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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You often need to be pretty good at math. But not because you’re “doing math” to write the code.

    In real world software systems, you need to handle monitoring and alerting. To properly do this, you need to understand stats, rolling averages, percentiles, probability distributions, and significance testing. At least at a basic level. Enough to know how to recognize these problems and where to look when you run into them.

    For being a better coder, you need to understand mathematical logic, proofs, algebra/symbolic logic, etc in order to reason your way through tricky edge cases.

    To do AI/ML, you need to know a shitton of calculus and diff eqs, plus numerical algorithms concepts like numerical stability. This is kinda a niche (but rapidly growing) engineering field.

    The same thing about AI also applies to any other domain where the thing being computed is fundamentally a math or logic solution. This is somewhat common in backend engineering.

    I’m not “doing math” with pen and paper at work, but I do use all of these mathematical skills all. the. time.

    I am an SRE on a ML serving platform.






  • You don’t need to provide root access just because you used GPL code, you just have to follow the GPL.

    Well, to follow version 3 of the GPL, you do actually need to provide effective root access.

    Specifically, version 3 of the GPL adds language to prevent Tivoization.

    It’s not enough to just provide the user with the code. The user is entitled to the freedom to modify that code and to use their modifications.

    In other words, in addition to providing access to the source code, you must actually provide a mechanism to allow the user to change the code on the device.

    The name “Tivoization” comes from the practice of the company TiVo, which sold set-top boxes based on GPL code, but employed DRM to prevent the user from applying custom patches. V3 of the GPL remedies this bug.





  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinus Torvalds and Richard Stallman
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    1 year ago

    However, Linus’s kernel was more elaborate than GNU Hurd, so it was incorporated.

    Quite the opposite.

    GNU Hurd was a microkernel, using lots of cutting edge research, and necessitating a lot of additional complexity in userspace. This complexity also made it very difficult to get good performance.

    Linux, on the other hand, was just a bog standard Unix monolithic kernel. Once they got a libc working on it, most existing Unix userspace, including the GNU userspace, was easy to port.

    Linux won because it was simple, not elaborate.



  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoRust@programming.devDioxus Labs + “High-level Rust
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    1 year ago

    Fair. But unwrap versus expect isn’t really the point. Sure one has a better error message printed to your backtrace. But IMO that’s not what I’m looking for when I’m looking at a backtrace. I don’t mind plain unwraps or assertions without messages.

    From my experience, when people say “don’t unwrap in production code” they really mean “don’t call panic! in production code.” And that’s a bad take.

    Annotating unreachable branches with a panic is the right thing to do; mucking up your interfaces to propagate errors that can’t actually happen is the wrong thing to do.


  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoRust@programming.devDioxus Labs + “High-level Rust
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    1 year ago

    Unwrap should literally never appear in production code

    Unwrap comes up all the time in the standard library.

    For example, if you know you’re popping from a non-empty vector, unwrap is totally the right too for the job. There are tons of circumstances where you know at higher levels that edge cases defended against at lower levels with Option cannot occur.