too fiddly and inadequately responsive.

AWS Lambda@edge only supports the node.js runtime, so a comparison between workers and lambda@edge isn't so unreasonable; they have very similar execution models, I think.

I'm talking about using the Lambda@edge console to push a new, numbered version of a lambda function written in node.js. I have pushed 100s of versions in this way, and I would guess that the mean time until the new version begins running is on the order of one minute. By "begins running", I mean that the new version number appears in CloudWatch output.

No other changes to config.

The article says that pushing a new lamda@edge function takes 30 minutes. That has not been my experience. I routinely push lambda@edge versions from the AWS console and the new versions typically run within a minute or so. Have others seen anything like a 30 minute propagation delay?

Apple's SDK has an EULA that says it cannot be deployed on a server and made available as a service. Why can't mongo just create a license that says such a deployment requires a commercial license from them?