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I spent a lot of time on systolic arrays to compute crypto currency POW (Blake 2 specifically). It’s an interesting problem and I learned a lot but made no progress. I’ve often wondered if anyone has done the same?

You should check out AMD's NPU architecture.

I’ve always been curious how Roblox games are deployed and managed. Is each instance of a game executed in a docker container, and the luau code isolated that way or is there some multi-tenant solution?

They run the game servers in Docker. Doing multi-tenant is a weaker security boundary and makes it easier to steal places from other users, which Roblox takes pretty seriously when places represent all the time invested by game studios and millions of dollars in revenue.

How is this cost effective though? There are a lot of low quality games, not by a big studio. These also get a dedicated docker container?

What do you mean? A docker container is just a process. Are you suggesting they run different game servers in the same process?

running multiple game servers in docker is a multi-tenant environment, because docker is not a serious security boundary unless you're applying significant kernel hardening to your kconfig to the tune of grsecurity patches or similar

I haven't used Roblox but Lua has the ability to create sandboxes to run user code. You expose only the functionality you allow to the user code, usually block I/O, and any unsafe functions. https://luau.org/sandbox

Fast food franchises aren’t generating $1M a year either. Ok a McDonald’s in a high traffic area can, but a sandwich shop anywhere? Nope.

We’re supposedly talking about 4 major crime families, it wouldn’t be one McDonalds it would be dozens and dozens. And all legal.

Nothing about this story makes sense other other than as yet another headline to try to get people talking about something other than Epstein.

Did illegal gambling take place? I’m sure. Were 4 different crime families investing significant resources to take home barely $1m/year? I’m extremely skeptical and given this is coming from Kash “I always look like I just did a line of coke” Patel, I’d say it’s more likely than not we’re getting incomplete, if not bad information


She is thirsty my friends.

> stole the classified documents

A nitpick of mine is how Trump having the documents wasn’t the case against him. The case against Trump was an obstruction case because he lied and concealed the documents from authorities, going so far as shuffling them between properties, having his lawyers give false statements, and defying subpoenas.

This differentiates Trumps document case from everyone else’s (ie Bidens); the right loves to use this as an example of DOJ weaponization when they couldn’t be more different.


Yes! And when the FBI started closing in he asked his bodyguard to pull some of the documents and his IT guy to wipe the video evidence! The details are sooo much worse than the high level description can do justice.

Can anyone comment on what VEX robotics kits do with POE? Their controller box connects to motors via cat5 (they call them “smart cables”)which carry’s power, pwm, and encoder data. I don’t think it’s carrying ethernet but could be? Any sources for more info would be appreciated!

It seems to be RJ11 and they might be spec:ed slightly differently (thicker leads?) to power motors. I get the impression it is mainly to control what can be used in competitions.

This was what I found from skimming around: https://www.robotevents.com/V5RC/2018-2019/QA/35

I doubt it is Ethernet at all, so it wouldn't be Power-over-Ethernet. Just some useful connectors and wires making for an appropriate cable. Also seems like you can make your own perfectly fine. Or they might melt. I suppose try it.


I think writing lexers and parsers is just fun, code generation I have not done; which is next level imo. I guess the next level after that is doing the lexing parsing and code generation on the chip. Then the need for multi pass compilation would become apparent quickly I presume!

I once saw a layoff that was followed by a week long outage because no one remaining knew how to deploy to prod, and no one knew how to recover after the failed deployment. I felt bad for the people remaining who had to go through that,but it was hilarious.

> to being surrounded by Dilbert characters.

As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.


Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart.

I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.

The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.

I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.

It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.


I'm currently in a place that pays me €100k just to sit on my ass, and I can do that remotely. I've tried actually doing some work, but that backfired. Not sure what to do, because on one hand my skills are evaporating, but on the other if I wanted a job that pays more I'd have to learn a lot and then work substantially more. I'm wondering if maybe sitting here until retirement is a viable option.

Similar situation. I work for a provincial government and make €61k, my scope is actually relatively large for how long I’ve been with my team but the actual problems are simple enough that some decent code means I have 0 downtime. As a result if I don’t bug anyone I typically get left alone to manage a bunch of products that run without issue. This week I literally have no meetings on my calendar, just a small project with a generous due date where I’m the solo developer.

I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.

Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.

I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.


Honestly I do use that time to play video games because I don't see the point of working my ass off. Suppose I grind my ass off and manage to get a €200k on-site job with on-call. Is that actually a win? I don't think so.

I do the same, but mostly because when I have bothered to work my ass pff to try and get a cool job, I never get hired anyway because they only hire established domain experts and juniors via a university pipeline.

What games are you playing now?

If this is really the case work on a side gig you find enjoyable.

I don't find anything enjoyable

You at least need some source of self-actualisation

It would be easier for me to appreciate the small things in everyday life if I weren't so lonely but it is what it is

Software development evolved well past the point of solving problems, now it is just plugging solutions. Very few people actually work in novel stuff these days...

I used octave in place of matlab in undergrad numerical analysis course 15 years ago. The language was completely compatible for what we did.

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