An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes
with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel
and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was
insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by
the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF
(out-of-fuel) mechanism. In emergency cases a passenger was selected
and thrown out of the plane. (When necessary, the procedure was
repeated.) A large body of theory was developed and many publications
were devoted to the problem of properly selecting the victim to be
ejected. Should the victim be chosen at random? Or should one choose
the heaviest person? Or the oldest? Should passengers pay in order not
to be ejected, so that the victim would be the poorest on board? And
if for example the heaviest person was chosen, should there be a
special exception in case that was the pilot? Should first class
passengers be exempted? Now that the OOF mechanism existed, it would
be activated every now and then, and eject passengers even when there
was no fuel shortage. The engineers are still studying precisely how
this malfunction is caused.
I'm wondering which overcommit strategy this example referrs to.
Because If my bitcoin price checker built on electron will start allocating all memory on the machine, then (assuming no overcommitting takes place) some arbitrary process (e.g. systemd) can get malloc error. But it's not systemd's fault the memory got eaten; so why it's being punished for low memory conditions?
It's like choosing a random person to be ejected from the plane.
I get that this is humorous, but it seems like it illustrates the point of why this strategy is useful in the first place: memory is not human life, does not feel pain, and can even be resurrected from swap (which might still take some extra time but still is way less of an issue than the corresponding problem for humans)? If the strongest objection to the system is that it can't be ethically generalized to apply to managing people instead of memory, I think I'm happy with it. I don't care about whether it's inelegant if it works well enough for me in practice when the "victims" are arbitrary values in memory.
This is not about reclaiming memory by swapping the contents out to disk. It is about killing processes due to having overcommitted beyond the available memory plus swap space. The processes thrown out of the plane (targeted by the OOM killer) cannot be resurrected
Fair enough. I still think that the analogy is a bit overzealous given that my issue with the hypothetical weight-shedding strategy is ethical rather than technical.
Let me understand it fully. That means they updated dependencies using old, out of date package manager. If pnpm was up to date, this would no have happened? Sounds totally like their fault then
I don't think they are unlearning how to eat other things. It's humans who will have to find a new way to build cars, planes, boxes, bottles and electronics. Think how expensive it will be once car tire or fiber-optic cable eating bacteria hits a major city. Your access to fresh food will be limited and you don't even have a single apple tree.
For me Copilot keeps commenting something like "this changes typo in a documentation". The comment is now blocking automerge of the PR, so I have more work. I have to go to the PR and mark the comment as resolved. Thanks AI, thanks Microsoft, fantastic job burning electricity for this. At least Bitcoin created some value ;)
Just wait until people realize how little value Bitcoin has when people rush to the exits. Limited number of transactions, limited utility for the average person. We haven't had runs on banks in a long time in the US because of regulation. Crypto is a wild west. There will eventually be a Bitcoin exit trigger event and it will be brutal.
When the first names were announced I read some comments on r/LocalLLaMA that they assembled a team with too many high egos and this was going to fall apart, because of general soft-skills issues.
I know nothing about the situation, but that comment was strangely specific
