Interesting but I can't deal with the AI generated prose.
Sentences like "This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was ..." show me no human has proof read or edited the text.
World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.
is a clunker of a sentence. (NB: didn't say 'clanker')
Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.
The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.
During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.
The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.
Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.
As the poser of the obviously rhetorical question in question ...
for many speakers of English as a first language seeped in the conventions of English conversation, storytelling, and literature it was a clear juxtaposition intended to single out the ridiculous proposition that technology advances during wartime are somehow tied to WWII alone.
Have a look at the original sentence again, it's absolutely a clunker, very probably the product of a clanker (or of an ESL human).
It's not just the prose but article's structure that seems to have an AI-suggestive weirdness. Wikipedia's history of the raincoat [1] gives a sort of reasonable narrative of water resistant garment's through the ages. The main is that the Mackintosh and other innovations weren't the start of raincoats but versions of raincoats that arose with mass production. Mass production often doesn't make better things but it can make adequate things available to more people.
Even more, googling the history of waterproof garments, I found a variety of product catalogues and a museum brochure [2] that gave a "history" similar to the article. My guess is these are shallow histories of products (Mackintosh, Gortex, etc) and they all copied each other (manually) and then AI copied the narrative (automatically).
But more than copying the narrative, the article tries to make this haphazard narrative into something more systematic. But there is where the rhetorical structure actually starts to strain.
And the last paragraph about waxed coats is distinctly bizarre: "The waxed cotton coat was not a technical solution. It was a cultural one, a garment that said something about who you were and how you spent your time, that happened to keep you reasonably dry while you were doing it. " In late 19th century Britain, the class system didn't involve anyone signally that they spent time fishing in an open boat (maybe 2020's US has wealthy MAGA type who want to impersonate rawboned sons of toil but that can't be project view back to the past).
And yes, the prose is more jarring the more closely you read the text.
And jeesh, tearing apart a text that was likely automatically generated in the blink of an eye might show defense beats offense these day (and damn, it's hard to avoid these AIism myself). But at least it gives insight into crazy stuff that can even reach the top of hn.
I don't think it was written by AI but rather edited with help of AI.
There are just a few obvious AI lines in the text.
Not great, not terrible but it immediately caught my eye.
Seriously, people are looking for reasons to get offended. Have you read anything written between 1990 and 2023? Plenty of people talk and write like this. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.
Even the video is generated. The whole thing is just slop upon slop, I'm amazed that it got to the top of the front page here. I suppose it's a genuinely impressive amount of fakery all integrated together.
As of this comment, Debian Stable ("Trixie", though I hate codenames) doesn't have a fix in place and remains vulnerable, or at least their CVE tracker shows it as such:
I choose not to call it Debian 13 because that carries less context than Stable/Testing/sid. I'd rather not require the user to maintain that extra metnal mapping.
Anyone who knows anything about this subject immediately understands what is connoted by "Debian Stable". I run Trixie on most of my personal boxes and I had no idea what version number it is, nor do I particularly care.
Yes you can pin it to core 1 whilst pinning all other tasks to core 0. Then will never be interrupted or preempted (except by interrupts created on core 1)
As expected ANC headphones cancel less noise at low frequencies so I guess the 780Hz is a trade off between high enough frequency to be a bell and low enough frequency to get attenuated a little bit less than high frequencies.
The research paper is pretty poor quality and this is mainly a marketing exercise.
I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.
Or another process will die at random instead, which might be your desktop environment, the main browser process, Signal (10% chance at corrupting message history each time), a large image you were working on in Gimp...
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your tabs will be discarded.
I've already described above what the browser's behavior is. That your browser works differently is good for you; I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There are also other downsides that this other behavior does not fix, mentioned in sibling comments
This is not a chrome problem but an OS problem. Android does a much better job here by comparison. Desktop Linux is simply not well optimized for low RAM users.
I dunno I have 96GB of RAM and I still get the whole "system dies due to resource exhaustion" thing. Yesterday I managed to somehow crash DWM from handle exhaustion. Man, people really waste resources....
Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you’re talking about real RAM issues.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
MADV_FREE (since Linux 4.5)
The application no longer requires the pages in the range
specified by addr and size. The kernel can thus free these
pages, but the freeing could be delayed until memory
pressure occurs.
and
MADV_DONTNEED
Do not expect access in the near future. (For the time
being, the application is finished with the given range, so
the kernel can free resources associated with it.)
After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics
of memory access in the specified region are changed:
subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but
will result in either repopulating the memory contents from
the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for
shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem-
based techniques such as System V shared memory segments)
or zero-fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private
mappings.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
uBlock origin on Firefox or Brave, which will block most of the tracker bloat, causing the RAM spike. It's not a perfect fix, but it will cut out a significant chunk of it. Tab Wrangler also helps by suspending inactive tabs automatically. You should try out both.
I use a Mac which has really good memory management but still seeing that 10 GB of my SSD is clogged up with useless crap just because modern development systems are complete and utter crap feels bad.
March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature comfort features like loading in chat history from the server, mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake. The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people don't even consider what memory is.
Does the KV cache really grow to use more memory than the model weights? The reduction in overall RAM relies on the KV cache being a substantial proportion of the memory usage but with very large models I can't see how that holds true.
This series of graphs https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj-2024-082194/F1.large... shows that whilst those two professions are at the bottom of the distribution they are not particularly outlying and cherry picking of those professions has occurred. The statistical analysis should have adjusted for picking the best 2 occupations of the 443 in the study. That would likely show very little statistical significance.
This is good work. I wish branch predictor were better reverse engineered so CPU simulation could be improved. It would be much better to be able to accurately predict how software will work on other processors in software simulation rather than having to go out and buy hardware to test on (which is the way we still have to do things in 2026)
