what an amazing article packed with very useful physics insights. Need to follow up more on the last idea of the gaussian random force and the quantization of Newton's equations. Even the opening sentence had me try to remember some of my DE by expressing the rational faction via the technique of the variation of constants :) (have to admit that i felt too rusty...). Thank you for posting this!
similarly i am in this ridiculous position. I am a security engineer, wanting to work in vulnerability research. Got an EB2-NIW green card due to my skills being valuable for the national interest. Can't even get an interview because all vulnerability researcher positions require TS clearance... I guess i will just have to wait 4 more years for the citizenship, but it's a pity.
Maybe because the hailing for yet another "safe" language starts to feel kinda repetitive?
Java, C#, Go, Rust, Python, modern C++ with smartpointer,...
I mean a concepts for handling files in a safe way are an awesome (and really needed) thing, but inventing a whole new programming language around a single task (even if it's just a transpiler to c)?
One of the advantages with wuffs is that it compiles to C and wuffs-the-library is distributed as C code that is easy to integrate with an existing C or C++ project without having to incorporate new toolchains.
> Maybe because the hailing for yet another "safe" language starts to feel kinda repetitive?
Ah yeah, because the endless stream of exploits and “new CVE allows for zero-click RCE, please update ASAP” doesn't feel repetitive?
> I mean a concepts for handling files in a safe way are an awesome (and really needed) thing, but inventing a whole new programming language around a single task (even if it's just a transpiler to c)?
It's a “single task” in the same way “writing compilers” is a single task. And like we're happy that LLVM IR exists, having a language dedicated to writing codecs (of which there are dozens) is a worthwhile goal, especially since they are both security critical and have stringent performance needs for which existing languages (be it managed languages or Rust) aren't good enough.
https://veilid.com/ should also be a great alternative. i haven't had time to use it yet, but it was built to address performance issues with ipfs and allow for both dht style content discovery, but also for direct websocket connections for streaming (and doing that in an anonymous fashion)
This looks very interesting. They made very similar choices than we (iroh) did. Rust, ed keys, blake3.
They seem to do their own streams, while we are adapting QUIC to a more p2p approach. Also the holepunching approach seems to be different. But I would love to get more details.
Thanks. This is awesome. I think they are doing more work themselves in terms of crypto, whereas we rely on QUIC+TLS more.
Regarding holepunching, our approach is a bit less pure p2p, but has quite good success rates. We copy the DERP protocol from tailscale.
I am confident that we have a better story regarding handling of large blobs. We don't just use blake3, but blake3 verified streaming to allow for range requests.
Also I wrote my own rust library for blake3 verified streaming that reduces the overhead of the verification data. https://crates.io/crates/bao-tree
I tried to get on their discord at https://veilid.com/discord, but I get an invalid invite. You know a better way to get in touch?
I'm sorry but i fail to see how this is _simple_ networking.
It shows the state of Linux these days.
Compare that with OpenBSD's interface to do the same thing.
wired: ifconfig [if] autoconf up
wireless: ifconfig [if] join [ssid] wpakey [pass] autoconf up
Consistent documentation existing in man ifconfig.
The sad thing is that Linux used to be designed not evolved.
i would also need wpa_supplicant for the wifi though. i would also need to install ifconfig or iptools and making sure that systemd/network-network manager respects my config. I would also need to figure out the interface's name-du-jour or add udev rules to force a name of my preference. I hope you see my point.
completely agree with you. ken and the not so big group of people who has positively shaped all our technology really need more appreciation from us users, although i'm sure he would be weirded out by it like any proper geek. That been said: thanks ken!
what about designing the DSP/memory scsi disk that managed to do realtime ripping to PAC, then changing all that to mp3 using LAME, and the most important, creating usable metadata and finding all these CDs, and even finding ways to find a top-N song collection from dates that didn't have any relevant publications. I think you're underselling his achievement a bit ;).
I found the talk to be an epic geek journey.
I came to argue in favor of aj7's argument as a physicist. I think we are all missing the forest for the trees here. what elevates the gravitational law to it's status and differentiates it from a simple model, and what i think the point that aj7 is trying to make, and also the point that norvig is choosing not to focus on here, is not the gravitational constant G. Noone really cares about the value of the constant and how it is approximated in this part of our spacetime etc [edit: of course they do care if it is postive, zero, or negative for reasons consistent to what i am saying later]. The "juice" here is the inverse square relation to length. The form of the equation is what is the deep insight and what also provides for that insight to transfer to other systems. Knowing the nature of the differential equation is of uttermost importance because then we can reason about possible and impossible outcomes of it just from it's mathematical (and only) nature. If these models in the future can be built in ways that they can be reasoned about symbolically like these systems that we strive for in physics, i think they will be elevated to laws (or proper theories as aj7 says) rather than models. and noone will care if they have a billion parameters as long as they have a certain structure that we can work with. I hope this makes some sense to support the counter-norvig argument in this (and i personally respect both chomsky and norvig infinitely of course. i just think norvig's wording in this specific part of the article is indeed crude and shallow, maybe just to make his counterargument)
many great suggestions but i can't believe no one has mentioned the original SICP lectures yet :)! (and a thing i always enjoy in it is the transformation to the expressions of the students as more magic is revealed)
