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Yeah, it's my favorite bit of C lore, a program that reads two integers, adds them, and reports the sum isn't well defined.


I'd be impressed with a touchpad and OS that can go from an actuation to a userspace process receiving a click event in 1.2ms. I'd expect something more like 10x that. My understanding is that most hardware samples between 90-130Hz, and even premium hardware only samples at 250Hz which would average 2ms before the kernel is aware.


chrome can detect my 1000hz polling mouse, but i bet there must be a buffer somewhere.


recent chrome versions actually throttle these reports down to 60hz max, checked this on several systems and mice


I see, but the path from hardware to userspace app should remain unchange, right ?


The honest way to say this is that Fable is not useful for bio-related work. The author is working on processing RNA sequences and similar biology tasks, and Fable's classifier has a hair trigger on those tasks.


The author is working on an opensource C++ codebase and not on biology tasks. The work is around tooling.

It's like saying well a scalpel is used for medical reasons, sure. But manufacturing scalpels is metalworking, not medicine.


I think it's accurate to characterize the project as bio-related work: https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/salmon

> salmon is a wicked-fast program for highly-accurate, transcript-level quantification from RNA-seq data. It pairs a fast mapping stage — selective alignment, or alignment-free sketch mode (--sketch) — with a massively-parallel statistical model (EM/VBEM over equivalence classes) to estimate transcript abundances. You can give salmon raw sequencing reads, or regular alignments to the transcriptome (an unsorted BAM), and it uses the same inference engine either way.


Got it, so all those advances in medicine we were promised in exchange for higher electricity costs, global warming, and other pitfalls of AI were bunk?


It's also data that Anthropic likely scraped and included in their training data.


> The honest way to say this is that Fable is not useful for bio-related work.

It is way worse than that. Try "How does digestion work?" and you will see "Fable's safeguards flagged this message". It's a stupid rate of false positives.


Yes! Very exciting to see this.

Bloom's Two Sigma Opportunity suggests that there's another SD improvement available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem


The story around Bloom's two sigma is a bit complex https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/


Apparently my definition of tutor is so demanding that it should not be expected at all from a tutor (even if provided with information on the tutees weaknesses, tutors don't use the information effectively). However, the point of these studies are to gauge large scale effects rather than high variance small sample size effects. There's a lot more that is very interesting.


Beat me to it. The Wikipedia page for example looks like an advertisement for tutoring firms, and when you dig into the sources, it’s pretty oversold


Thank you for this and for parent’s comment - I know what rabbit hole I’m going down today.


Hmm, it might be better to just go straight to what leading countries currently do (Finland/Estonia/Japan/Singapore/etc). Other factors probably play a bigger role, like school funding, school autonomy, teacher professionalism (high education level + continuing education + good pay), free school meals/healthcare/transportation etc


One major limitation is the cost. It costs lots of money to train teachers and pay them good salaries. What leading countries are doing currently might not be sustainable for the long run. Cognitive abilities also different greatly from people to people in different discipline. There is no silver bullet.


America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.


The long term sustainability in at least one of those leading countries (Japan) has been shown effective for at least the period from the end of WWII to now. The principle difficulty they have is not maintaining high levels of educational success but in having enough children to keep the schools open and the teachers fully employed. But, that is a different concern than successful educational outcomes.

The average level of capability and comprehension in fundamental disciplines for students completing primary is a direct result of some fundamental differences in the way they approach classroom organization: for one middle school and high school students do not change classrooms during a school day.

Teachers rotate rooms while students remain in place and this maintains a less disjointed, less distracted transition between classes. There are still very little to zero technological advances to the teaching methods: blackboards/whiteboards, overhead projectors, hand written paperwork, textbooks.

The reasoning is simple. The fundamentals which students in primary education are in need of learning do not change much. Last years' textbooks are perfectly useful and the cost of replacement is directly carried by each student. If they damage a book, they must replace it.

Salaries for teachers are not unusually high, but they are also not low. The building and administrative costs are kept low, for one, by there not being a significant non-instructor labor expense of janitorial and maintenance workers. Schools share the pool of municipal HVAC and other trades for serious infrastructure, but janitors? Nope. The students are required to actually clean up after themselves, and to actually clean the whole school. It makes a difference, and those avoidable labor costs can be directed to proper compensation for the teaching staff.

Anecdotal observation of the overall efficacy of this approach reaches areas not usually measured as 'educational success' but also includes one noteworthy artifact. The common clerk, shop keeper, cook, or gas tank delivery driver all know that i = sqrt(-1) and that a complex number is a pair of numbers, one of which is the coefficient of (i). Let that sink in. How many people graduate with a B.A. from western schools without that?

There is not a 'silver bullet' but there are a full compliment of approaches which when applied together, consistently, and persistently, yield excellent sustainable outcomes.

Back to the falling population problem. There are pluses and minuses from the choice to provide separate boys and girls middle and high schools; one of which is lower teenage pregnancy and it's inverse, lower adult birthrates. (It's not the only reason for the lower birthrates, but it's not having zero impact.) You cant win 'em all.


As far as I know, replications showed an effect size that's still pretty amazing by educational standards but nowhere near z=2.0 (I think z=0.6 is the current best guess).


The author has written about stacked sigmoids in the past, e.g. in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/15/is-science-slowing-dow...

I suspect that he started down the path of considering them more deeply here but found that they didn't add much to the analysis. A stack of sigmoids ultimately either gives you a single sigmoid if you run out of new innovations, or an exponential if you don't.


Yep. What nix adds is a declarative and reproducible way to build customized OS images to boot into.


Nix is the best answer to "works on my machine," which is a problem I've seen at pretty much every place I've ever worked.


It's also an answer to caching with /nix/store. I wish more cloud services supported "give me your nixosConfiguration or something similar" instead of providing api to build containers/vms imperatively. Dockerfile and everything that mimics it is my least favorite way to do this.


It’s fairly trivial to map your NixOS config into a VM image: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-image-nixos-rebui...

An alternative is to “infect” a VM running in whatever cloud and convert it into a NixOS VM in-place: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

In fact, it is a common practice to use the latter to install NixOS on new machines. You start off by booting into a live USB with SSH enabled, then use nixos-anywhere to install NixOS and partition disks via disko. Here is an example I used recently to provision a new gaming desktop:

    nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- \
      --flake .#myhost \
      --target-host user@192.168.0.100 \
      --generate-hardware-config nixos-generate-config ./hosts/myhost/hardware-configuration.nix
At the end of this invocation, you end up with a NixOS machine running your config partitioned based on your disk config. My disko config in this case (ZFS pool with 1 disk vdev): https://gist.github.com/aksiksi/7fed39f17037e9ae82c043457ed2...


I know that part is easy, i just nix-anywhere just yesterday to reinstall one of my servers. It's not what I'm talking about.


Okay, so your idea is that cloud providers should make this even easier?

    $ nixos-rebuild build-image --flake .#myhost --image-variant amazon
    $ aws-cli image upload < result/images/image.ami
    $ aws-cli create vm --image={image}


Less about IaaS providers, more about PaaS providers that often abstract away image you're running and tell you "just run pip/apt/gem install whatever".

Same with the CI platforms, instead of `setup-*` steps in GHA it could have just take flake in. Yes, I know I can build OCI image with nix, again, not the issue.

My private CI runs on top of nix, all workers on the same host share /nix/store. My pipelines focused on running actual things rather than getting a worker ready to run things. If I didn't want output to be parsed by CI, I could have just reduced my pipeline to `nix flake check`.

I share the exact same pipeline and worker image across multiple projects in multiple languages, all because everything is hidden behind devenv's tasks. When I switched project different rust and node versions, I didn't have to touch my CI at all. When I added a bunch of native deps that usually needed to be installed separately on GHA - again, didn't have to touch anything beyond my nix env once.


Or try this: https://github.com/deepclause/agentvm, it's based on container2wasm, so the VM is fully defined by a Dockerfile.


Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.


Incomes are up, but the expenses are up as well, especially with the upcoming changes in healthcare for people on the ACA.

Also any comparison of wage growth vs corporate profit growth over the last 30 years shows that wages have not kept pace with the increase in productivity.

So incomes are only just barely keeping up, when they should be booming.


How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?


Housing is not part of the inflation calculation. There IS a housing inflation crisis.


Household income is more than just wages. Household income can go up while wages remain stagnant or shrinking because other pieces of the pie are increasing (e.g. work benefits, investments, money from the government). https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/09/sources-of-household...


The price of housing can rise even faster than incomes.

Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.


Accommodation costs are the first part of any sensible measure of inflation. If you're not factoring in housing then you're fudging the figures.


Many people don’t see housing inflation - if you bought a house in 2020 and house prices were up 80% since then it doesn’t affect your housing costs, especially in the US where mortgage rates are fixed for length of term even if interest rates sky rocket.


Yes? Who says otherwise?

As long as accommodation isn't 100% of your basket of goods and services you use to measure inflation, accommodation can rise in price faster (or slower) than the basket. This ain't exactly rocket science.


If the mandatory basket item expense raises, it should also become a larger portion of basket, as the basket is supposed to measure the cost of living. So either CPI is not properly measuring the cost of living, or there isn't an affordability crisis.

You cannot have rising inflation adjusted wages and worse spending power, unless the inflation is not being measured meaningfully.


Housing, schooling, healthcare, daycare, food.

Samsung TV purchasing power has skyrocketed, though, so there's that.


Inflation also corrodes your savings and investments.


Yet more and more people are struggling to afford even basic necessities and one can only dream of the luxury of the 50's when a single working class person was able to pay and cover for housing, car, family and even have enough for leisure. Where has all the economic surplus gone? Right...to the bourgeois, the capital owning class that exceedingly extract more and more of the wealth generated by the society.


because the developing world is producing a lot of things except the housing.


They also don't produce haircuts.


Agree, for modern React with hooks. A React component looks like a normal function, only you can't call it. Only React can call it, in order to set up its hooks state.


You can disable it for your site using a trusted types content security policy.


Missing from the article: how to communicate progress and failure to the user?

This is much more complicated with task queues. Doable still! But often skipped, because it's tempting to imagine that the backend will just handle the failure by retrying. But there are lots of kinds of failure that can happen.

The recipient's server doesn't accept the email. The recipient's domain name expired. Actually, we don't have an email address for that recipient at all.

The user has seen "got it, will do, don't worry about it" but if that email is time sensitive, they might want to know that it hasn't been sent yet, and maybe they should place a phone call instead.


You can still do that. You can poll status while the page is open. Toast errors or state changes. Even toast them on return. Anything is possible.

After all Amazon does this for a physical order. It may be days before a status update!


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