> A few days ago, the CEO of Vercel—an AI coding startup that, as of Tuesday, raised a $300 million Series F at a $9 billion—posted a selfie with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. Vercel is a product for AI developers that companies like Meta are investing heavily in in order to develop their AI faster than competitors.
As an aside, when was Vercel ever an AI company? I’ve been (past tense, but I left a bit ago) a customer for years and it was a “hosting service with convenient feature bundling”.
Labeling everyone an AI company is watering down so much detail and nuance to put it lightly.
Ring already had this happen a dozen times with their own employees. Turns out giving random people access to other people's personal cameras is bad. Who would've thought?
Anyway, don't send potentially sensitive footage to a third party server.
In their minds, everyone is either a criminal or about to be the victim of a criminal. Developing this world view is a hazard of the job, and is completely understandable based on what they have to deal with every day. The problem is the lack of accountability from larger society, and their push back against that accountability under some mistaken narrative that it's everyone else with the warped world view.
Something that follows this pattern of a single file backend is PocketBase. I’ve used it on personal projects and, while not being 1.0 yet, it’s growing quickly
There's a bit of a struggle between sections that use just one or the other, but Elm has the managerial blessing right now.
While I think Elm is neat, it suffers from ecosystem issues. It drive a large amount of Not Invented Here because JS invented somewhere else is hard to incorporate. Also, good luck rendering arbitrary HTML that comes in as data from somewhere else.
Yeah, I loved Elm, but the restriction that you can't build your own "effect" modules really made it impossible to embrace. Say you want to use a new web API similar to using Elm's core `Http`, well... you can try and fork Elm...
Why not just spend the one time cost of the approximately four seconds it takes to remove Copilot and save yourself from feeling drained if it's that upsetting? This is right below the level of effort involved in changing the theme and setting the font in your IDE.
QNX is a microkernel-based real time operating system. The kernel is tiny; it was about 60KB (not MB) twenty years ago. All the kernel does is message passing, timers, CPU dispatching, and memory allocation. Everything else is in user space, including file systems.
Everything is a message, rather than being a file. Messaging works like a function call - you send a block of data to another process, wait, and get a reply back. Processes which receive messages act like servers - they have a thread or threads waiting for incoming requests, and when a request comes in, it's handled and a reply is sent back. It's a microservices architecture.
Unlike Linux, it's a fast microservices architecture. Message passing and CPU dispatching are integrated. When a process sends a message to a service process, the sender blocks. (Timeouts are available.) If the service process isn't busy, control immediately transfers to the service process without a trip through the CPU dispatcher. When the service process replies, the reverse happens, and control goes back to the original sender. With most inter-process communication systems, there's queuing delay for this kind of operation. QNX got this right. This is the core insight behind QNX.
Yes, there is message passing copying overhead. In practice it's under 10%. I've sent video through the message system. Copying is less of a problem than you might expect, because, with today's large CPU caches, the data being copied is probably warm and in cache.
All this is real-time aware. Higher priority processes get their messages through first. If you call a service, it inherits the caller's priority until it replies. This prevents priority inversion, where a high priority process calls a low priority one and gets preempted by lower priority work. This works so well that I was able to do compiles and web browsing on a single-CPU machine that was also running a robot vehicle.
There's a tool for building boot images. You put in the kernel, a standard utility process called "proc", and whatever else you need available at startup. For deeply embedded systems, the application might go in the boot image. It's all read-only and can execute from ROM if needed, which is good for applications where you really, really want startup to always work.
Files and file systems are optional. For systems with files, there are file system and disk drivers to put in the boot image. They run in user space. There's a standard startup program set that creates a Unix-type environment at boot time. This is all done in user space. The file system is accessed by message passing.
System calls look like POSIX. Most of them are implemented in a library, not the kernel. Service processes do the work.
When an application calls POSIX "read", the library makes an interprocess function call to the file system or network service server. Program loading ("exec") is done in user space. The boot image can contain .so files. "Exec" is done by a .so file that loads the image. So the kernel doesn't have to worry about executable format, and program loading is done by untrusted code.
Because it uses POSIX, most command line UNIX and Linux programs will compile and run. That's QNX's big advantage over L4. L4 is a good microkernel, but it's so stripped down it's just a hypervisor. Typically, people run Linux on top of L4, so all the bloat comes back.
There is no paging at the OS level. That would kill real-time. There's a paging to disk library that can be used by programs such as compilers with big transient memory needs, but most programs don't use it. The effect is that responsiveness is very consistent.
I miss using QNX desktop. There's no lag.
So, we have to look at our requirements first. QNX systems want performance, UNIX compatibility, increased reliability/security, field-proven, and supportable. They want certain features that increase developer productivity, too. You can run a lot of stuff on QNX within its existing security expectations.
Whereas, seL4 is a separation kernel. It does almost nothing but with high security. To do anything, you have to add software to it that can undermine its security or performance claims at a system level. These are also unproven additions most people know nothing about. That overall deal might be fine if one component being ultra-secure is your highest goal.
QNX is usually better than seL4 for most needs. Even security people because they’ll want useful functionality which they’d have to secure on seL4 anyway.
My HSA emailed me and said “woopsies, we leaked all your data”.
And…? You’re going to try and give me credit monitoring when I literally have 2 overlapping credit monitoring offers from the other companies that leaked my data?
Long term PDE 5 treatment lowers estrogen and increases testosterone. As a consequence of that, and its cardiovasvular effects, it makes it easier for the body to turn fat into energy by fat-browning, to grow muscles and to lose fat.
I don't know how people imagine viagra working - it's not like you take a pill, you continue browsing the internet, reading news, and suddenly, a boner lifts your desk.
Was news to me to read in a sibling that it also requires mental stimulation. I thought it was purely a physical inducement by the drug, as many drugs for other purposes induce a physical response without requiring mental effort.
>it's not like you take a pill, you continue browsing the internet, reading news, and suddenly, a boner lifts your desk.
Aside from the lifting the desk part, that's exactly how I imagine it working - and how it should work. You mean it also requires special sexual arousal? Well, even that it shouldn't be that difficult.
That’s not how it works at all. As someone with recent onset of ED taking viagra regularly, it’s been fantastic but it just makes me function like I should.
It takes about an hour to take effect (usually less for me) and lasts a little over 4 hours with some lingering effects for several hours later, with diminishing effects towards the 4 and above hours.
If I’m sexually stimulated during that time physically and or mentally, everything works like it should (erection). If during that time even when I would normally see peak effects around the 50 min to 90 min mark I’m driving or doing taxes or whatever non-sexually stimulating activity one might do, no erection at all.
> Viagra should make you "pop" regardless of what activity you're doing.
No it doesn't. It simply makes the effect of sexual stimulation more effective. If you body is not trying to engorge the penis it has little to no effect on that part of you.
Tadalafil works well for getting more out of your workouts too (I take that). Gives you an overall feeling of well-being too (better than any cup of joe), I no-bullshit begin my day with it.
As an aside, when was Vercel ever an AI company? I’ve been (past tense, but I left a bit ago) a customer for years and it was a “hosting service with convenient feature bundling”.
Labeling everyone an AI company is watering down so much detail and nuance to put it lightly.