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“We’d like to keep the circumstances private”

Yes, but now I’m like, super suspicious.


He was defeated by Mr Rogers in a blood-stained sweater. Understandable they're keeping that quiet.

(Ok, ok, technically it was Gandalf the Gray and White, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight)


And Benito Musollini, and the Blue Meanie. And Cowboy Curtis and Jambi the Genie

And Robocop, Terminator, Captain Kirk and Darth Vader. Lo-Pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger.

And Bill S. Preston, Theodore Logan, Spock, The Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan.

There is nothing suspicious about a celebrity's family just wanting to deal with death in private.

You're probably right, but that's not the usual wording you hear. Of course, when grieving, proper proofreading may not be (nor should it be) at the top of anyone's list.

They usually don't put it like that, though. It's usually just "please respect our privacy during this difficult time", etc.

You went from BSON to your own and skipped CBOR and Protobuf? … I wonder if you would have made different decisions without Claude vibing you in a direction?

It’s neither!

Sample output:

'fdiscovered,aextreme,7danger,6+1A+16;6level_range,b:QThe Heap ,d'th

Human unreadable, ascii output. Line up and get yours today!


it's not really possible to stay human readable and get the compression levels and random access properties I was going for. But it is as human tooling friendly as possible given the constraints.

>it's not really possible

I find it obvious that your first attempt failed. Try again, you have not even remotely failed enough if you are making the argument that this is kinda readable. Yes, ascii words are easy to pick out, you didn’t do that, you did the part that makes it all harder.


What about CBOR that can retain JSON compatibility?

If you are working with an end you don’t control, this “newer better” format isn’t in your cards either.


How does CBOR retain JSON compatibility more than RX?

RX can represent any value JSON can represent. It doesn't even lose key order like some random-access formats do.

In fact, RX is closer to JSON than CBOR.

Take decimals as an example:

JSON numbers are arbitrary precision numbers written in decimal. This means it can technically represent any decimal number to full precision.

CBOR stores numbers as binary floats which are appriximations of decimal numbers. This is why they needed to add Decimal Fractions (Tag 4)

RX already stores as decimal base and decimal power of 10. So out of the box, it matches JSON


'fdiscovered,aextreme,7danger,6+1A+16;6level_range,b:QThe Heap ,d'th

Oof.


Very similar to bittorrent’s bencode. That has the benefit that it has a canonical encoding which this doesn’t (because of the different compression options). I wouldn’t be put off by how it looks as text.

Very true. I had forgotten about bencode, I should read up on that again.

It makes sense they need a canonical form because they want same values to have same content hashes.


I was instantly suspicious that a “new better format” for serialization didn’t open with the input/output. And this is why (fucking lol, gtfo):

    Q^mSat,3^b:d+s+E,4Fri,3^u:h+k+u,6Thu,3^P:j+
If you are effectively going binary, do it. CBOR or Protobuf or any dozen other binary serializations that would be far more efficient.

The author claims this is because of copy and pasting… cool, remind me what BASE64 is again?


It is also a format that can be read as-is without any preprocessing. In some cases base64 can do that, and this format does make heavy use of base64 varints.

Sure, you can encode as JSON, then compress with gzip and then base64 encode. You'll probably end up with something smaller than rx and be extremely safe to copy-paste. But your consumers are going to consume orders of magnitude more CPU reading data from this document.

RX is usable as-is, is compressed, and is copy-pasteable. It's the unique combination of properties that makes it interesting.


>It is also a format that can be read as-is without any preprocessing.

>Q^mSat,3^b:d+s+E,4Fri,3^u:h+k+u,6Thu,3^P:j+

My man… no. I have no doubt you could kind of figure out what that sample is hot off the heels of writing this, and likely not in six months. And to consider that anyone else would fill their brain with the rules to decipher that, Nah 2.0.


I meant computers can read it without any preprocessing. It's random access. You don't need to parse it, you don't need to decompress it. You just start at the end and follow pointers till you get to the desired value.

Even a trivial doc like this is challenging for me to read as a human.


But... what sort of storage device does not allow your computers to use all 256 byte values? Why is random access data stored on teletype?

> what sort of storage device does not allow your computers to use all 256 byte values

- clipboards

- logs

- terminal output

- alerts

- yaml configs

- JSON configs

- hacker news comments

- markdown documentation

- etc...

I assure you, this is not a solution looking for a problem. I started out with binary encodings first, but then realized it limits so many workflows.


Ick, why are you talking to another person like this?

> Nah.com, fam.


> It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity.

Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense.

You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.


> You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.

The inflection point for the public was Musk calling the cave diver, who helped orchestrate the rescue of a dozen trapped kids, a "pedo guy" and then doubling down on it, again, twice in front of his audience of millions.

The inflection point for anyone in tech with two eyes and a brain was Musk insisting his companies produce products that do more than they are, still to this day, capable of.

First was around 2018, the latter was ~2016, although anyone who was familiar with machine learning knew models were not as capable as Musk was insisting they were, and that the hyperloop was a scam.


Before he went in for Trump he created an obviously fake, insanely expensive system that could never work in practice (Hyperloop) just to slow down California rail projects

California rail projects fail because it’s California

Before he went in for Trump he was running a factory with an alarmingly high injury rate, where employees were regularly called the N-word, and union busting. People who liked him then weren't paying attention at all.

For what it's worth, I hated him well before he had anything to do with Trump. Most concretely when he called the cave diver a pedo for not wanting to use his stupid submarine, but I remember thinking that the Hyperloop thing he was proposing was pretty stupid too.

Oh, and when he lied about taking Tesla private so he could quickly boost the price of the stock. That sucks too. He's always sucked.


If you are doing video models, this is an excellent way to murder your SSD.

Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.


> Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.

This.

Many people rediscovering what the purpose of swap files are, but will still find a way to abuse it without knowing that they are actually destroying their SSD.


You can of course monitor SMART wearout indicators to check whether this is happening. Casual use of swap for non LLM-use is actually fine since "cold" ephemeral data will be swapped out first and that will never get written to; KV cache is mostly fine since it's similarly append-only so writes are tolerably small; but yes, more general LLM inference totally breaks that limited-writes pattern and will wear out/kill your media.

I was writing it somewhat tongue-in-cheek and not as a serious suggestion. But thanks for adding the disclaimer, that's good advice!

zram swap otoh should be relatively 'free'

LLM working memory is not compressible so ZRAM doesn't buy you anything.

EU has had a lot of time to recognize the situation they have been in regarding energy.

Sorry, but this will never not be not amusing. Where Trump being a stopped clock warns the UN about relying on foreign energy and the German delegation laughs as they were shutting down their nuclear and increasing reliance on Russia for energy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwg


> EU has had a lot of time to recognize the situation they have been in regarding energy.

There is no case of they just needed to pay attention earlier. The problem is known. There is just no good solution. Drastically scaling back energy consumption isn't going to happen any time soon and would harm the economy. So we can choose between Russia, the Middle East and the USA. Best would be of course to reduce fossil use, but that is orthogonal.


There is just no good solution.

Refraining from shutting down their nuclear plants for no good reason would have been a start.


That's not a solution. A solution is something you can actually do.

They can restart them and/or build new ones. Fission isn't some lost technology like Greek fire or Damascus steel.

> They can restart them

Can they?

> build new ones

That'll take 20 years.


Damascus steel…isn’t a lost technology.

Are you willing to share where you heard that?


Ok, now balance your response with the image of them laughing at dumb old Trump being a dumb dumb.

Trump? The same Trump that threatened Greenland while the EU is relying on US LNG? Indeed the EU should not rely on US energy.

Trump is completely inconsistent anyway. First he blamed the EU for wanting to continue the Ukraine war. Then he periodically floats lifting Russia sanctions. But if the EU were to lift Russia sanctions, that of course would lead to severe repercussions.

Trump is about economic suppression of the EU.

If you say "nuclear energy". The US has imported Russian uranium to at least 2025.


We have a monkeys and typewriters thing for this already.

Just instead of hitting keys, they’re hitting words, and the words have probability links to each other.

Who the hell thinks this is ready to make important decisions?


It's not ready to make important decisions. But that's not the same as making important contributions.

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