- On startup processing begins at a known address, and you put the bootloader code over there. Hardware engineers can guarantee this for you.
- Every time you execute an assembly instruction, the program counter either explicitly jumps to a new location or else it just increments by 1. Hardware people can also make this happen as easily as implementing an adder.
Don't get me wrong, there are LOTS of layers between the hardware and most "useful" programs any of us will ever write. But all of them are pretty understandable. They're often not very complicated, just tedious.
Similarly for making a basic CPU that implements the logic you’re describing. In 2006 or so I made a super simple microcontroller on an FPGA for a course project. It had a whopping 256 bytes of RAM, 1kB of ROM, and I think four 8-bit registers plus a 16-bit program counter. You could only jump +/- 256 bytes. It was largely useless but also incredibly satisfying.
Well the most basic redis replacement would be just a global hashmap to replace GET and SET, possibly with a background thread to periodically delete expired keys. But obviously that stops working as soon as you get a second node.
The entire value of redis IMO is that is ISN'T inside your normal application, but rather some shared storage that all nodes can use to coordinate and that survives deploys, but that provides more ergonomic data structures than SQL databases. Caches are only one type of such shared data, but things like feature flags, circuit breakers and rate limiters are also super common (and super useful).
Neat. Write that up, match parity, and give all the function calls with the same name as redis, and you're both happy! You get to hand roll something, he gets to use a library that others have perfected over the years!
On a plane built in 2025 and only started doing production flights in February this year. There's video of the incident and it really does like it just suddenly collapses. Several people injured but thankfully nobody died. Insane how Boeing just keeps having quality problems even after everything that happened the last few years.
This entire article tries to make a point that it's not just "great men" or "structural forces" alone being responsible for the course of history, but then completely misses the point again by labeling someone in power as mediocre and arguing that that mediocrity caused much of the events of the 20th century.
This once again causes oversimplifies history to a few people and some nebulous "structural forces", and provides an attractive but wrong model of how history developed. In software terms we would call this a "leaky abstraction", and this particular abstraction leaks so much it's barely useful at all.
The world is much too complex to be understood by examining less than at least a few hundred million people. That this is beyond the capability of humans is not the world's problem.
Well obviously. Vesting schedules are explicitly designed the way they are to keep people around. That's their entire purpose.
Retirement is inherently a choice to earn less lifetime money and pour that time into family and other things you like doing. Waiting for the next vesting cliff is inherently a choice to earn more money and spend less time on your family.
My point is that it being a choice starts to disappear with kids, rising costs etc. It was a choice I could make independently, now it’s a choice the entire family gets to participate in since we’d need to sell the house, move to a lower cost of living locale etc.
For myself I usually call it "(not) playing to win", after David Sirlin's book (see also https://www.sirlin.net/ptw for the free web version). In it, he describes a phenomenon in competitive videogaming where some people try to forbid valid moves in an online game because they are "broken", like throws in fighting games or rush strategies in RTS games. Sirlin argues that because they recognize a powerful tool but refuse to use it, they needlessly handicap themselves. As such, they're not playing to win but playing to feel morally superior and consequently lose to those who do use all the tools the game provides.
In reasonably balanced games, it usually turns out the "overpowered" strategy is not all that overpowered and that they have huge downsides when played against people who know how to counter them. In real life, which has no requirement of being balanced, we can recognize that certain strategies ((explicitly legal and often even encouraged!) consistently work really well. Choosing not to use those strategies doesn't make one morally superior, just bad at playing the game of life.
That said, "minimizing your own odds of falling into societal cracks" often still includes caring for others around you. On a small scale, being rich but alone because everyone around you went bankrupt and/or became estranged to you is not much fun. On a bigger scale it's just good governance to make sure everyone has food, safety and entertainment, just to keep the pitchforks away.
Sure but these things are not really "odds" anymore, right? The most searched terms might be a mystery to the general public, but not to the engineers at Google. It gets even murkier when you can influence the outcome. The exact temperature at an airport might be difficult to predict, but if you are able to hold up a hair drier to the sensor for a few minutes you can be pretty sure it won't be cold.
When the other side either has information that makes it not a bet, or if they have means to influence the odds, the best outcome for outsiders is to not play at all.
And of course, the entire conceit relies on the idea that more accurate information to the public is always good and always outweighs the negative externalities. But is it really all that important to the public good what the most searched artist is on Google in a certain year? Or if an announcer will say a certain word during the super bowl?
I don't think this is entirely true. Polymarket is extremely transparent on user accounts and markets so you can see who is betting what, their other bets, and so on. The article mentions that other users fingered him for insider trading. That itself opens up an opportunity for profit, by simply following the trades on what he seems to be an insider on. It'd be like if you could see in real time what Nancy Pelosi was investing it - shadow her trades and make big bucks with the soon to be announced market shifting government deal/regulation/etc.
The markets also open up the door for hedging, arbitration and other sorts of opportunities where you don't necessarily even care what the result is.
Right, and that is not some grand secret. Every person taking a side on the bet is aware of that nuance for any trivially gamed market. If you think the size of the market is sufficient to incentivize somebody to do so then that would obviously increase the yes odds.
It's akin to betting on penny stocks in the market where you are also aware that a single person could dramatically shift the market one way or the other if they wanted so you're betting not just on the stock's performance, but also on the meta-market.
It's not only about the data, it's about the risk that the US would basically turn off things like tax collection and doctors' visits in the Netherlands as part of (say) a first strike on Greenland.
Sure, the chance is low. But in the current climate people are nervous and it's best not to risk it. The current government has already embarked on a long-term strategy to bring more of critical software infrastructure back in-country, selling the core identity provider software abroad would go directly against current policy.
Sanctioning people is basically risk-free and more importantly dollar-free. Fighting wars is extremely not-free, as Trump is currently discovering in Iran. I personally rate the risk of the US actually invading Greenland as not higher than about 10%, with the matter most likely being resolved by the US administration re-discovering that the US is allowed to establish a base on the country, doing so and then announcing with big fanfare that they solved the terrible terrible problem of Greenland being "the most unsafe".
Still though, that is about 10 percentage points higher than before Trump took office. Better not to hand him too many tools to exert leverage with.
> Sanctioning people is basically risk-free and more importantly dollar-free.
In the long term, I think this was actually really expensive. People talk and worry about this, and as a result of this (and similar developments) general consensus seems to have shifted towards preferring EU companies over US companies for tech. That used to be the exact opposite for as long as I can remember.
reply