I didn't see much cryptic except having to click on "perf_takehome.py" without being told to. But, 2 hours didn't seem like much to bring the sample code into some kind of test environment, debug it enough to works out details of its behaviour, read through the reference kernel and get some idea of what the algorithm is doing, read through the simulator to understand the VM instruction set, understand the test harness enough to see how the parallelism works, re-code the algorithm in the VM's machine language while iterating performance tweaks and running simulations, etc.
Basically it's a long enough problem that I'd be annoyed at being asked to do it at home for free, if what I wanted from that was a shot at an interview. If I had time on my hands though, it's something I could see trying for fun.
it's "cryptic" for an interview problem. e.g. the fact that you have to actually look at the vm implementation instead of having the full documentation of the instruction set from the get go.
That seems normal for an interview problem. They put you in front of some already-written code and you have to fix a bug or implement a feature. I've done tons of those in live interviews. So that part didn't bother me. It's mostly the rather large effort cost in the case where the person is a job applicant, vs an unknown and maybe quite low chance of getting hired.
With a live interview, you get past a phone screening, and now the company is investing significant resources in the day or so of engineering time it takes to have people interview you. They won't do that unless they have a serious level of interest in you. The take-home means no investment for the company so there's a huge imbalance.
> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?
Was about to post some examples that I liked, but then realized that anything from the previous century (1900's) probably can't be called "modern" any more. And after that, realized that I don't think I've read any "modern" corporate-published SF by that standard. I'm getting old.
That's swell if you have a balcony facing the sun and enough space for 4m2 of solar without blocking your neighbors' sun. In my unit for example, it's completely infeasible.
The biggest problem I have seen with AI scrapping is that they blindly try every possible combination of URLs once they find your site and blast it 100 times per second for each page they can find.
They don’t respect robots.txt, they don’t care about your sitemap, they don’t bother caching, just mindlessly churning away effectively a DDOS.
Google at least played nice.
And so that is why things like anubis exist, why people flock to cloudflare and all the other tried and true methods to block bots.
I don't see how that is possible. The web site is a disconnected graph with a lot of components. If they get hold of a url, maybe that gets them to a few other pages, but not all of them. Most of the pages on my personal site are .txt files with no outbound links, for that matter. Nothing to navigate.
They assemble their PCBs in New York, there's no chance they are actually manufacturing the PCBs themselves there however. PCB manufacturing is an ecological disaster.
It goes back before that. There were well known Usenet folks who adhered to the style. The 1970s-and-earlier Arpanet was before my time, but I'm sure it existed then too ;).
You know, I was trying to remember if anyone from Usenet did similarly, but I couldn't think of anyone.
I was a bit post-Great Renaming into well post-Eternal September. And we may have followed different groups.
The style arises spontaneously in isolated individuals and groups of course (at least since e. e. cummings!), but it was pervasive-to-universal on IRC and MUDs.
I do wonder how it trickled into there though. The most boring answer is probably the correct one. it was slightly easier to type and kids are naturally flexible.
> Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
If I want that much performance, maybe I should think about a Pocketbeagle 2. And almost every embedded MCU these days is sprouting an on-chip "AI" extension ;).
Basically it's a long enough problem that I'd be annoyed at being asked to do it at home for free, if what I wanted from that was a shot at an interview. If I had time on my hands though, it's something I could see trying for fun.
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