fiasco

joined 1 year ago
[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Setting aside stuff like Plan Nine and Manos and The Room and Birdemic, probably Star Trek XI, the one that JJ made. Splicing together test footage of Bela Lugosi and his chiropractor is one thing, but desecrating something beautiful is a sin.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think it's better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn't any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn't enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.

If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.

Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I'm curious why, but unless you're in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.

Edit: Didn't notice what community this was. Since it's a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I'm pretty sure they're easier to resize as conditions change.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 4 points 1 year ago

Userland malloc comes from libc, which is most likely glibc. Maybe this will tell you what you wanna know: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MallocInternals

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As I recall, the basic differences between employee and contractor are whether the employer can dictate time, place, and manner. The problem for gig "contractors" is that they're in a much tougher spot on exercising their rights, since not many people who can afford a lawyer deliver food. And they aren't exactly in short supply, so if Uber oversteps and individual "contractors" try to push back, they'll just be fired. Which gets back to the lawyer issue.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 2 points 1 year ago

Sounds like gin and tea, served hot with a twist of lemon.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I suppose I disagree with the formulation of the argument. The entscheidungsproblem and the halting problem are limitations on formal analysis. It isn't relevant to talk about either of them in terms of "solving them," that's why we use the term undecidable. The halting problem asks, in modern terms—

Given a computer program and a set of inputs to it, can you write a second computer program that decides whether the input program halts (i.e., finishes running)?

The answer to that question is no. In limited terms, this tells you something fundamental about the capabilities of Turing machines and lambda calculus; in general terms, this tells you something deeply important about formal analysis. This all started with the question—

Can you create a formal process for deciding whether a proposition, given an axiomatic system in first-order logic, is always true?

The answer to this question is also no. Digital computers were devised as a means of specifying a formal process for solving logic problems, so the undecidability of the entscheidungsproblem was proven through the undecidability of the halting problem. This is why there are still open logic problems despite the invention of digital computers, and despite how many flops a modern supercomputer can pull off.

We don't use formal process for most of the things we do. And when we do try to use formal process for ourselves, it turns into a nightmare called civil and criminal law. The inadequacies of those formal processes are why we have a massive judicial system, and why the whole thing has devolved into a circus. Importantly, the inherent informality of law in practice is why we have so many lawyers, and why they can get away with charging so much.

As for whether it's necessary to be able to write a computer program that can effectively analyze computer programs, to be able to write a computer program that can effectively write computer programs, consider... Even the loosey goosey horseshit called "deep learning" is based on error functions. If you can't compute how far away you are from your target, then you've got nothing.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io -2 points 1 year ago

Computer numerical simulation is a different kind of shell game from AI. The only reason it's done is because most differential equations aren't solvable in the ordinary sense, so instead they're discretized and approximated. Zeno's paradox for the modern world. Since the discretization doesn't work out, they're then hacked to make the results look right. This is also why they always want more flops, because they believe that, if you just discretize finely enough, you'll eventually reach infinity (or infinitesimal).

This also should not fill you with hope for general AI.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I sometimes get mistaken for the human pope, while you can clearly see that I'm the raccoon pope.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 38 points 1 year ago (16 children)

While there are technical solutions to that problem, realistically it's only a problem if people start thinking they're celebrities. Personally I prefer a platform that lets people dunk on celebrities.

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