oldgeezr

Just curious, is there a good site/book/etc to learn how the modern internet actually works? As a lowly programmer, I have a good understanding of network communications, and some knowledge of things like routing protocols, but I'm completely lost when it comes to understanding how the modern internet actually functions. Thanks!

A friend of mine is playing with neural networks and training them to play reversi. He's working with a lot of matrices so he tried AVX extensions and CUDA. AVX runs circles around CUDA, probably because of the setup time of moving things back and forth to the GPU. Also, CUDA can be a big pain in the ass to get working.

If that's your audience, then you should give them a library/framework/language that hides all the complexity. I'm currently spending a lot of time working on Python Tornado stuff on an embedded device, and I can say that the lack of threads does not substantially reduce the number of ways you can screw things up.

There are many answers to your question but for starters:

- There is no perfect security. There is a notion of raising the expense of piracy to a level that it effectively does not matter.

- IIRC, for instance, rooted Android loses support for... Widevine? So you can't really use Netflix on a rooted device where you could easily steal frames from the video buffer. Yeah, you can rig up a nice camera system and record analog off the display. Nothing they can do about that. They also may insert watermarks to let them know who recorded it.

Oh gee I guess I'm a wizard.

Lots of systems/embedded programmers roll their eyes at this kind of talk. Threads aren't really that hard.

Event queues do have benefits in certain situations. They pair nicely with state machines. You can easily end up in callback hell though, and it is often difficult to integrate some long-running, atomic tasks into your event loop. You end up doing things like having a thread pool, at which point you have to wonder why you stopped using threads in the first place. Oftentimes a threaded approach is a cleaner approach. Just get the locking granularity right - it's not that difficult.

Visual disturbances affected my ability to read books for years. I am no longer a speed reader thanks to psychedelics. For years after my first big trip, walls breathed and floor tiles became 3d. It is hard to be indifferent to such things.

My set going into the trip was that I was expecting to have a great time with friends. I was young and very positive towards psychedelics. I did not have a 'bad trip'. The effects came later.

I have permanent visual disturbances and suffered long-term panic attacks and anxiety as a result of psychedelic use. Things got better over time, but not completely back to normal. I'm not advocating for the continuation of our current legal strategy, but I feel like these drugs need to come with strong cultural wisdom about their appropriate use and potential for abuse.

Anyone who's been in a psychedelic community for long(stoners, deadheads, etc) knows at least a few people who have been temporarily(1 day - 1 year) or permanently fried from having experienced one or many trips. I feel like there is often a backlash against our regressive legal approach which tends to accentuate the positives and diminish the negatives but really we need information. These drugs can permanently change your personality in some ways that will generally not be seen as positive. Yes, they can have many good effects but that comes with a small risk of extreme side effects.

> two years ago

Ok, so let us know how it goes in 20 years.

I can only speak from my experience with Amazon. I sent a resume in for a job at Lab126 since I'm an embedded guy with an EE background, no CS except 21 years doing embedded software. I never heard from Lab126, but the AWS team got back to me. After failing to pass all the test vectors of the coding test, they gave me a phone interview. I did OK at best. They flew me up for an interview and proceeded to ask me CS algorithm questions on a whiteboard for 6 hours. I didn't get the job(and probably would have turned it down otherwise, since it involved being on-call), but it surprised me that their screening process was so bad. Nowhere on my resume did I indicate having any knowledge of CS algorithms, yet it was seemingly vital for the role. Strangely enough, I did study up on virtualization implementations(KVM/Xen), but no one asked me a single question about that(despite it being listed as vital on the job description).

Working on new projects every couple of weeks would be fun.

Learning a new set of APIs, version control strategies, team members, platform peculiarities, build systems, bug reporting and issue tracking software, groupware... fuck that. I could sort of do it when I was in my early 30s but not now.

It's an interesting way of looking things. Depression is as complex as the brain which produces it, however. This may be a part of it, but there are many pieces in that puzzle.

> They’re particularly ideal for embedded systems.

While I agree, I think this promotes the idea that they're only good for embedded systems, especially small ones. State machines are not always the right tool for the job... only most of the time :)

State machines(or DFAs for you CS guys) are used all over. For instance, AFAIK, grep is generally implemented with a state-machine, albeit one which is dynamically constructed at run-time(which is a pretty cool concept if you ask me).

Is there a consensus on the cancer risks of fermented foods like kimchi yet? Last I saw, some types of kimchi were associated with stomach cancer while some were not, but I'm not sure.

Lately I do a lot of pickling with vinegar/salt/sugar. I'm now addicted to pickled daikon. If I could only find a container capable of restraining the smell...

What stops Google from forming a shell corp to handle government contracts? They can profit off the shell corp while allowing them unfettered, royalty free access to their internal technology. They can staff the shell corp with smart people who aren't anti-government, and even continue to employ them at Google so no one knows what's going on.

+1

From the author's page:

> I work at MIT trying to make program transformation and synthesis tools easier to build

So, the author works in an academic environment. He doesn't have to deal with real-world code, budgets, bugs, teammates, etc. Please take his coding advice with a grain of salt.