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They said this:

> Even a normal spreadsheet is fairly complex beast. But the novel thing about bidicalc is the backwards solver. Mathematically, updating a spreadsheet "backward" is a (potentially underdetermined) root finding problem, because we are trying to find a vector of unknowns such that , where F is the function computed by the cells formulas, and G is the objective value entered in the cell. Note that F is not necessarily a single formula, but the result of composing an upstream graph of cells into a single function.

> The actual root-finding solver is a custom algorithm that I made. It a general purpose algorithm that will find one root of any continuous-almost-everywhere function for which a complete syntactic expression is known. It uses a mix of continuous constraint propagation on interval union arithmetic , directional Newton's method and dichotomic search. It is of course limited by floating point precision and available computation time.

But that really doesn't answer your question. I see no reason why the solver wouldn't decide every time it had a two-variable summation that ADD(X+Y) doesn't reverse to X=-90 and Y=100.


Sounds good, but what happens when everyone else uses ideological purity filters too?

Because if what this guy is saying is reasonable, then it immediately follows that it's also reasonable for every ideology and religion to exclude the ones they don't like. For example: how does an antisimetic software license strike you? Because that would be a perfectly reasonable license for some people to enact, and fully justified by this article's logic.

Do unto others, and all that.


No, what is deemed evil by this blog, is what exploites open source. For open source software, that's very relevant.

Just like anti democratic values are relevant for democracies.

Don't straw man this.


No, I did not. From the article. This is, unfortunately, a straightforward case of poorly-considered moralizing with extremely bad consequences.

> Overall, these ideas lead me to believe that the open source movement needs to see itself as in a larger social context. Can we shift the balance of power away from massive companies and their massive harms? Can we prevent Nazis from using our software? Should we even try?

> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.


Whoops you're right. I read it twice and completely overlooked that part. Also one of the seven bullet points points in that direction.

I read it as a more "big corps exploiting open source devs" take (as were six out of seven bullet points), but they did indeed slip that in, and concluded with it even.


Upvoted but felt bad for not replying. Yeah, I initially read it as a generic "big corps exploiting open source devs" take as well. Not often someone actually says "whoops you're right" so kudos - not sure I would've done the same.

The article is an interesting philosophical situation where you know the intent is good. But maybe, they took it too far without any of the necessary caveats.


Was anyone surprised? This follows the classic pattern.

  - XP was good
  - vista was bad
  - 7 was good
  - 8 was bad
  - 10 was good
  - 11 is .....drumroll please.... bad.


I think it's generous to say anything after 7 was good.

8 was just so offensively bad with getting rid of the start menu and replacing it with a fullscreen tablet UI, 10 was celebrated for backtracking on that.

But it was also famous for shoving bullshit like Candy Crush into everyone's start menu. I haven't forgotten that.


  - XP was good
  - vista was bad
  - 7 was good
  - 8 was a disaster
  - 10 was worse
  - 11 is even worse
It's a downward spiral.


Windows 11 is bad but will only get worse with AI updates.


Nerds do tend to forget that people make procedural errors.


Imagine the viruses and pranks.


You’re comparing the tech sector of the EU to that of Africa?


No


Nice edit


Bad troll!


> As an aside... Because one node didn't start, and my Proxmox cluster has only two nodes, it can't reach quorum, meaning I can't really make any changes to my other node, and I can't start any containers that are stopped. I've recently added another Zigbee dongle, that supports Thread, and it happens to share same VID:PID combo as the old dongle, so due to how these were mapped into guest OS, all my light switches stopped working. I had to fix the issue fast.

Lesson in here somewhere. Something about about a toaster representing the local intelligence maxima?


The lesson is use dumb light switches and have a shotgun ready if the printer starts to act up.


Also regularly print out sheets of electronic recycling facts to remind the printer of its place.


I see you made the mistake of buying an hp inkjet in the last twenty years as well...


Lesson 1: clusters should have an odd number of nodes.


I really, really think there are better lessons there. Maybe more like "Lesson 0. Don't put distributed clusters in control of your light switches"


Yes, but then I'm going to have to manually go around my house and turn off all the lights when I leave the house and when I come back I have to turn them on manually instead of them just turning on when I open the door to a room. Also my AC/heating automatically turns off when I leave the house and turns on when I come back, my lights automatically dim/change to a warmer temperature in the evening as it gets closer to bed time, my desktop goes to sleep when I leave the house, my TV automatically turns on when I power on the living room media PC, etc. etc.


Why not?? It's fun!


Two node / even node clusters can work fine.

For even n>2 you define a tie breaker node in advance and only the partition connected to that node can make a quorum at 50%. For n=2 going from no quorum to quorum requires both nodes but losing a node doesn't lose quorum, and when you lose a node you stop, shoot the other node, and continue. For split brain the fastest draw wins the shootout.


> For split brain the fastest draw wins the shootout.

I bet there is still space for a race condition there.


Originally I was planning on building the NAS with just the Minisforum MS-01, but truenas and USB enclosures do not play well together.

So I went for the AOOSTAR NAS mini-pc as a "proper" solution. Ended up with two machines, so why not join them into the cluster!

Probably can chuck proxmox on a RasPi somewhere, just for quorum purposes :)


In fairness to proxmox, that's the recommended way.

Most homelabbers ignore recommendations because if anything breaks nothing of corporate value is lost and no one's gonna lose their job.


proxmox even makes it easy by letting you run something like a raspberry pi as an additional quorum member if you dont have enough hardware for a 3rd node


At least I was laughing at the Cloudflare oopsie, since all my light switches (et al) are all local. Unlike those people with a fancy smart bed that went into a W shape because it couldn't talk to AWS.


Yup, if you're going to have smart lights, get ones that still have a physical switch!


I’m confused, are you talking about getting PXE enabled in the hardware, or customizing something about your PXE software for the new hardware?


There's a lot of nonsense at every level. Especially when dealing with heterogenous infrastructure.

Some NICs support http. Some NICs support tftp. Some NICs have enough memory for a big iPXE, other NICs don't. Some BMC systems make next-boot-to-lan easy, but not all.

We almost always use iPXE in order to normalize our pxe environment before OS kickstart. There's a lot to it and quite a lot of little things that can go wrong. Oh, and every bit of it becomes critical infra.


Ok, that makes more sense. I'm used to iPXE, and I guess that quick bootstrap from PXE->iPXE bypasses a lot of the nonstandard weirdness.


All of 'em.


A rule of thumb among your friends: those who don’t talk politics are the conservative ones. Similarly, I’d wager most of the examples here without overtly progressive stickers are conservative.


Depends on where you live. Around me the conservatives are more than willing to offer their political opinions even when the context doesn't fit. Progressive/Liberal folks tend to be less vocal because we already know where we stand with each other and don't want to invite the loudmouth to go off.


The UK has their "blade runners" - maybe the US needs them, too.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...


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