danudey

IMHO because it means that Signal stays focused on being a secure messaging platform and not an 'application platform'.

Telegram is great because it has bots, etc. but Signal is great because they have one core focus and they don't complicate their infrastructure or codebase by adding things that aren't what people want from Signal.

There's nothing wrong with having two messaging applications; let Telegram be the bot and automation platform of choice and let Signal focus on being a secure and reliable messaging solution.

Usually "true capitalism" means one of two things:

1. Capitalism where there is no government or regulatory interference, and the "invisible hand of the free market" produces some kind of utopian society based purely on every business abiding by rules enforced by no one, where somehow corporations don't take advantage of workers they way they do now despite there being no laws against it.

2. The same thing but sarcastically because it's obvious that that system would be demonstrably worse than the restricted version of capitalism that we have now.

Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.

But if SpaceX valuation drops by 2/3 before settling into a steady state, does that not mean that SpaceX is not one of the "largest X companies" but rather was overvalued?

The entire reason for these seasoning periods is to give the market time to determine what the company is actually worth to the market itself. Bypassing those rules to get it in earlier says to me that they don't believe it will settle at a price near its start.

If I IPO my lemonade stand at $1T valuation do I deserve to be in that "largest X companies" list? Or does it only make sense if I can maintain that valuation over time?

Imagine the fallout if someone discovered a method of read access to this bucket.

Well, excepting that there's a toggle to turn off 'improving the model' (i.e. don't use my repo for training data) and it still uploads your entire repository, git history, etc., all of which can be fetched locally and fed to the model rather than uploading it to a bulk storage bucket.

Add to that the fact that this also includes env files, which may contain secrets that aren't part of the repo, that don't need to be fed to the model, and that might now be leaked.

Which leads us to the third thing: if this bucket weren't discovered and Grok didn't turn this 'feature' off, imagine the disaster fallout if someone ever managed to get read access to this bucket.

The number of people we got to see on TikTok discover that you can write yourself a cheque for $100k and then get access to that money as though it was some kind of infinite money glitch that no one had ever thought of, manufacturing money out of nowhere that no one would try to get back... ridiculous.

most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so

This is what Christians tell themselves and others to explain why believing in their religion is so important, but it's not even remotely true. Humans evolved community and society long before we evolved organized religion.

I constantly see Christians pitching this like some kind of gotcha: "If you don't believe in God, then how do you know what's right or wrong?" The simple answer is that I have empty and I care about how other people feel; I try to do things that make things better and avoid things that make things worse, both for me and for others.

If the only reason that you don't rape and murder is because you're worried about consequences then that makes you a horrible person whether you act on it or not.

Conversely, it seems as though Christians see these 'teachings' as a get out of moral quandary free card; if the Bible implies it's okay, or you can justify an interpretation where that's the case, then it's completely fine to do whatever you like. Harass or attack trans people, bomb Iran, make miscarriages illegal but refuse to feed the poor or help with daycare - all because one reading of the bible supports the things you want to do (even though it doesn't) but doesn't require what you don't want to do (even though it does, actually).

Now he's up to his ears in debt and a felon in his original country, plus he's not likely to get another six-figure job from any country willing to do a background check. I hope that extra $95k was sufficient to set him up for life.

But the poster said that that was basically his yearly salary. He fled the country and has to spend the rest of his life worrying about extradition (and/or having people find out he's a felon) for a year's pay.

Not to mention that, despite having done nothing wrong, you can still be blamed and suffer the consequences. Imagine that company did notice, and the person who sent the payment went into a panic. They call their bank, that bank calls your bank, they put a hold on your entire account, and now your payroll, bills, leases, etc. all start bouncing and you can't accept payments from other clients to cover anything in the short term.

Now you've done nothing wrong, maybe even haven't noticed yet, and suddenly they kill your business overnight.

Yeah, as long as the feds don't decide that 'OpenAI is too important to our AI ambitions vs. China, et al so we can't afford to punish them in any way that matters', which is probably what's happening here.

OpenAI/Altman are trying to cozy up to Trump so that they can bypass laws and regulations in their quest for infinite growth at no cost (see also: all the NASDAQ 'rules' which didn't apply to SpaceX, the AI company). In return to stroking his ego, etc., Trump gets to seem like he's M'ing AGA by boosting up this new, world-changing technology and helping to keep the US ahead of everyone else. OpenAI, in the administration's eyes, is now 'too big to fail' (because of the blow to Trump's ego) so OpenAI gets to continue to break laws (first copyright violations, now IP theft) with nothing but a slap on the wrist.

Is it a competition? I wonder if the Zig people feel as though it is, because I doubt the Rust people do.

Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare.

I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).

Saying 15 years of content updates feels disingenuous when most of those years, at least lately, feel like minimal updates from a company that's out of ideas and doesn't want to change anything that might have a chance at annoying some people.

It seems like every year is "a new mob and a new biome", which is... not much. If you sign into Minecraft from five years ago I doubt you would notice many changes at all.

To be fair, Minecraft is a huge thing to be a steward of, and they're doing dual-development across Bedrock and Java, but... it's obvious that this isn't what they want to be doing and I think at some point they just need to make a decision what they want to be, let everyone know, and start making it work.

Also, with regard to Mojang account - I tried to get mine converted. I followed the steps, they didn't work. I opened a ticket, no one responded. I worked on it for six months and couldn't get any reply from them until it was too late. Now I've lost that account, not because I didn't care but because they didn't seem to.

I lost my original minecraft account because I wasn't able to get in contact with them. I had the original purchase information as required, but it wouldn't accept it. I contacted the e-mail address they said to get in touch with but heard nothing. No matter what I did nothing happened and now my old account is gone forever.

I don't necessarily disagree, but two other points to consider:

1. Every test that is written is another use case that wasn't tested before. 100% test coverage is often impractical, but the more tests you have the more of the code you can be confident about.

2. Every test you add is another regression that can't happen in the future; if you test the index rebuilding code and validate the output then you know that you aren't going to make a change that breaks the index rebuilding code. If you have a legitimate change you update the tests, but if you're not expecting the change then you know there's a bug somewhere.

sqlite is the pathological case though; it has ~590 times more SLOC in the test suite than in the actual sqlite project.

https://sqlite.org/testing.html

It's not unique to postgres, as others have said; the same thing can happen with e.g. MySQL poolers/proxies/etc., since the behavior of the connection can be changed dynamically and it persists for the lifetime of the connection.

Example: legacy client A connects to MySQL via the bouncer and says 'I want all of our conversations to use latin-1, not utf-8'. This changes the character set that MySQL parses queries with and returns responses in. The legacy client does some queries and then disconnects.

Now a new client connects to MySQL, and the bouncer just assigns it to the still-open connection from before. The new client is fully UTF-8 compatible and since this is the default for our database it doesn't explicitly say so; it just assumes that UTF-8 is the way to go. Unfortunately, the database server is still thinking in latin-1, meaning that if this new client sends UTF-8 data it will be parsed as latin-1; latin-1 is a subset of UTF-8, meaning that queries will actually work fine unless they need to use a character outside of latin-1, in which case they will get an error, or corrupted data, from the server.

The only solutions around this are:

1. Ensure that every client is using the same settings; if your database is for a single app that uses the same ORM, then this is automatic.

2. Ensure that every client is always explicit about everything it might need to change e4very time, so that every UTF-8 client explicitly sets UTF-8 connections even when that's the default; clients that need utf8mb4 ask for it explicitly and clients that can't handle it ask for something else. One way of ensuring this happens is to configure the server (or the bouncer) to use defaults which are not valid for anyone, or which are going to cause errors frequently and not rarely (e.g. setting the default character set to 7-bit swedish, which would cause frequent errors).

3. Use a bouncer which can either disallow these changes or detect and revert them after the original client has disconnected. I'm not sure if this exists for MySQL at least.

4. Use separate bouncers for each application that might be different (extension of #1); in other words, instead of having a bouncer or set of bouncers for each pool of database servers, you have them for each application; your web app gets one, your legacy reporting tool gets one, your ODBC connector gets one, and so on.

It's kind of a huge mess in theory; in practice, a lot of installations fall into the #1 case so it never matters, but that makes the occasional instance where it does matter extremely difficult to debug.

Just for reference, Peer 1 has a data centre in downtown Vancouver which, fifteen or so years ago, was able to accept my then-employer as a client and offer us a quarter, half, or full rack, but could only offer us enough actual power to run about two servers.

The reason being that they had a huge number of old, grandfathered-in clients with old systems from ten or fifteen years ago which were using massive amounts of power for the work they were doing; newer systems could do the same work for a tenth the power or less, but the customers have no reason to upgrade so they don't.

Getting any more power into the building, I was told, would require having BC Hydro replace the transmission lines coming into the building, which would expand out to a modernization of a lot of the transmission lines in the neighbourhood. For obvious reasons it was cheaper for them to just build a new data centre somewhere else, though they wouldn't say where at the time.

When it comes to the hyperscale data centres that are all the rage these days, it's very likely that downtown Seattle doesn't have the power infrastructure to support very many, if any; couple that with the claim from this random website I've never heard of that hyperscale data centres could be up to 10 million square feet and you'd probably have to bulldoze half of downtown Seattle to build the infrastructure required.

https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/

I had Claude do a "short, succinct summary" of two bugs I found in someone else's Python code: one was missing parentheses around subtraction (x = a - b - c instead of x = a - (b - c)) and one was `SomeException("asdf")` instead of `raise SomeException("asdf")`.

Both explanations were a paragraph of text, each about six lines long, which I replaced with a single sentence each.

I now have the full picture.

Funny thing about conspiracy "theory" is that a lot of the time the theory turns out to be true.

I would love to see any sources on this claim.

A lot of "conspiracy theories" end up being true in some vague way; "the NSA is spying on all of us", yeah, that was true. The NSA is using satellites to read our thoughts? Not so much. Still, people will point to things like the Snowdon leaks to prove that the US government cannot be trusted (which is true) and therefore all the other claims that people make are also true.

The reality is that most conspiracy theories are impossible, either from a technical sense or a logistical one. The extreme examples, like "the earth is flat and the governments are hiding it" or "COVID isn't real and the vaccine is going to kill everyone but every government and doctor on earth is secretly in on it" get shrugged off as "well, not THOSE ones obviously", but most of the rest I've ever seen are also completely unbelievable.

Here's the thing: anyone can come up with a theory and stitch together the most circumstantial "evidence" to "prove" it, combining misinformation, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation to produce something that feels like it could be true on its face if people don't do any real digging, and most don't. I've yet to see a "conspiracy theory" backed by any actual hard evidence; they seem to entirely spring from an overactive imagination and are then "justified" and "proven" by finding other facts to fit the narrative retroactively.

Is there clandestine activity? Absolutely. Are there groups of people trying to manipulate situations and lie to the public for their own gain? Almost certainly. Do people with unsourced, unproven conspiracy theories make it easier for governments to get away with whatever they want because the rampant proliferation of crackpot theories allows for a convenient smokescreen whenever the truth starts to come out? Also yes.

Even if only 10% of conspiracy theories are true, which they are not, the people repeating them do more harm than good by doing so in a way that discredits themselves and others.

DJB is the same person who created qmail, the mail transfer agent which was ridiculously secure because of a series of over-the-top design decisions; for example, each file in the mail queue was named after the inode it was stored in, meaning you couldn't copy your mail queue to another server if your original one was having issues (unless you cloned the whole filesystem). Also, all configuration was done at compile time, including what UIDs and GIDs to run as, meaning it was very difficult to build it once and re-use it on multiple systems unless you were very careful to make them identical, which is fine because you weren't allowed to distribute compiled binaries.

He maintained that it was the most secure option available, which was technically true until the technology around mail transfer started improving with things like SPF records. qmail didn't support them and wouldn't support them, patches weren't accepted, and the only way to use things like SPF (to reduce spam) was through unofficial community patches that could never be upstreamed.

qmail was far better than sendmail at the tiume, and honestly it probably still is to a large degree, but, like forcing users to change their password every week, it was a case of security being so tight that users had to break it in order to make the system functional.

All this to say that, while DJB is undoubtedly insightful and intelligent, I'm wary of any of his claims of 'this isn't secure enough' because of his past history of making things so secure as to be inflexibly unmanagable.

For people who use car share services, this is a godsend. It feels like every other trip we take is in a new vehicle we've never used before, but all we have to do is plug the phone in (which we would do to charge anyway) and when we bring up maps to check the route to my in-laws' place it already has the address saved, my playlists available, etc.

I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context.

I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.

The reason everyone hates them is that they've been committing genocide for decades and have refused any sort of peace process. All the countries around them have offered to guarantee Israel's security in exchange for just letting the Palestians live their lives free of oppression but Israel is not willing to give up its land grab because the narrative that 'everyone is trying to destroy us' is what keeps the right wing in power and allows the population to look the other way.

Even the US was concerned recently that Israel was planning not just to sabotage the peace talks with Iran but to assassinate the Iranian representatives:

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/429561

The only reason Israel has its back to the wall is that its 'never again' attitude has extended to any concept of solving problems that doesn't involve military force, and since they've had the backing of the US that means they've been able to get away with anything they wanted so far. It's the asshole little brother whose big brother will beat you up if he ever runs the risk of facing the consequences of his actions.

If Israel had any desire to live in peace with their neighbors then maybe they would, but either they don't want peace except through victory, they don't want peace if it means giving up the ability to continue their ethnic cleansing of Palestine to build more settlements, or they want peace but they don't believe that anyone else wants it (despite everyone else trying to work towards it except them).

If they hadn't been so focused on aggression, genocide, and apartheid for the past 70 years maybe this all could have been solved, but the narrative that they're the only bastion of democracy and freedom in West Asia/North Africa and that's why everyone wants to destroy them doesn't hold up to the barest of scrutiny.

Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?

If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it.

If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase.

If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough?

The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days.

I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.

It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of.

I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why.

The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit.

So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.

Put another way: if all that you're doing is prompting the AI and giving me the result then I have no use for you. If you're not contributing insight, understanding, experience, or creativity then it's far cheaper for me to prompt the AI myself.

I mean, one answer is that docker configuration on your local dev machine can go one of two ways:

1. You have to use `sudo` for every `docker ...` command; or

2. You add your user to the `docker` group and now anything that can run as your user can use docker to read or write any file on your system, making docker into the best local privilege escalation option out there.

Even security code. Fortinet, a vendor whose entire thing is security for your network, is consistently getting caught out with default passwords, backdoors, etc.

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/hard-coded-password-backd...

This sort of thing leads to every kind of exploit, like

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/half-worlds-fortinet-firewall...