A staff+ skill

Previously, I wrote some sketchy ideas for what I call a p-fast trie, which is basically a wide fan-out variant of an x-fast trie. It allows you to find the longest matching prefix or nearest predecessor or successor of a query string in a set of names in O(log k) time, where k is the key length. My initial sketch was more complicated and greedy for space than necessary, so here’s a simplified revision. (“p” now stands for prefix.) layout A p-fast trie stores a lexicographically ordered set of names. A name is a sequence of characters from some small-ish character set. For example, DNS names can be represented as a set of about 50 letters, digits, punctuation and escape characters, usually one per byte of name. Names that are arbitrary bit strings can be split into chunks of 6 bits to make a set of 64 characters. Every unique prefix of every name is added to a hash table. An entry in the hash table contains: A shared reference to the closest name lexicographically greater than or equal to the prefix. Multiple hash table entries will refer to the same name. A reference to a name might instead be a reference to a leaf object containing the name. The length of the prefix. To save space, each prefix is not stored separately, but implied by the combination of the closest name and prefix length. A bitmap with one bit per possible character, corresponding to the next character after this prefix. For every other prefix that matches this prefix and is one character longer than this prefix, a bit is set in the bitmap corresponding to the last character of the longer prefix. search The basic algorithm is a longest-prefix match. Look up the query string in the hash table. If there’s a match, great, done. Otherwise proceed by binary chop on the length of the query string. If the prefix isn’t in the hash table, reduce the prefix length and search again. (If the empty prefix isn’t in the hash table then there are no names to find.) If the prefix is in the hash table, check the next character of the query string in the bitmap. If its bit is set, increase the prefix length and search again. Otherwise, this prefix is the answer. predecessor Instead of putting leaf objects in a linked list, we can use a more complicated search algorithm to find names lexicographically closest to the query string. It’s tricky because a longest-prefix match can land in the wrong branch of the implicit trie. Here’s an outline of a predecessor search; successor requires more thought. During the binary chop, when we find a prefix in the hash table, compare the complete query string against the complete name that the hash table entry refers to (the closest name greater than or equal to the common prefix). If the name is greater than the query string we’re in the wrong branch of the trie, so reduce the length of the prefix and search again. Otherwise search the set bits in the bitmap for one corresponding to the greatest character less than the query string’s next character; if there is one remember it and the prefix length. This will be the top of the sub-trie containing the predecessor, unless we find a longer match. If the next character’s bit is set in the bitmap, continue searching with a longer prefix, else stop. When the binary chop has finished, we need to walk down the predecessor sub-trie to find its greatest leaf. This must be done one character at a time – there’s no shortcut. thoughts In my previous note I wondered how the number of search steps in a p-fast trie compares to a qp-trie. I have some old numbers measuring the average depth of binary, 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 4-bit, 5-bit, dns qp-trie variants. A DNS-trie varies between 7 and 15 deep on average, depending on the data set. The number of steps for a search matches the depth for exact-match lookups, and is up to twice the depth for predecessor searches. A p-fast trie is at most 9 hash table probes for DNS names, and unlikely to be more than 7. I didn’t record the average length of names in my benchmark data sets, but I guess they would be 8–32 characters, meaning 3–5 probes. Which is far fewer than a qp-trie, though I suspect a hash table probe takes more time than chasing a qp-trie pointer. (But this kind of guesstimate is notoriously likely to be wrong!) However, a predecessor search might need 30 probes to walk down the p-fast trie, which I think suggests a linked list of leaf objects is a better option.

I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the business, it's an entirely different story. And that's the tale of YouTube: The King of Internet Archives (Video Edition). I've just revived my YouTube channel after realizing just how often video has become my go-to for learning. This entire Linux adventure I've gotten myself into started by watching YouTube creators like ThePrimeagen, Typecraft, and Bread on Penguins. I learned about mechanical keyboards from Hipyo Tech. Devoured endless mini PC reviews from Level1Techs and Robtech. Oh, and took a side quest into retro gaming handhelds with Retro Game Corps. But it was when putting together the playlists for my own channel that YouTube's royal role in internet archival really stood out. Like with the original Rails Demo from 19 years ago(!), the infamous talk at Startup School from 2009, or my very first RailsConf keynote from 2006. You'd be hard-pressed to find any video content on the internet from those days anywhere else. I notice that with podcast appearances from even just a few years ago that have gone missing already. Decentralization is wonderful in many ways, but it's very much subject to link rot and disappearing content. I love how you can pull in videos from other channels onto your own page as well. I've gathered up a bunch of the many podcast appearances I've done, and even dedicated an entire playlist to the 69(!!) clips from the Lex Fridman interview. The majority of the RailsConf and Rails World keynotes are on a list. So is the old On Writing Software Well series that I keep meaning to bring back. When you're working in small tech, it's really easy to become so jaded with big tech that you become ideologically blind to the benefits they do bring. I find no inconsistency in cheering much of the antitrust agenda against Google while also celebrating their work on Chrome or their stewardship of YouTube. Any company as large as Google is bound to be full of contradictions, ambitions, and behaviors. We ought to have the capacity to cheer for the good parts and boo at the bad parts without feeling like frauds. So today, I choose to cheer for YouTube. It's an international treasure of learning, enthusiasm, and discovery.

I was listening to a podcast interview with the Jackson Browne (American singer/songwriter, political activist, and inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and the interviewer asks him how he approaches writing songs with social commentaries and critiques — something along the lines of: “How do you get from the New York Times headline on a social subject to the emotional heart of a song that matters to each individual?” Browne discusses how if you’re too subtle, people won’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’re too direct, you run the risk of making people feel like they’re being scolded. Here’s what he says about his songwriting: I want this to sound like you and I were drinking in a bar and we’re just talking about what’s going on in the world. Not as if you’re at some elevated place and lecturing people about something they should know about but don’t but [you think] they should care. You have to get to people where [they are, where] they do care and where they do know. I think that’s a great insight for anyone looking to have a connecting, effective voice. I know for me, it’s really easily to slide into a lecturing voice — you “should” do this and you “shouldn’t” do that. But I like Browne’s framing of trying to have an informal, conversational tone that meets people where they are. Like you’re discussing an issue in the bar, rather than listening to a sermon. Chris Coyier is the canonical example of this that comes to mind. I still think of this post from CSS Tricks where Chris talks about how to have submit buttons that go to different URLs: When you submit that form, it’s going to go to the URL /submit. Say you need another submit button that submits to a different URL. It doesn’t matter why. There is always a reason for things. The web is a big place and all that. He doesn’t conjure up some universally-applicable, justified rationale for why he’s sharing this method. Nor is there any pontificating on why this is “good” or “bad”. Instead, like most of Chris’ stuff, I read it as a humble acknowledgement of the practicalities at hand — “Hey, the world is a big place. People have to do crafty things to make their stuff work. And if you’re in that situation, here’s something that might help what ails ya.” I want to work on developing that kind of a voice because I love reading voices like that. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

I've been running the Framework Desktop for a few months here in Copenhagen now. It's an incredible machine. It's completely quiet, even under heavy, stress-all-cores load. It's tiny too, at just 4.5L of volume, especially compared to my old beautiful but bulky North tower running the 7950X — yet it's faster! And finally, it's simply funky, quirky, and fun! In some ways, the Framework Desktop is a curious machine. Desktop PCs are already very user-repairable! So why is Framework even bringing their talents to this domain? In the laptop realm, they're basically alone with that concept, but in the desktop space, it's rather crowded already. Yet it somehow still makes sense. Partly because Framework has gone with the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+, which is technically a laptop CPU. You can find it in the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 and the HP ZBook Ultra. Which means it'll fit in a tiny footprint, and Framework apparently just wanted to see what they could do in that form factor. They clearly had fun with it. Look at mine: There are 21 little tiles on the front that you can get in a bunch of different colors or with logos from Framework. Or you can 3D print your own! It's a welcome change in aesthetic from the brushed aluminum or gamer-focused RGBs approach that most of the competition is taking. But let's cut to the benchmarks. That's really why you'd buy a machine like the Framework Desktop. There are significantly cheaper mini PCs available from Beelink and others, but so far, Framework has the only AMD 395+ unit on sale that's completely silent (the GMKTec very much is not, nor is the Z3 Flow). And for me, that's just a dealbreaker. I can't listen to roaring fans anymore. Here's the key benchmark for me: That's the only type of multi-core workload I really sit around waiting on these days, and the Framework Desktop absolutely crushes it. It's almost twice as fast as the Beelink SER8 and still a solid third faster than the Beelink SER9 too. Of course, it's also a lot more expensive, but you're clearly getting some multi-core bang for your buck here! It's even a more dramatic difference to the Macs. It's a solid 40% faster than the M4 Max and 50% faster than the M4 Pro! Now some will say "that's just because Docker is faster on Linux," and they're not entirely wrong. Docker runs natively on Linux, so for this test, where the MySQL/Redis/ElasticSearch data stores run in Docker while Ruby and the app code runs natively, that's part of the answer. Last I checked, it was about 25% of the difference. But so what? Docker is an integral part of the workflow for tons of developers. We use it to be able to run different versions of MySQL, Redis, and ElasticSearch for different applications on the same machine at the same time. You can't really do that without Docker. So this is what Real World benchmarks reveal. It's not just about having a Docker advantage, though. The AMD 395+ is also incredibly potent in RAW CPU performance. Those 16 Zen5 cores are running at 5.1GHz, and in Geekbench 6 multicore, this is how they stack up: Basically matching the M4 Max! And a good chunk faster than the M4 Pro (as well as other AMDs and Intel's 14900K!). No wonder that it's crazy quick with a full-core stress test like running 30,000 assertions for our HEY test suite. To be fair, the M4s are faster in single-core performance. Apple holds the crown there. It's about 20%. And you'll see that in benchmarks like Speedometer, which mostly measures JavaScript single-core performance. The Framework Desktop puts out 670 vs 744 on the M4 Pro on Speedometer 2.1. On SP 3.1, it's an even bigger difference with 35 vs 50. But I've found that all these computers feel fast enough in single-core performance these days. I can't actually feel the difference browsing on a machine that does 670 vs 744 on SP2.1. Hell, I can barely feel the difference between the SER8, which does 506, and the M4 Pro! The only time I actually feel like I'm waiting on anything is in multi-core workloads like the HEY test suite, and here the AMD 395+ is very near the fastest you can get for a consumer desktop machine today at any price. It gets even better when you bring price into the equation, though. The Framework Desktop with 64GB RAM + 2TB NVMe is $1,876. To get a Mac Studio with similar specs — M4 Max, 64GB RAM, 2TB NVMe — you'll literally spend nearly twice as much at $3,299! If you go for 128GB RAM, you'll spend $2,276 on the Framework, but $4,099 on the Mac. And it'll still be way slower for development work using Docker! The Framework Desktop is simply a great deal. Speaking of 64GB vs 128GB, I've been running the 64GB version, and I almost never get anywhere close to the limits. I think the highest I've seen in regular use is about 20GB of RAM in action. Linux is really efficient. Especially when you're using a window manager like Hyprland, as we do in Omarchy. The only reason you really want to go for the full 128GB RAM is to run local LLM models. The AMD 395+ uses unified memory, like Apple, so nearly all of it is addressable to be used by the GPU. That means you can run monster models, like the new 120b gpt-oss from OpenAI. Framework has a video showing them pushing out 40 tokens/second doing just that. That seems about in range of the numbers I've seen from the M4 Max, which also seem in the 40-50 token/second range, but I'll defer to folks who benchmark local LLMs for the exact details on that. I tried running the new gpt-oss-20b on my 64GB machine, though, and I wasn't exactly blown away by the accuracy. In fact, I'd say it was pretty bad. I mean, exceptionally cool that it's doable, but very far off the frontier models we have access to as SaaS. So personally, this isn't yet something I actually use all that much in day-to-day development. I want the best models running at full speed, and right now that means SaaS. So if you just want the best, small computer that runs Linux superbly well out of the box, you should buy the Framework Desktop. It's completely quiet, fantastically fast, and super fun to look at. But I think it's also fair to mention that you can get something like a Beelink SER9 for half the price! Yes, it's also only 2/3 the performance in multi-core, but it's just as fast in single-core. Most developers could totally get away with the SER9, and barely notice what they were missing. But there are just as many people for whom the extra $1,000 is worth the price to run the test suite 40 seconds quicker! You know who you are. Oh, before I close, I also need to mention that this thing is a gaming powerhouse. It basically punches about as hard as an RTX 4060! With an iGPU! That's kinda crazy. Totally new territory on the PC side for integrated graphics. ETA Prime has a video showing the same chip in the GMK Tech running premier games at 1440p High Settings at great frame rates. You can run most games under Linux these days too (thanks Valve and Steam Deck!), but if you need to dual boot with Windows, the dual NVMe slots in the Framework Desktop come very handy. Framework did good with this one. AMD really blew it out of the water with the 395+. We're spoiled to have such incredible hardware available for Linux at such appealing discounts over similar stuff from Cupertino. What a great time to love open source software and tinker-friendly hardware!