Tobin Baker

database, concurrency nerd

I barely speak for myself, let alone my employer

that said, fuck authoritarians

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tobinbaker@discuss-systems.mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2026-08-18 19:49:44 UTC

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@nprofile…40v7 @nprofile…pfuj "what should we do with this potentially life-saving but horrifically unethical Nazi medical research?"

2026-05-02 21:34:47 UTC

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@nprofile…snss I lost a good year of undergrad to Angband (which is quite similar)

2026-04-11 14:50:35 UTC

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@nprofile…snss ugh sounds like Lincoln Lab

2026-03-09 06:03:58 UTC

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@nprofile…p9u9 also the screenshotted response reads like AI

2026-02-06 19:18:12 UTC

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@nprofile…xhtk @nprofile…g0zc well the Cambridge 5 helped fix that

2026-01-29 22:57:23 UTC

I really love designing tabulation machines here at IBM. Such cool technology. I'm not really exposed to the sales side but hear there's a lot of demand from Europe, Germany maybe? Anyway, super-fun technology to work on.

2026-01-13 19:32:59 UTC

What are your favorite tricks for sharding in-memory structures to mitigate contention?
Currently I'm looking at reducing contention on a global lockfree allocator with a very naive fully-shared design, and before a full redesign I'd like to try sharding the existing design. But I'm not sure whether to start with a fixed number of shards linear in cores, or just one or a few shards that dynamically expands on contention. If the latter, there's also the question of a stateless but possibly unfair pseudorandom mapping of threads to shards, vs a stateful but guaranteed-fair mapping. And also how to detect and respond to contention, and whether the complexity of shrinking number of shards when contention subsides is worth it...
cc @nprofile…2ad0 @nprofile…rhdc @nprofile…kudx

2026-01-13 07:01:06 UTC

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@nprofile…nuf5 @nprofile…5wht sounds like Parnas's work on modularization, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361598.361623

2025-11-29 22:06:47 UTC

sick burn
https://fd.discuss.systems/media_attachments/files/115/635/254/204/612/318/original/8aa023b3e0dd375f.jpeg

2025-11-26 20:00:21 UTC

the graduate student from hell
https://blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/phd-level-intelligence-or-the-graduate

2025-10-27 18:10:28 UTC

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@nprofile…e4ry unfortunately Rand Paul is an extreme outlier among the GOP (always has been a principled noninterventionist), so his response doesn't tell you much about the general "conservative" attitude to these extrajudicial killings.

2025-10-15 20:44:30 UTC

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@nprofile…stct I recently heard a fascinating interview about the cultural significance of Stonehenge to its builders. Amazing that the Beaker people who almost totally replaced the Neolithic population arrived just after the initial construction phase, and then continued working on it for centuries! One can only imagine that it must have meant something very different to them than to the original builders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eT9q5Poe5g

2025-10-15 20:36:48 UTC

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@nprofile…stct imagine if neolithic Europe was a continuous civilization like ancient Egypt so we actually knew something about their beliefs and motivations

2025-06-19 20:07:59 UTC

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@nprofile…veyj I remember when I thought bringing a Mac to work at MSFT was edgy :/

2025-05-30 20:58:08 UTC

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@nprofile…veyj I would like to use it as a futon

2025-05-12 20:45:00 UTC

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@nprofile…veyj I still have some RJ11 network cards in my closet, anyone remember those?

2025-04-14 20:42:22 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…59k6 granted, the intuition I'm referring to is from 25+ years ago when I was learning diff geo, and I might well approach it differently if I were learning it now.

2025-04-14 17:46:06 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 @nprofile…fa4k It may be less elegant than derivations but I find the equivalence class definition useful for building intuition for e.g. pushforwards of tangent vectors: I just imagine a representative curve through the source point mapped to another representative curve through the target point.

2025-04-11 17:05:35 UTC

I hope TS Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month because how could it get any crueler than this but of course it can

2025-04-11 16:05:46 UTC

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@nprofile…a33k @nprofile…59k6 that's the most charitable interpretation I can come up with as well (where "charitable" just means "kinda makes sense" not "maybe these are good and reasonable people after all")

2025-04-11 01:05:34 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 "ideas"??? wtf

2025-04-06 20:16:45 UTC

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@nprofile…veyj now post him reviewing grant proposals

2025-03-11 19:07:02 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 grounds for deportation, obviously

2025-02-10 02:10:23 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k We need a general strike, but that seems like an impossible collective action problem. I suspect a general strike against just the big tech companies would be enough to get the oligarchs’ attention.

2025-02-08 03:09:25 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 The real fatal flaw in the Constitution is the presumption of rivalry between the 3 branches, rather than collusion across them by political parties.

2024-05-27 03:40:35 UTC

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@npub1c9m…9xjd LOL I had to do this dance a few months ago, it really helps to have someone on the ladder and someone else in the car!

2024-05-05 00:10:28 UTC

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@npub1a4c…t2kf indeed, overt racism has basically been replaced by overt classism among affluent whites