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rom-antics

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Today, I finally understand the anger that led to the creation of Bitcoin

twitter.com
3 points·by rom-antics·3년 전·0 comments

Wine Wayland Driver

gitlab.winehq.org
204 points·by rom-antics·3년 전·103 comments

Samsung deletes majority of questions on their own AMA

old.reddit.com
4 points·by rom-antics·3년 전·0 comments

Florida school removes all books pending review for compliance with state law

news4jax.com
2 points·by rom-antics·3년 전·1 comments

comments

rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
I agree. I gave Zig a fair shake, even went so far as to find the compiler PR that automatically adds `_ = foo` to your source code while compiling[1] and set up the VSCode extension with autofix. I couldn't get used to seeing the lines with `_ =` appear and disappear all over my code while I was typing.

With the usual warnings approach, you can rely on compiler/IDE/pre-commit tooling to find unused variables - they'll all nag you until it's fixed. With Zig's autofix approach, those problems are immediately silenced and you don't have any help from the compiler or tooling to find unused variables. It's quite an ironic outcome if you think about it.

[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/12803
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
Yvette and Ling would be perfect for each other. https://www.lingscars.com/
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
> I've been wondering lately whether a new spatial approach can yet again simplify matters.

I've been closely following the development of Vale since I first saw it here. Though their approach is slightly higher-level than Rust and requires (some) runtime safety checks (though to be fair, so does GC).

https://vale.dev/

https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-memory-safety-regions-ov...

I think it would be tough to change the spatial model in a language as low-level as Rust, because that spatial model is just reflecting how your CPU actually works under the hood. If you try to hide that away, the programmer is going to end up losing some control.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
On the other hand though, it brings symmetry to types and values, and makes destructuring feel natural.

  let i: i32 = 1;
  let &i: &i32 = &1;
  let &mut i: &mut i32 = &mut 1;
  let (i, &mut j): (i32, &mut i32) = (1, &mut 2);
I'm not sure how you'd recreate this symmetry without using the same symbol in both places.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
When I was a kid I had a toy electronics kit and one of the circuits was an AM radio that worked without batteries. A normal radio station signal is strong enough to drive a pair of earbuds without any additional power. Since then I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries, maybe even a Game Boy. There's electromagnetic radiation in the air all around us. And I'm sure you could build a Game Boy using today's tech that's much more power efficient than the ones from the 90s.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
You mean due process? Sounds great, sign me up!
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
If you want compact, use an array of tuples:

  const foos = [("foo", 1, "bar"), ("foo", 1, "bar"), ...];
  for (str1, num, str2) in &foos {
      // ...
  }
For a proper struct you have to name the fields, because otherwise refactoring the fields could cause struct instances to silently get out of sync with the definition.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
This is megabytes (at most) of text we're talking about, not gigabytes. And ripgrep is absurdly fast. Grepping a 5MB text file should be pretty much instantaneous.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
> discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful

Their search makes me want to pull my hair out.

Why can't I just search the history with grep? That's a feature I would pay for (if anyone at Discord is reading this and wants my $10/month)
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
I can't say I'm impressed.

https://i.imgur.com/Iq9DcSY.png
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
How about a nice game of chess?
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
Well that's a loaded title. (EDIT: The article title, not the changed HN title)

Another take:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/enforcement-overreach-...

Read the section on Trusted Flaggers to find out what that word "safer" really means.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
> we are not yet at the point where a voice can be mimicked accurately from a voicemail or a clip on social media

See: https://www.thestar.com/business/technology/2023/01/10/micro...

> Microsoft’s new AI can mimic any voice after just 3 seconds

Play the result over a low-bandwidth PTSN line and it could probably fool people in tech, let alone your grandma. Welcome to the future.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
The word "fraud" has really lost its punch these last couple years. OpenAI has actual, working products that people think are valuable enough to pay for. The name is misleading, sure, but that doesn't make them a fraudulent company.

Is there a word for the opposite of the euphemism treadmill, where people call ordinary things by worse and worse names trying to get an emotional reaction out of people?
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
I don't see a video in either article. Link?
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
That article doesn't support the headline. The closest it gets is saying nobody asked her beforehand, but she doesn't say after the fact that she wants people to stop.

Meanwhile, from the people who actually bothered to talk to her[1]:

> In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said.

This whole situation reminds me of GitHub, Fuck Your Name Change[2]. People want to drum up outrage and don't care one bit about the people involved.

Is it really worth erasing a piece of computing history because of some kids virtue signaling about a picture that was taken before they were born?

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...

[2]: https://mooseyanon.medium.com/github-f-ck-your-name-change-d...
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
In this case it was one of the founders of the company. If you can't trust the founders, who can you trust?
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
You forgot:

0. Get elected to Congress
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
I love that there are so many options that people disagree about which is best. THAT is probably the worst thing that can happen to OpenAI - not just one competitor, but a whole heap of them.
rom-antics
·3년 전·discuss
I wouldn't call codegen adversarial. The optimizer isn't out to get you. It emits the best code it can given a certain set of assumptions. It may just seem adversarial at times because the output can behave in unintuitive ways if you break those assumptions.

I don't believe PROT_NONE suffices. The address needs to be accessible, not merely mapped. If reading through a pointer, the address must be readable. If writing through a pointer, the address must be writeable. This is why writing to a string constant is undefined behavior, even though reading would be fine.

Another issue is alignment. If you read from a `*const i32` with unaligned pointer value 0x2, the optimizer is free to assume that code path is unreachable and, you guessed it, bulldoze your house. If you get a segfault from reading an `i32` from address 0x2, you've already hit UB and spun the roulette wheel.

In theory the emitted code could check pointers for alignment and validity (in whatever platform-specific way) before accessing them, and simulate a segfault if not. Such checks would serve as optimization barriers in LLVM, and prevent these instances of UB. Of course Zig's current ReleaseSafe doesn't do this, and I think it would be silly if it did. But that's the only way you could accurately call segfaults "well-defined".