Most British people don’t respond well to attempts to cow them. They refuse to be cowed! To allow oneself to be cowed would be cowardly. To do so would have one accused of cowardice, of being a coward.
I checked and apparently they have different etymologies, the verb "to cow" is from old Norse "kúga", to oppress), whereas "coward" comes from Old French "couard".
Sadly the UK is a favorite venue for oligarchs looking to silence critics, with feral law firms like Carter Ruck specializing in this tawdry business.
In the UK, the losing party usually pays the legal costs of the winning one, and libel litogation can cost millions, far exceeding whatever damages are awarded. Few newspapers or publishers can afford to defend such lawsuits.
Invert the economics. Right now there is value in posting LLM generated content that is more than the cost of using the model.
If platforms had a subscription model that you had to pay for in order to do more than just read comments, there’d be a lot less LLM content. There would also be a lot less of all content. But maybe that’s the price you pay (literally) to get rid of AI slop.
I meant the social media platforms. If HN charged a fee for posting and commenting it doesn’t matter how cheap the AI models are, it’d be punishingly expensive to sling slop.
If we just put enough effort in and write the right spec/prompt/design then the programmers/llms/plug compatible coding units will produce the correct output first time!
Closing feedback loops. That’s the whole thing. WE Deming would have recognised agile (little a) as a PDCA system and approved.
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.
Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
The standard pattern to avoid select for update (which can cause poor performance under load) is to use optimistic concurrency control.
Add a numeric version column to the table being updated, read and increment it in the application layer and use the value you saw as part of the where clause in the update statement. If you see ‘0 rows updated’ it means you were beaten in a race and should replay the operation.
I don't think such a broad recommendation will be good for most people, it really depends.
Optimistic updates looks great when there is no contention, and they will beat locking in a toy benchmark, but if you're not very careful they can cause insane amplification under load.
It's a similar trap as spinlocks. People keep re-discovering this great performance hack that avoids the slow locks in the standard. And some day the system has a spike that creates contention, and now you have 25 instances with 24 of them spinning like crazy, slowing to a crawl the only one that could be making progress.
It's possible to implement this pattern correctly, and it can be better in some specific situations. But a standard FOR UPDATE lock will beat the average badly implemented retry loop nine times out of ten.
Good point. The barrier pattern from the article applies to both approaches - whether you're using pessimistic locks or optimistic version checks, it's good to verify that the concurrency handling actually works. Barriers let you test that your version check correctly rejects the stale update, the same way they test that your lock prevents the race.
But you’re not getting slower and slower for every car. Lets say 100 cars pull in front of you, and let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space, so you have 500 metres of ‘lost’ space to regain.
At over 100 km/h that would be ideally 5m for a car and 70m for a safe distance between each one so 7,5km, which is 4.5 minutes at 100 km/h or 9 minutes at 30 mph.
