Graydon Hoare

better or worse than the federal budget?

actually i think warp factors are some other weird thing that approach infinity as they approach 10 but my point stands everyone knows 6 is whatever and 9.99 is serious.

counterpoint: both richter scale and warp factors in star trek have achieved some level of popular acceptance.

interesting series. lots to chew on. personally i'm always interested in the smallest possible design rather than the most scalable, but that's still partly illuminated by this series. thanks!

Consensus algorithms at scale: Part 1 - Introduction — PlanetScale This is a multi-part blog series and will be updated with links to the corresponding posts.

I had missed @ssougou.bsky.social's blog post series on consensus when it was originally posted. I really like the perspective of breaking down Raft/Paxos/etc. into the individual actions that comprise consensus.
planetscale.com/blog...

like you can equally ask what division by zero should do. it can return a result or just define it as zero or add NaN to the range or whatever. and its caller can ignore some of those cases, or make similar choices, and so on. it doesn't have to "propagate all the way up the stack".

every function decides for itself how it makes sense to totalize. some return results of errors. some sentinel values. some just eat errors (eg. impossible ones). my point is there is nothing special about non termination of some function, you can transform it into a result via a counter and limit.

I think the typical answer is "step metering". most people don't want to wait for u64::max compute steps anyways.

Ten years ago, the Canadian Liberals got elected to implement carbon pricing. They did so.

Ever since, conservatives and the Canadian press sold Canadians on the concept that Trudeau IMPOSED carbon pricing on Canadians and that he did so at the expense of provincial sovereignty.
#cdnpoli #cdnecon

I may even go a bold step further and accidentally bump into Alan Dershowitz's elbow causing him to tip his pierogi plate and lose all his pierogis onto the ground of the farmer's market

i would actually write more code if i were not employed

come visit small town ageing hippie world where peacenik granola wraps around into antivax 5g microchip antiflouridation maha

they don't need an intuition they just need to know that 7 is not 12. at present people seem to hear all words that end in "illion" as literally the same word.

along with the original article you left out a key point "even the slightest attention paid to personal grooming" and I mean the bar here is incredibly low like do you even know there is soap

I read a proposal in a book a long time ago that public discourse would be improved if number-reporting had to be done in log scale / scientific notation. So when someone proposes spending money on a publi policy they have to say it'll cost "money power 8" vs. "money power 12" or whatever.

puts a thermodynamic limit on head size. and, because heat exchange is proportional to the difference in temperature between two things, the efficiency of exhausting heat increases linearly with decreasing temperature. this implies that whatever the effective thermodynamic limit for human brains is, that limit can be expected to be higher in colder climates. further, in colder climates excess waste heat is potentially an advantage, with bloodflow distributing the waste heat generated by the brain into the core and cold extremities. the neat thing about the theory that cranial volume is weakly upper-bounded by the functional thermodynamic envelope of human brains is that it explains both temporary reductions in cognitive performance due to higher temperatures, as well as population level differences. anyway, if you want to yell at me or each other in the replies you may now do so but I promise it won't make you look cool and it won't make

Over on X the everything app, they’re busy reinventing phrenology from first principles

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

The latest Canadian standards association guidance for universal use of respirators for preventing respiratory infection in healthcare is based on actual science (rather than dogma) and has generated a predictable response from predictable quarters

Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too! Aleksey and I sat down to read this paper on Monday night. This was an experiment which aimed to share how experts read papers in real tim...

[new blog post]

Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too! (HotOS'25)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/real...

Aleksey and I recorded our reading/discussion section. It is also available through the blog post, and is instructive for how to read papers.

23 and I'm canadian! (but I did most of those on a single -- awesome -- amtrak spree)

Hero

Not surprising. Lawrence and Griswold are next, IMHO; just a question of when and what pretext.

computer biz is fun-house microcosm of any stage of capitalism: chase stock pops and high margins from cornered markets / moats / monopolies; pretend not to know underlying vast expanse of low margin high volume grinding awful work is what holds the whole thing together. mainly: be born lucky.

I spent seven years writing a book on this and she just… said it in three succinct paragraphs to politico.

The best way to build brand awareness on here is to post photos of your dog and talk about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The Rust Foundation is pleased to announce a new multi-year agreement with GitHub that formalizes its ongoing sponsorship of the Rust Project!

We're grateful for GitHub's support of Rust over the years & excited to have it formalized via this agreement. rustfoundation.org/media/rust-f...

density is just the secret sauce for everything

I've been silent for 21 months of genocide, but this one editorial criticizing Israel will prove I've always been on the right side of history By: Martin Olsen, Syndicated Columnist The images coming out of Gaza are horrendous. Mothers holding starving babies, children crying out for food, people collapsing in the street from hunger. They ar...

"Instead I focused on important domestic matters, like all of Canada’s national, provincial and municipal elections, the delay in the Eglinton LRT, the royal visit, the debate over whether it’s anti-semitic to..." [cont'd]

Opinion: The International Court of Justice’s statement on fossil fuels puts Carney in a tough spot An advisory opinion on responsibility for emissions means that Canada could be on the hook for major climate-change-related damages in the years ahead

Reflecting on the implications of last week's International Court of Justice decision, UBC prof Michael Byers concludes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney"can no longer justify including fossil fuel projects among his infrastructure goals." #cdnpoli #icj
www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

This is so perfect. "Dead Center" and he's so far to the right that he's half off the cover