Tilo Soenke

[DHH @dhh]

Get your words together. Writing well is thinking well. Peterson is spot on. Thus the danger of outsourcing your words to AI. Your mind might stop trying to bother with the thinking bit too.

[Peter Kraft @petereliaskraft]

What happens if your CPU gets something wrong? If it wakes up one day and decides 2+2=5?

Well, most of us will never have to worry about that. But if you work at a company the size of Google, you do, which is why this paper on "mercurial cores" is so fascinating.

What the authors report--and supposedly this is common knowledge at the hyperscalers--is that a couple cores per several thousand machines are "mercurial." Due to subtle manufacturing defects or old age, they give wrong answers for certain instructions. These can cause all sorts of impossible-to-diagnose issues. Some rare problems at Google that were traced back to bad CPUs include:

- Mutexes not working, causing application crashes
- Silent data corruption
- Garbage collectors targeting live memory, causing application crashes
- Kernel state corruption causing kernel panics

What makes CPUs go bad? It's very hard to tell. The authors posit that issues are becoming more frequent as CPUs get more complex, but there aren't solid numbers behind that. There are certainly strong relationships between frequency, temperature, voltage, and bad CPU behavior--most mercurial CPUs only cause problems under very specific conditions, but those conditions vary from CPU to CPU. Age is another source of problems, as older CPUs are more likely to exhibit problems.

Bad CPUs are an especially serious problem because they're very hard to detect. If cosmic rays flip bits in storage or on the network, that can be detected through error coding. But there's no analogy for a CPU that allows cheap online verification of its correctness. Instead, the best detection techniques involve monitoring for symptoms. If a core exhibits exceptionally high rates of process crashes or kernel panics relative to its fellows, that's a strong indication something is wrong with it. For the most critical applications, the authors propose triple modular redundancy--redoing each of its computations on three cores and majority-voting a reliable result.

More than anything, this paper is a call to action--letting everyone know that CPUs can fail. So now, if you ever find a bug you can't diagnose, you can blame the CPU! 🙂

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

LOL, brilliant move. Way to turn a total nothingburger into tantalizing forbidden fruit....

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

One of the most striking charts this year:

China’s startup ecosystem has almost completely collapsed in the last 5 years.

[Mckay Wrigley @mckaywrigley]

“Will AI replace programmers?”

Perfect take by Lex.

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

Please watch this short video so you know at least a little about what is happening in Gaza

[David Fowler @davidfowl]

This tweet might not age well but here goes.

Using an LLM to do code generation is still code generation. It doesn't raise the level of abstraction. It does not fundamentally change the software engineering process. What we have is a new building block for the next wave of innovation in this space.

[Caitlin Cook @DeadCaitBounce]

"Muscle contraction is medicine"

As a society much of the movement once embedded into our daily routine has been stripped away, which is why it's more important than ever to make efforts to move your body throughout the day

This @hubermanlab pod ft. @CaseyMeansMD is well worth a full listen but here's my favorite clip

Link to full interview below

[Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom]

OpenAI just hired the guy who was in charge of mass surveillance at the NSA. He outsourced the illegal mass spying against Americans to British spy agencies to circumvent US law. He gave them unlimited spying access to US networks. Tells you all you need to know about OpenAI.

[Luke Stephens (hakluke) @hakluke]

Ouch.

The Windows Wi-Fi driver can be exploited by an attacker that is within Wi-Fi range. It requires no interaction from the victim and no prior knowledge of the system from the attacker. Just like the movies!

It affects all modern versions of Windows.
Patch immediately! 👇

[Edward Snowden @Snowden]

They've gone full mask-off: 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 trust @OpenAI or its products (ChatGPT etc). There is only one reason for appointing an @NSAGov Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth. You have been warned.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

If you had any doubt this wasn’t an attempt at regulatory capture…. This is not normal startup behavior. You can play on the field or try to bend the rules to your favor. Maybe it’s both.

[Colm MacCárthaigh @colmmacc]

Always remember that the CAP theorem is a law. Try to break it and the distributed systems police will arrest you.

[Edward Snowden @Snowden]

Everyone in the world needs to see this.

Note that this footage permits no room for "it was a mistake," showing repeated, specifically-targeted strikes on the unarmed and even wounded. The sort of behavior the ICJ explicitly forbid in the genocide ruling against Israel.

[DHH @dhh]

"Programmers are attracted to complexity like moths to a flame. The more convoluted the systems diagram, the greater the intellectual masturbation. Our commitment to resisting that is the key ingredient in this uptime success." https://t.co/sIEMZXpZ95

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

The prevalence of anti-science sentiment in public discourse is sad. Humanity wins when we celebrate great scientific & engineering innovation.

Not blindly, of course. Scientists, like all humans, can be corrupted by money, power, fame. But most are amazing humans.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Thanks to @friedberg & @theallinpod for inviting me to speak. One key phrase from Stigler is so important, "... leading to a net loss for society." It's not just that these lobby efforts have undo influence, its that this influence causes specific harm to society.

[John Collison @collision]

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

"I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell."

https://t.co/vsXyrASpRm