2025 – Page 3 – Made by Mikal

On GitHub merge queues, reliability, and multiplexed serial connections

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 26, 2025
Post category:Shaken Fist

Assuming anyone was paying attention, which I suspect they are not, they would have noticed that there are a lot of queued up pull requests for Shaken Fist right now. There are a couple of factors leading to that — there are now several bots which do automated pull requests for code hygiene purposes; and a couple of months ago I decided to give GitHub’s new merge queue functionality a go in order to keep the CI resource requirements for Shaken Fist under control. All CI runs on four machines in my home office, and there were periods of time where the testing backlog would be more than 24 hours long. I can’t simply buy more hardware, and I didn’t really want to test things less.

The basic idea of GitHub merge queues is that you have a quick set of initial tests which determine if the pull request smells, and then only run the full test suite on non-stinky code which a human has signed off on. Once the human signs off, the code will only merge if the full suite passes, and GitHub manages a queue of merge attempts to keep that reasonable.

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AI Snake Oil

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 15, 2025
Post category:Book

Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is.

The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI — imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like “car”, “bus”, “rocket”, and “boat”. Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was talking about boats and you were talking about rockets. This is one of the issues right now with discussions of “AI” — there are several kinds of AI, but the commentary is all grouped together and conflating the various types. I think this is probably a specific example of what Ben Goldacre talks about in Bad Science — science reporting by non-scientists is often overly credulous, and misses the subtleties.

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Title: AI Snake Oil
Author: Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor
Release Date: 2024
Pages: 348

From two of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about AI and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products. Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You're not alone.

Understanding the Intel 4004 clock circuit

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 11, 2025
Post category:Intel 4004 Microprocessors

Noting that the Intel 4004 was normally sold as a chip set called the Intel MCS-4, the standard clock circuit used appears to be this (from this PDF, kindly provided by this vendor of MCS-4 test boards):

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FastCDC, puzzlefs, and de-duplicating container and VM images

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 2, 2025
Post category:Containers Shaken Fist

Since about 2017, a group at Cisco has been working on an “OCI native operating system” under the title “project machine”, which is a terrible project name. I note that most of the people publicly involved in the project according to github commits no longer work at Cisco, so I cannot vouch for the health of the overall project. That said, they did come up with some interesting ideas along the way and given its a quiet time of year I figured I could do some reading.

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