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blub

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It’s trivial to publish these so that they’re both easily available and easy to understand. I’m guessing that’s not the case for the CDC, since you didn’t post any link or guideline.

A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.

Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.

Myocarditis-maxxies will likely never take off as an insult, but vaxmaxxer just might :) Shortness, pronunciation and simplicity all play a role.

Anyway, that statement is actually useless. The moment it became clear that some vaccine increases the risk of myocarditis, several European countries swapped them out for the less risky variants, like any sane person would.

The only people still fighting these windmills are the online kind.

These Rust discussions typically contain grains of truth wrapped into exaggerations while downplaying or ignoring the two big issues of Rust, which are complexity and out of control dependency trees.

For the first issue of complexity, the reply is along the lines of show me the code and then either nitpicking that to pieces or explaining in several paragraphs how the behavior is perfectly reasonable and in fact quite easy to understand. Beginners get intimidated, professionals don’t have time to write novels on HN. Complexity in Rust is systemic. It’s little things accumulating and amplifying each-other that add up to having to spend significant time just designing types to satisfy the static analyzer. Many Rust programmers seem to see the type system as a hammer to be used liberally, an predilection also known in the C++ metaprogramming community.

On the second topic (also present in this thread) the counter-argument is that other languages do it too and nothing bad happened so far. The former is not valid, because Rust is uniquely bad in its competitor group and security by waiting is not a valued approach.

There’s a few things happening here.

First of all, Rust is default safe. In C++ developers always trade performance for safety, in Rust they just swallow the penalty (which is often still performant enough). C++ code will often not be as memory safe as it could because someone decided to not use particular checks (like compiler-driven integer overflow checks).

Secondly, Android C++ code is not particularly high quality, also when it comes to memory safety. A lot of it is also quite old. I would consider it your average massive project, not a masterpiece coded by amazing engineers.

Thirdly, it has a massive target on its back and is under attack by pretty much everyone. They have to use whatever they can to keep up with the attackers.

Several companies have these issues and approach them in different ways. Rust is a very attractive approach for developers, since it’s just another programming language. It’s also quite ugly, people complain about its complexity and is unfortunately suffering from dependency explosion. I hope it’s a stepping stone to something better.

Declining America 2 months ago

And yet with all that experience you’ve still managed to come up with a conclusion which describes the exact opposite way humanity evolved and currently lives.

Good luck with your revolution. :)

Yours is a good book (got both editions myself), but sadly language learning books will be hit the hardest by AI. Partly it’s what you said regarding copyright washing, but the other big reason is that people will code less; I am writing little to no golang and am prompting it instead. The book is still useful to me, since I want to continue to understand what’s happening, review code, etc, however I expect that my kind of software engineer will be in the minority in the future.

If you publish a 3rd edition and I’m not replaced by AI by then, I’ll buy it. :)

On other topics, using AI can fill some gaps, but books summarizing years of hard-won knowledge are priceless. NoStarch is amazing when it comes to such resources. They have an upcoming book on Linux kernel Memory Management for example, the classic Linux tome from Kerrisk and very specialized security books.

On the other hand I cancelled my O’Reilly sub because I didn’t read enough to make it worth the price and now I purchase DRM-free e-books individually, as needed.

Declining America 2 months ago

In a student or IT worker bubble, countries are very similar. When one steps out, they’re going to get a rude awakening.

Culture shock is a real phenomenon.

All of these didn’t prevent Go from competing with Rust and I’m guessing that Fil-C will be the better choice in some cases.

Rust has managed to establish itself as a player, but it’s only the best choice for a limited amount of projects, like some (but not all) browser code or kernel code. Go, C++, C with Fil-C) have solid advantages of their own.

To name two:

* idiomatic code is easier to write in any of these languages compared to Rust, because one can shortcut thinking about ownership. Rust idiomatic code requires it.

* less effort needed to protect from supply-chain attacks

No, UV is unrelated to your issue.

First you need to figure out if it’s a surface infestation because of condensation or if it’s a constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters designed for this purpose.

In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it’s better to get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould spores don’t spread in other rooms.

For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home use.

ZoneAlarm, assuming it still exists, would be at least 20 years old.

Back then there was also a nice ~$15 program called Net Limiter which allowed one to cap network speeds individually per program.

The web and web apps as pushed by Google and others was another nail in the coffin of efficient software.

From Android to whatever web framework they’re peddling as development solutions, these are not designed for efficiency, but for time-to-market and consumption by front-end developers.

I worked on Windows programs similar to WinAmp, which had custom drawing, skins with custom shapes, etc. Usually written directly in WinAPI, VCL (C++ Builder, not Delphi) or a combination.

It was a matter of having access to the right (although limited) resources such as Petzold’s book, Codeproject and experimentation. There was no big rush, no start-up hustler mentality and most importantly hardware resources mattered a lot and it was a point of pride to create efficient software.

The development culture of present time is the opposite of that: developers are drowning in documentation, the default solution is technically inferior and the hustler mentality’s dominating.

A good rule of thumb for programming languages is to check what the general recommendation is on HN and do the opposite.

Using win32 from Rust is nonsensical. This is the kind of use-one-tool-for-any-job Visual Basic 6 programmers used to have, except VB6 would have actually been much better than Rust at Windows programming.

It’s certainly doable, but not as nice and easy as Delphi or Qt, which are WYSIWYG.

Of course, if one is a web developer, even attempting such a feat this could result in a brain-melting experience.

That’s genuinely nice that it doesn’t have the multimedia crap. They do also have an “extreme” model with touchscreen and connected services. At ~220km range it probably has about 100km in winter though. :-/

The UN has released a report on human rights abuses in China, but has not called these a genocide. The more credible accusations of genocide came from a handful of political bodies in Western countries, but crucially the acting governments have not defined it as such.

There’s absolutely no consensus that the legal definition is met, in contrast with another ongoing situation which enjoys wide recognition.

It feels that this is more a geopolitical cudgel, pulled out when the discourse against the US becomes negative. But given the events in the last years, this seems like a lost cause even in the West, never-mind the rest of the world.

This is less about languages and more about so-called AI. One thing’s for sure: it’s becoming harder and harder to deny that agentic coding is revolutionizing software development.

We’re at the point where a solid test suite and a high-quality agent can achieve impressive results in the hands of a competent coder. Yes, it will still screw up, needs careful human review and steering, etc, but there is a tangible productivity improvement. I don’t think it makes sense putting numbers on it, but for many tasks, it looks like there’s a tangible benefit.

I feel similar about the potential of this technique and have heard this from other C++ developers too.

Rust syntax is a PITA and investing a lot of effort in the language doesn’t seem worth the trouble for an experienced C++ developer, but with AI learning, porting and maintenance all become more accessible. It’s possible to integrate Rust in an existing codebase or write subparts of larger C++ projects in Rust where it makes sense.

I was recently involved in an AI porting effort, but using different languages and the results were fine. Validating and reviewing the code took longer than writing it.

Losing connectivity is a non-issue because it will come back soon enough absent some global event. The realistic risks are rather:

* all services are run at a loss and they increase price to the point the corp doesn’t want to pay for everyone any more.

* it turns out that our chats are used for corporate espionage and the corps get spooked and cut access

* some dispute between EU and US happens and they cut our access.

The solution’s having EU and local models.

The dependency management and complexity/poor ergonomics are the two major technical problems with Rust. Normally the first one’s ignored while the second is downplayed, so it would have been interesting to see what (if anything) Facebook have done about them.

Not only can AIs help, but they can write most if not all the code and spare the human from learning all the intricacies of individual programming languages. Problem is, reports are contradictory on compatibility with Rust. We know they work great with simpler/friendlier languages like Go or Python.