Notices by Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social), page 5

Looks like Arweave is adopting #LMDB now? https://github.com/permaweb/HyperBEAM/pull/309/commits/dde0a79d52643fe043b40adfa81e0c7290a446a3

It's amusing to me to see them adopting this code now, since they were the first project to adopt #RandomX. Early to adopt my recent work, late to adopt my early work. Also interesting to see that they use #Erlang - I first tried to develop an erlang wrapper for LMDB years ago to use in #riak, but all of that was abandoned.

@bagder oh, that explains this email I got today

@HXLNT I've been looking into this sort of thing as well. Running wireguard to a small VPS, which gives me ipv6 access and a static ipv4 address. Still cheaper than buying the necessary RAM and disk from a hosting provider.

"What happened – Switching from #RocksDB to #LMDB and tweaking pool allocation cut RSS by 52% in Pinterest’s GraphQL edge layer.

Why it matters – A reminder that “just buy more RAM” is not a strategy when you’re at a Pinterest scale"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-record-ddos-managing-450m-images-calling-uber-bart%C5%82omiej-%C5%BCyli%C5%84ski-lrncf

RocksDB is a resource hog...

@sundogplanets @steter yep, you can't beat the speed of light. Lower orbits give lower latency, higher orbits give higher latency. People demanding shorter delays will keep paying for those lower orbits.

Using balloon-lofted relays seemed like a pretty good idea, but you can't rely on them in warzones. And they probably can't stay aloft for decades at a time either. There's really not a lot of great alternatives, if you want wide coverage and low latency.

@feld ugh. Shades of Brian Kernighan "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

Just saw an FB post about using ultrasound to stimulate regions of the brain, to enhance memory, cognition, etc. Turns out this is an actual field of study, transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6579808/

Just reminded me of Star Trek S03E14 Whom Gods Destroy

@bagder yeah, everything you can possibly imagine to do wrong, they did wrong. https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/18317

It's difficult to show all the degradations in a reproducible single-threaded benchmark, so I never updated that ticket. But in a multithreaded workload, their heavy reliance on malloc and all the locking it requires interacts badly with every other need for synchronization in a process.

@bagder not only did they kill their multithreaded performance by making every crypto mechanism dependent on malloc, they also made it impossible to safely free all of the library's allocated memory. https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/25294#issuecomment-2312841205

It's like the entire OpenSSL dev team got replaced by a bunch of recent CS grad students.

@mms for truly elegant code one must be buzzed on champagne.

Yes, speaking from experience

@Saltssaltgirl Glad to help!

Hot take: web browsers shouldn't have any telemetry built in. If you want to know what users think of your UX, let them tell you in your bug tracker.

@mike @jwildeboer people scoff when I still recommend this book. But IMO it's still essential reading, to grok the proper mindset. Much like reading about Forth, most people need to be shown the elegance and efficiency that are part of good designs. They obviously have no clue otherwise, looking at the bloated crap they produce.

@irene @skinnylatte I had no idea this was Japanese. Had it a lot at home. But now I just make it with egg & water, then top with green onions and sesame oil, nothing else.

Torn Write Detection and Protection
with references to #LMDB

https://transactional.blog/blog/2025-torn-writes

LMDB is immune by design; the essential write that marks a txn as committed is only 120 bytes long. Guaranteed to be atomic even on ancient HDDs with 512 byte sectors.

@rayckeith presumably satnavs also work for sea and aircraft, while this would only work for ground. No?

@froge @rayckeith in any case, it seems like not much trouble to deploy, and certainly worth doing. https://mastodon.social/@hyc/112430694224002097

@feld @rberger @Eetschrijver if the courts have no power over the executive branch to force it to comply with judicial orders, then checks and balances are dead.

The court doesn't need power beyond our borders. The people responsible for the screwup are inside our borders and are subject to the court's decisions.

@feld @rberger @Eetschrijver back to the bigger picture - the republicans control both the House and Senate, so that's the Legislative branch taken care of. There are republican-appointed judges all over the federal courts, and of course the Supreme court too, so that's the Judicial branch taken care of. There is no balance, there's nothing to keep Executive branch in check.

@feld @rberger @Eetschrijver the system has responded at the expected speed: judges have issued injunctions and restraining orders against illegal actions already, but those orders have been ignored. It's not a question of judicial speed, it's an issue of failed enforcement, because the enforcers are all corrupt.