Titus Winters talks about maintaining and refactoring large C++ code bases (i.e. code bodies that require multi-step refactoring). He describes how “higher-level” language features effectively make refactoring harder (e.g. functions, classes, templates, concepts).
Tag: Insights
Usefulness of Swap Explained
Chris Down explains how swap’s main role is being the missing backing store for anonymous (i.e. allocated by malloc) pages. While all other kinds of data (e.g. paged-in files) can be reclaimed easily and later reloaded, because their “source of truth” is elsewhere. There’s no such source for anonymous pages hence these pages can “never” be reclaimed unless there’s swap space available (even if those pages aren’t “hot”).
Linux has historically had poor swap (and by extension OOM) handling with few and imprecise means for configuration. Chris describes the behavior of a machine with and without swap in different scenarios of memory contention. He thinks that poor swap performance is caused by having a poor measure of “memory pressure.” He explains how work on cgroups v2 might give the kernel (and thus admins) better measures for memory pressure and knobs for dealing with it.
6 weeks without the big 5
Kashmir Hill went 6 weeks without the big 5 tech giants (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple). It seems you basically have to become a level 5 vegan especially if you also avoid anything hosted/using their cloud services (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCloud).
Wrestling with the Python
Sometimes Python makes some useful things unnecessarily complex for weird and inconsistent reason … e.g. “code blocks.”
ECCploiting with Rowhammer
Certain types of ECC RAM can also be exploited with Rowhammer. ?
ZIO Pipeline
This is an awesome talk for nerding out on ZFS interna. ?
Threads on async
If you were to design a threading library today how would it look like? David Beazley manages to demonstrate a lot of edge cases in tiny examples … while live-coding! ?
systemd from BSD
A remarkably sober analysis of what problem systemd solves for Linux … at a BSD conference of all places. ?
Silicon Valley or Soviet Union
This made my day.
Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:
– waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
– promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
— anton (𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢) (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
In Support of Strong Encryption
IEEE supports the use of unfettered strong encryption to protect confidentiality and integrity of data and communications. We oppose efforts by governments to restrict the use of strong encryption and/or to mandate exceptional access mechanisms such as “backdoors” or “key escrow schemes” in order to facilitate government access to encrypted data. Governments have legitimate law enforcement and national security interests. IEEE believes that mandating the intentional creation of backdoors or escrow schemes – no matter how well intentioned – does not serve those interests well and will lead to the creation of vulnerabilities that would result in unforeseen effects as well as some predictable negative consequences.
— IEEE Position Statement