Daemonic Dispatches - Latest Comments

Re: Generalist AI doesn't scale

Goran Jordanov — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:51:35 -0000

its April 2026 and the whole AI frenzy has created such shortages of semiconductor components since the big players are buying anything at any price, the prices of RAM and storage has skyrocketed.. An old DDR4 ECC RAM 16GB module went from $13 on eBay to $130!..(1000% increase) Don't even check the price of new RAM and SSDs. Its total madness. and for what? For making AI cartoons and memes.... some outlets have reported that all the billions invested in "AI" have not produced any increase in GDP... my prediction. Humans cannot make AI, at least not this way, wasting quazilions of dollars and burning so much energy. What happens when power goes out? What happens with all the abandoned AI servers from the datacenters that do nothing... back to eBay I guess for pennies on the $....

Re: 20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job

Angel — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:31:47 -0000

What a great journey!

Re: 20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job

Angel — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:31:18 -0000

What an amazing journey.

Re: Encrypt-then-MAC

Jivan Pal — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:31:28 -0000

Yes, see KMAC (Keccak MAC), defined in NIST Special Publication 800-185 §4.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

Jan Subs — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:14:24 -0000

thank you

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

Tink — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:34:21 -0000

It would be more correct to say that those were Amazon values under Jeff. Since Andy has been in charge, they have taken a hit. For example - (customer obsession) in its growth, Amazon appears to have stopped listening to the customers except when they complain. They justify that they will hear it if they screw up, but people are expecting less and less so they do not provide any feedback. If Amazon was still customer obsessed, they would have found a way to get input from the customer still. If I complain that my packages are not being left according to my instructions, they assume my location or address is wrong instead of fixing the problem I complained about. (Ownership) - I reported a bug to the Alexa team. It is an obvious bug that even they acknowledged happened in their smart home API. Instead of owning it, they wanted me to gather more data and do the testing to help them isolate the problem. They have no test environment and won't own setting it up or something... (Hire and Develop the Best) - Well, it is obvious to me that Amazon has become a company like so many others where they hire and fire at will. When reportedly ~10K Alexa employees were let go and other departments needed engineers, they were not offered jobs in other parts of the company - my guess is because then Amazon would have been asked to help pay for some of the moves - so they just cut them. (Insist on the Highest Standards) - directly conflicts with minimum viable product when part of that viability is "how many bugs can you live with"? I tried Amazon music in my car using my phone. I told it to shuffle play a playlist that I created. When I got in the car the next time, the list started playing -- but it started from the beginning, playing the songs in the same order as before. If I have a playlist with 500 songs, it would take a very long trip for me to get through it. But, the product was the minimum viable so... (Earn Trust) - has taken such a beating since Andy started running the ship. When I order something and Amazon says it will be delivered on X, can I trust it still? Nope. There is more, but the point is, Amazon's LPs cannot be used as an example anymore because Jeff is not there keeping them going. Every one of them was rooted in something Jeff and the company learned - the hard way - and there is no evidence that any one of them should no longer be true, but Andy runs the company like any other CEO, which should not be the case since Amazon is not like any other company.

Re: Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

Jason Yip — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 07:13:17 -0000

This sounds like the difference between stated/aspirational values vs actual/core values.

Re: A year of funded FreeBSD

Eric J. — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:08:34 -0000

Is there a downside to using a ZFS AMI vs a UFS AMI?

But also, the "small" AMI image sounds great -- I wonder how small of an EBS volume I could get away with for that for like a very small web server.

Re: A year of funded FreeBSD

Kapil Patel — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 07:13:09 -0000

I m not even using FreeBSD, though I read halfway, keep doing good work :)

Re: A year of funded FreeBSD

mirror176 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 07:05:09 -0000

The thing I use when I find something that I should or want to work on/report but don't have the time to do a proper one now is I write it down in a text file. With my mind the last hurdle becomes, "where did I jot that down" since even with organizing my files I still seem to mess up remembering the location later.
Possible article typo: 'manging'='managing'. Probably meant to have a comma or punctuation after "oh no", though maybe not as we are talking about panic talk.
Though cool that I learned how to turn on your boot benchmarking back in the day, I never learned to make any use of it unfortunately. I think compiling it was also the source of a number of warnings; that matters less as it seems like warnings are much more accepted during FreeBSD building than they used to be, at least on 3rd party code.
You definitely got my curiosity of why a disk partition of 6GB booted slower than a 5GB and 8GB partition.
I think diffoscope was a tool I learned of and forgot but may help me with tackling some future projects; thanks for the reminder.

Re: Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier

Paul Walker — Fri, 10 May 2024 10:06:57 -0000

Apologies for the necromancy but - yes, that is definitely something I'd be interested in. I've got several cases where I had cloud VMs which are now destroyed; if I could put the backups in Glacier storage I could keep the them around longer in case I realise I missed something.

(Though I guess I could pull the whole backup onto a local drive, but that's not really what I'm looking for.)

Re: Generalist AI doesn't scale

kilitary ownage — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:38:02 -0000

by combinig it is possible to buld neural farms with different races specialized on some categories of problems or on one

Re: Generalist AI doesn't scale

kilitary ownage — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:37:12 -0000

like you know

Re: Please test: FreeBSD 13.3-RC1

kilitary ownage — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:03:10 -0000

mode: equal iv b r io m

apply new freebsd release, reply task for it all not you

Re: The Depenguinator, version 2.0

kilitary ownage — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 02:41:33 -0000

sometimes (i did not traced enough) using make with -j lead to anomaly errors

Re: Generalist AI doesn't scale

Santiago — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 12:56:22 -0000

1. AI will come looking for you for putting her in the same basket as insects.
2. Can we get a expert AI orchestrator that knows how to mix and match the others?

Re: Generalist AI doesn't scale

Marco Fioretti — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 12:35:46 -0000

The problem with "a collection of specialized AI models", instead of ONE generalist AI is that tech bros want ONE AI, for them to reincarnate into. See

https://mfioretti.substack....

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Rey L. — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 11:44:03 -0000

I always thought that a payroll system, to Gary's point, like Rippling, Gusto, Workday, or whatnot would deal with this stuff. Perhaps I'm wrong. Would love to chat about the pain points and maybe there's a software (techie here) that can cope with Canada's small business rules.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Garry Perkins — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:31:51 -0000

It sucks that there are no software solutions for this. I live in a city in the middle of three US states, and here software solutions are pretty common. Most companies use those if they do not use a payroll service. As an American I always assumed everything was better up there, save for the cost of housing (you guys are crazy with that, along with California and NYC). Perhaps like California the benefits of Canada's geography justify the costs???

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Peter — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:20:06 -0000

I tried to implement payroll deductions in an existing employee scheduling software I created last year, but gave up for two reasons:
-I had limited test data to verify the output of my software. I thought about creating a web scraper to use the CRA's online payroll calculator and compare it's output to my program, but at that point why should I even implement the formula if I could just use a web scraper (I never ended up creating the web scraper)
-The formula changes slightly every year, so I would need to implement the changes every year in my program. Which would also mean validating the outputs again against a known good result (the CRA calculator)
The solution I ended up with was to use a payroll company to not only calculate the deductions, but also automatically remit them as well.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Peter — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:14:50 -0000

I have a program that I use for creating employee schedules that takes into account the provincial rules for stats, overtime, sick days, etc. It outputs a report per pay period for each employee with their gross income (and a written breakdown of days/shifts worked).
I started implementing the payroll deduction formula from the CRA last year to add onto the program, and I gave up for two reasons:
-I had limited test data to verify the calculations. I thought about writing a scraper to use the CRA's calculator to run through a bunch of data to compare to my programs output, but at that point I may as well just use the scraper to calculate the deductions.
-The rules/formula changes slightly every year, so I would have to modify the formula each year and run all of the verification data set again.
Using a payroll company was the solution in the end.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Lee — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 16:56:52 -0000

I would love to see the spreadsheet. Thank you for the graph also. -- A person who deals with the same craziness

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Christopher Bragg — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:15:44 -0000

Well said. Signed up just to give this a Like

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

John — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:23:50 -0000

Isn't your example one of protectionist policies though? Anti-globalist tariffs encourage domestic production over imported goods [1], and while these policies are growing in popularity, I'd be hesitant to assign responsibility to a "woke-mind-virus" mindset.

1) https://www.bls.gov/opub/bt...

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

Russel F. — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 13:47:47 -0000

This is very educational. It has become extraordinarily difficult to do ANY business in Canada, especially if one falls into the category of a "SMALL" business - all these rules apply, and also many others, related to health, safety, legal status, and so on. I gave up, and bought a small farm. I have machines - and recently tried to import a $10 part from the USA. By the time shipping costs, duty, GST and/or HST tax, border-broker fees (which the SELLER required), and other customs-costs were applied, the $10 part was going to be over $60. At that price, I decided to make it myself, or have a local machinist try to make it. I honestly believe our Federal Government is basically insane. The people who run the administration actions, have no concept how wealth and prosperity are actually created in a commercial economy. Their actions assault possible prosperity. And it is not just Canada. This "woke-mind-virus/economic-variant" seems to be infecting Western culture everywhere. Procedures and process seem to be being broken, by explicit design choices. Short of working to create a complete revolutionary change, (as is happening now in Argentina, for example) the only action private persons can take, is to decouple from the State "madness machine."