I use google search only for the most trivial searches now. Something where I know almost precisely what information I want.
I use LLMs for most info now, any slightly ambiguous query really. Often times I use the LLM to figure out what source I should find, then I just use google for retrieval
When I want to “surf the web” I use kagi search (usually with small web filter) when I want to see sources written by people. This isn’t that often, but when I need it kagi is the best!
An example, the other day I wanted to make fermented hot sauce, and I couldn’t remember how much salt was needed for the fermentation. I could google and get served hundreds of crappy ad ridden recipe sites that have the answer to my question buried under five pop up videos, or I could ask an llm with one or two follow ups and have a much more pleasant experience.
Then when I decided I wanted to follow a real recipe I used kagi with small web to find a recipe page that wasn’t an ad farm.
A few more steps than google, but all and all so much better.
+1 for Kagi. Worth the $10/month for me to be able to block SEO crap from my searches, and adding "?" to the end of searches automatically gives you an LLM summary from the top search results. Unfortunately there are still some hallucinations, but since it links to original sources it's easy enough to double check if something doesn't pass the smell test.
I’m getting more and more convinced that this is a main problem all over the West. In Germany, a business owner called Marco Scheel is becoming more and more popular by being very outspoken about how bureaucracy is hindering him. His company is called Nordwolle by the way. They make clothing out of sheep wool. They spend a lot of effort finding the right type of wool so they don’t need chemicals to paint it.
One major example which Marco first became popular with was that he owned a barn but wasn’t allowed to use it for the factory since it was a farm on paper. The government told him to move to a designated factory area. He argued that it made no sense since he was living in a very remote area, and the barn was of high quality. What else should he do with the barn? Why would he need to build something new somewhere else? The barn was there already and stood already for hundreds of years.
His most popular quote is something along the lines of “we can’t all sit with a Chai latte and a MacBook in a coworking space in Berlin and make the 5th dating app. We need some people who do that but not everyone. Some people need to make things with their hands! And for that I need space! I don’t need glass fibre. I need space!”
I associate this attitude with criticism of Wikipedia and narcissism. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's often around editing things they are related to that this comes up.
I tried to do something and they stopped me. This is wrong, I should be able to do this and write my own story.
Which is a perfectly normal feeling. But if you end up saying that loudly in public without ever thinking, well what if the rule of "let this person do whatever they want" applied to people other than yourself, then that seems to indicate some lack of a wider view.
> ... well what if the rule of "let this person do whatever they want" applied to people other than yourself, then that seems to indicate some lack of a wider view.
It sounds like Mr. Scheel is applying exactly that view. The idea is everyone should be able to use their remote farm shed for industrial purposes. Indeed, most of the intellectual foundation of the pro-freedom view is precisely that when you take a wider view freedom is generally better for everyone than authoritarianism right up until it becomes a threat to personal safety (even then, pushing the dial a little further towards freedom generally gets better results). If people can't do what they want, then how are things supposed to get done? If we're all doing things in ways that are believed to be impractical then it is going to waste an unreasonable amount of resources and be stupid.
> I associate this attitude with criticism of Wikipedia and narcissism.
I never said anything about Wikipedia. For the record, I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and I'm skeptical about the new US government.
Please don't assume that because someone holds opinion X that they also hold opinion Y. With the current levels of polarization, it's probably a fair assumption to make, but I think we all as individuals have a responsibility to counter that.
I brought up Wikipedia because it's something I'm interested in.
And it's an example of somewhere I'd seen this exact argument against rules/regulation regularly made on HN stories and the comments on them in what I thought was a mostly non-political context.
> One major example which Marco first became popular with was that he owned a barn but wasn’t allowed to use it for the factory since it was a farm on paper. The government told him to move to a designated factory area. He argued that it made no sense since he was living in a very remote area, and the barn was of high quality. What else should he do with the barn? Why would he need to build something new somewhere else? The barn was there already and stood already for hundreds of years.
Of course it makes sense. Farmland is dedicated to farming and producing food/related things. It lacks connectivity, has fertile soil, prices are cheaper. If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc). It's the same reason why you can't farm in an industrial zone, nor can you set up a factory in the middle of the city.
Yes, it can be taken too far and abused, but absolutely 100% makes sense and must exist.
The guy's not building a gigafactory in his garden, is he?
> If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc).
All true of farming. FWIW as a fellow NIMBY myself, I use the excuse of 'animal flow' (in particular the flow of bats) to prevent anyone from putting anything more than a fence up within 150m of my house. It's great!
> The guy's not building a gigafactory in his garden, is he?
How could this possibly be known without a review in your opinion?
> fellow NIMBY myself
Unless you're American, things don't have to be so binary. The choice isn't between nothing gets built or anyone can just do whatever. We need a balance.
> All true of farming
I'm pretty sure birds and bees and what not prefer having plants than factories.
> You're going to end up in a position where you're telling a farmer how to manage
Funny you say that. Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country, it's actually needed for a variety of reasons. There are subsidies to incentivise the "correct" crops (you don't want all farmers only doing cash crops for export, rendering your country very vulnerable to import markets to sustain itself), there are also rules/policies to rotate crops to avoid top soil erosion which could be devastating, there are rules on what types of pesticides can be used, etc etc etc etc.
> Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country...
"Everyone does it" isn't much of an argument when it comes to economics, the field is littered with a long history of group-think episodes where most people do things in a way that was, in hindsight, a mistake. And being steamrollered by more economically productive societies that don't ban progress. The modern policies developed countries adopted have resulted in vast investments in China (and Asia more broadly) to dodge the regulatory states that were built.
And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers! If we can't trust them to farm then putting regulators in charge isn't going to save us. That attitude of mother knowing best is still going to result in more misses than hits, even if confidently repeated a few times.
> And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers
Strongly disagree. The incentives are just not the same. If farmers use pesticides which will kill all bugs and pollute nearby rivers to increase their yield a tiny bit, that's not good for everyone else. If they decide they're only going to do tobacco because it's very lucrative to export, that's not good either. If the techniques they're using are obsolete (and thus inefficient and resulting in them barely being able to survive against foreign competition) or very bad for the soil/environment.
Farmers produce food, it's one of the most critical things in a country. If things go wrong, there are famines or economical crisis (cf. Egypt, Sri Lanka in the last few years, Soviet Russia in the past century). Hell, many countries were couped to take over control over their farming sectors for commercial interests (Hawai, Central America and the Caribbean, cf. the Banana Wars).
If you have to cut red tape for certain projects, the tape probably shouldn't exist in the first place.
edit: for instance, if you have e.g. an environmental regulation that is so onerous that exemptions must be doled out for something as sensible as train electrification, then you don't have an environmental review regulation, you have a 'build nothing except what the exemptor decrees' regulation. Which is rather antithetical to the rule of law and good governance.
True enough, but having designed a “fantasy cpu” gives you a better frame of reference for understanding the more complex features of a cpu (privilege levels, memory segmentation, virtual addresses, cache hierarchy, etc.)
I often feel like those who haven’t done the exercise of understanding the ISA of a “fantasy cpu” have a really hard time understanding those more advanced features.
I guess all I am saying is that learning the “fantasy cpu” still has value even if everything else in the real world is more complex.
I've been doing some planning for a 24-bit fantasy CPU, my plan is to make it pretty baroque. For instance it has some instructions to do things like unpack UTF-8 strings into chars, do alpha compositing, etc. The CPU part looks like a strange mainframe that didn't quite get built into the 1970s and it is coupled to a video system that would make a Neo-Geo blush.
“Neo Geo[a] is a brand of video game hardware developed by SNK.
It was launched with the Neo Geo, an arcade system (called MVS) with a home console counterpart (AES). Games on the Neo Geo (MVS and AES) were well received and it spawned several long-running and critically acclaimed series, mostly 2D fighters. Later, SNK released the Neo Geo CD, a more cost-effective console with games released on compact discs, which was met with limited success. A new arcade system, Hyper Neo Geo 64, was released in 1997, but it did not fare well. SNK also released a handheld console under the brand, the Neo Geo Pocket, which was quickly succeeded by the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which have been given praise despite its short lifetime.
SNK encountered various legal and financial issues resulting in a sale of the company in 2001. Despite that, the original Neo Geo arcade and console continued receiving new games under new ownership until 2004. The Neo Geo brand was revived in 2012 with the release of the Neo Geo X[1] handheld. Since then, a number of other Neo Geo products have been released based on the original Neo Geo.”
I just realized that people like me that know all about the Neo Geo are actually in the minority in the world. It's easy to forget what is and isn't common knowledge.
Forget advanced features... Without understanding a CPU it's easy to never really understand pointers, and without pointers, it's hard to understand lots of data structures.
I was easily 12 months ahead of other students in my CS education because I learned 6502 assembly in high school. I wish all CS courses started with "make a VM".
I don’t get this take. Is it so hard to understand that a computer operates on a giant array of bytes?
I think the hard thing to understand is that C’s pointer syntax is backwards (usage follows declaration is weird).
I also think understanding how arrays silently decay to pointers and how pointer arithmetic works in C is hard: ptr+1 is not address+1, but address+sizeof(*ptr)!
Pointers are not hard. C is just confusing, but happens to be the lingua franca for “high level” assembly.
> Is it so hard to understand that a computer operates on a giant array of bytes?
Beginner programming languages universally (since BASIC and Pascal) were designed to hide this fact. There's nothing in a beginning Python course that explains the true nature of computers. You learn about syntax, semantics, namespaces, data structures and libraries. But there's nothing that says, "a computer is endlessly incrementing a counter and executing what it finds where the counter points". And this is probably partly because of "go-to considered harmful", which posited that a lack of control flow (which is a fundamental fact of how computers actually work) is harmful to reasoning about programs.
It's probably objectively true. But a lack of go-to also restricts people from seeing the fundamental truth of the indistinguishable nature of data and instructions in the Von Neumann architecture. Which may also make it difficult to explain GPU computing to students (because it must be understood by contrasting it with Von Neumann architecture).
This is very true. I had tried learning C multiple times but pointers were always kind of hard. I kind of understood them but not really. I later spent a lot of time making an OS in assembly for my homebrew 6502 computer, and after that pointers made so much sense. It actually took me a little while to realize that these addresses I was passing around were pointers, and I had started to understand them without realizing it.
Writing blog posts and being ok with them not being perfect.
I often have an idea for a post that would be interesting, but then as a learn more about the topic in order to write, I start to realize how much I don’t know. At this point, the post either dies or I spend way too long learning every irrelevant detail until I feel like I know enough.
So I think the skill I am trying to learn is writing as a non-expert. Learning to write in a tone that makes it ok to not know everything. Writing in a tone that conveys my experience and understanding, but doesn’t try to be an authority on the subject.
Who is your blog's target audience? I write https://www.curiosities.dev/ for myself. I'm a non-expert in all of the posts.
When I revisit old posts, I digest the information differently and add more explorations/questions. It's much easier to build upon scaffolding that's already there. Maybe in N years, I'll have something insightful to say about X, but I don't have to hold off writing anything until then -- incomplete notes and rephrasing of other people's ideas already benefit me now.
I’ve been working on writing this year. It’s hard. I have countless posts or ideas for posts sitting there because I don’t like them for one reason or another.
For me I don’t collect metrics or really try to think that anyone might read a shred of it. I think that’s been helpful. And also just publish it. In the grand scheme it’s for you anyways to enjoy and develop. One piece of advice that I’ve gotten, is to commit to your points or idea. I think that’s can even include committing to uncertainty. You might need to revise it later, but done thoughtfully if you have readers, they should respect that. If not, well, without comments and metrics what does it matter?
Over the holiday break I’ve migrated to my own blog instead of a platform. So I’ve certainly found it enjoyable even if frustrating!
Personally I think that even if you don't know everything, just make clear what you are certain and uncertain about.
You probably know a lot, and what you write is still good as long as you don't spread misinformation. I have issues trusting most sources that are not clear about what they are uncertain about, cause most people are not experts.
I particularly like the mit 6.S081 operating systems course [1].
The course has you make useful extensions to a reimplementation of the XV6 kernel in RISC-V.
This course really helped me start to understand how an OS works and what the hardware software interface really is.
[1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2020/ — linking to the 2020 class because all of the lectures were uploaded to YouTube to accommodate remote work during the thick of Covid.
My favorite part of this book is that guides you through writing two separate interpreters for the same language.
I think it really allows you to grasp some of the more intricate and nuanced parts about building a programming language.
You can encounter all of the big ideas in the first half of the book and gain enough familiarity with them so that when you revisit them again in the second interpreter, you can actually absorb the interesting parts.
I was so pleased when I finally discovered the QEMU Monitor.
It is an excellent tool that covers a lot of the gaps in the QEMU documentation.
Curious which devices are memory mapped to which regions on your virtual board and the docs aren’t specific? Check the device info in the monitor!
Want to know what interrupt signals a device might generate and can’t find that info in the docs, use the monitor to check!
It’s honestly a life saver.
A cool tip I recently found to make using the Monitor easier when you are running your QEMU machine in nographic mode is that you can have QEMU read and write the monitor to a file on your system. Then you can use a tool like socat to have one terminal running your QEMU machine and another running your monitor! Super convenient.
I use LLMs for most info now, any slightly ambiguous query really. Often times I use the LLM to figure out what source I should find, then I just use google for retrieval
When I want to “surf the web” I use kagi search (usually with small web filter) when I want to see sources written by people. This isn’t that often, but when I need it kagi is the best!
An example, the other day I wanted to make fermented hot sauce, and I couldn’t remember how much salt was needed for the fermentation. I could google and get served hundreds of crappy ad ridden recipe sites that have the answer to my question buried under five pop up videos, or I could ask an llm with one or two follow ups and have a much more pleasant experience.
Then when I decided I wanted to follow a real recipe I used kagi with small web to find a recipe page that wasn’t an ad farm.
A few more steps than google, but all and all so much better.