brighteyes

It definitely does. And even better in some ways like no ads and fewer trolls.

No, there is wide consensus that it was most likely (but not certainly) an errant rocket from Gaza, and not Israel. Wikipedia has a good summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...

Specifically, that is the position of the intelligence agencies of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and also the conclusion of investigations by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. That's really the best we know about it.

It is downvoted because it said "sizable fraction", which is a conspiracy theory.

It is true that there were a few incidents, but they only account for a very small fraction of the death toll.

Yes, the ICJ can order a ceasefire. It ordered Russia to stop its invasion of Ukraine, for example. In this case it decided not to, but it did order other measures (which hopefully will save lives, but time will tell).

Unfortunately for the Palestinians, that is not what was ruled. They were hoping for a full ceasefire like what you have interpreted, but they are very disappointed in the ruling because it does not say that.

What it does say is

1. Israel must do more to prevent the possibility of genocide. Genocide is killing a people with the intent of killing them for the sake of destroying them, and not as collateral damage, so it does not mean stopping all death. Collateral damage, unfortunately, remains on the table.

2. Israel must report back in a month with how they are doing that. For example, they could show lower amounts of collateral damage, an increase in aid, punishments for officials that make statements that could be construed as genocidal, and so forth.

That is better than nothing, to be certain, but it is far from a ceasefire, unfortunately.

That is already being worked on, of course, regardless of the Houthis. The Keren Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza just opened, which should allow double the aid to reach Gazans,

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/aid-enters-gaza-th...

That should be enough in theory. But see details in the article, there are many logistical challenges remaining to actually get it to those in need.

To clarify, WebAssembly specs are made by the WebAssembly W3C community group here:

https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/

Its true that many of those companies are also members of the Bytecode Alliance. But the W3C community group is where actual specs and standardization happen. That's where votes occur, and that's the Github organization in which they are published, and so forth.

Even aside from the immediate danger, the reputational damage to Microsoft and Bing is growing quickly. I'm amazed they haven't removed it yet.

And also eventually it will do something bad, like tell someone depressed to end their lives in very convincing text.

Igalia is doing the work, but does anyone know who is funding Igalia to work on it? (Or are they doing this without funding?)

Maybe you're right, I might be too sensitive on this matter. Thank you for your thoughts.

I just think our industry would be a better place if we didn't try to tear down other technologies, say stuff like "X sucks", etc.

But I agree that friendly competition is a good thing! I feel this article was a little past that, though.

GC might not be a productivity win for you, but for many people it definitely is.

I'm pretty sure that's true for the great majority of software developers, but of course they don't even use a non-GC language!

Part of the reason they don't is that productivity. Not that they chose it personally for that reason, but e.g. historically enterprise code moved to Java and C# for related reasons.

(I also agree there are people that are equally productive in non-GC languages, or even more - different people have different programming styles.)

Chrome does this too, it times GCs for when it has free time or is rendering in another thread, https://blog.chromium.org/2015/12/smarter-garbage-collection...

You're right, yes - a 1ms pause has a cost, even in a 16ms budget.

I interpreted the author's point as "GC is now potentially viable for games", in the sense that older GCs might have pause times larger than 16ms, making them obviously inappropriate, whereas today 1ms pauses is something that can be budgeted for at least in some cases.

As you said, malloc/free also have costs, and also GC has other benefits, like bump allocation, moving things to compact memory and improve cache locality, etc. 1ms pauses means GC is worth considering even for a game, in other words.

The technical detail in this article is excellent! A great read.

But I think it would have been an even better article without the negativity about Go and how the author thinks "the Java guys are winning" in his words. That felt a little petty.

No, the article focuses on something completely different: That more men are diagnosed with HPV-associated cancer than women, these days.

That's because of a huge increase in mouth and throat cancer among men, likely caused by an increase in oral sex.

Boys getting the vaccine can prevent them from getting cancer decades later, basically.

At least one presidential candidate does support some form of nuclear,

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/

but yes, it's a rare position.

Rust would have tradeoffs here, though. For example, in C# you'd be able to do (non-leaking) graphs and other structures in 100% safe code, while Rust would need unsafe.

I really hope this works, but I fear it will die a shumway death.

Yes, it may find a niche subset of Flash content it can do well, but there have been many attempts at Flash replacements, and all of them have failed, including serious ones with corporate backing like Shumway. Another cool one is Lightspark [1]

The only real chance at 100% preservation of Flash content is for Adobe to open source all of it - the VMs, the runtime including the graphics, etc. - and to compile that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightspark

Yes, leaks are possible in all languages.

In Rust you can leak due to reference cycles for example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-06-reference-cycles.html

C# will clean up reference cycles, but an unintended reference can cause leaks (if you forget to remove it).

In both languages such leaks are not good, but at least they aren't memory safety issues.

I think that's too generous to the author given the other mistakes in the article, but sure, if you expand the meaning beyond regular memory safety, then it becomes a mixed picture: Rust protects from some race conditions, but other types of parallel code must use 'unsafe'. And as mentioned before some data structures can be done safely in C# but not in Rust.

It is definitely false for the author to say Rust is "superior to C# in regards to better memory protections", in any definition of "memory protections".

It's interesting that someone in Microsoft is talking about Rust, but the article is very flawed. For example,

C#, a programming language developed by Microsoft, also features some memory access improvements but is not as advanced as Rust. [..] Besides [Rust] being superior to C# in regards to better memory protections

That's false, isn't it? C# is a memory safe language, period. It relies on GC for that.

In fact C# has arguably better memory safety than Rust because you can do things safely in C# that you would be forced to use 'unsafe' in Rust for. (Granted, then you have overhead from GC, but that's not what the author is talking about.)

Rust is also more popular with developers these days and might be easier to recruit for.

The author has misinterpreted what "most loved" means in the quoted survey: it means that among Rust developers, it gets a very high rating. That says nothing about how big that group is, nor how popular it is in the general population of developers.

The Rust community is growing but still very small - it's an emerging language. Almost everyone that uses it decided to use it because they like it. (That doesn't diminish the accomplishment - there are other emerging languages that are not as loved by their users.)

Yes, much easier to tinker with a more barebones system. The downside of powerful toolchains is often their complexity. So there's a difference between one being better for shipping code and one better for learning.

I think you're right. We can also add .NET (C#, etc.) to that list, as a popular hardware-independent language on the server (in enterprises at least). So, yes, most server languages are already hardware independent I believe.

Wasm does provide that property for C++ & Rust. I'm unsure how important that is in the server space.

Also, Servo isn't a general-purpose browser project anymore at Mozilla. It's part of the "Mixed Reality" department:

https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/

Interesting survey, but some points to keep in mind:

This is a survey of all tech workers in the US. It's not focused on Silicon Valley, and it's not focused on startups (in fact they only surveyed people in companies with 500+ people). Of course the tech giants + startups are not all of tech, but on the other hand, a lot of press coverage of tech is of them. The difference matters here - for example, people in the top tech companies are much more left-leaning on average than the people in this survey, since many are in the left-leaning Bay Area and Seattle, and we have political donation data on them confirming that.

And to be specific, just 20% of people surveyed are in the West (which would include the Bay Area and Seattle), while 37% are from the South and 20% from the Midwest. So over half are not from the stereotypical "tech industry" that the media covers.

Also the survey shows that many tech workers have mixed feelings about the media. The article tries to explain it by right-leaning politics (that the media is too liberal, a backlash against feminism, etc.). However, the article states,

women in the tech industry are less likely to hold a positive opinion of the media than their male counterparts.

The article spends only this one sentence on that topic. But it may matter quite a bit, since women tend to be more left-leaning in their politics, and make up almost half of the people surveyed (44%). Given that, the article's explanations don't seem sufficient - there's something else going on here.

True that many people are misled about this, but

1. 11 billion may be too much.

2. This isn't uniform across the globe. Japan's population is shrinking due to a very low birth rate, and that may be a bad thing (loss of cultural and genetic diversity, for example). And this is the more relevant aspect given the context.

I don't think either of those arguments assumes they are different. In fact the second mentions it may be the same.

It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach.

One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies.

Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further disadvantaging couples from having children.

Overall, it's an interesting idea, and definitely worth discussing.

This is important information, but it's also easy to misinterpret, which I've seen a lot of on twitter.

That alcohol has different impacts in different cultures certainly supports it not having a single "natural" affect on humans. But:

1. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a single "natural" effect inside a single culture. In a culture where alcohol is strongly tied to violence, it may have such an effect regardless of a person aware of that fact or even trying to counteract it.

2. That doesn't mean alcohol doesn't actually have a single "natural" effect on humans - it's possible cultures manage to overcome that effect through effort. (Though, this is certainly less likely than the alternative.)