kaladin-jasnah

I read the entire article, and it seemed that the article supported the headline well. Am I missing something?

Yeah, I would agree. To be honest, I used Beeper for a while, and I had no issues with it, despite at least the client being similar to Element.

I used Cinny at some point, but the issue for me was the mobile client. I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client. I think I tried Fractal and whatever KDE was working on and neither was polished at the time of use.

Not the original commenter, but Matrix is awful. I used it on and off, and self-hosted it too. It's slow, bloated (I'm pretty sure I tried other homeservers). The app UI/UX is not great either. The E2EE stuff got better by the end but adoption-wise I was able to get way more people on Signal.

Isn't fingerprinting used across many different websites? Then the analogy would be a number of stores colluding to recognize the same person across all stores?

(I have no idea, I don't know too much about this)

That seems like a great setup, and maybe something I'll think about after grad school (or maybe look into being a professor at LACs or less research oriented schools)! I'm already sort of nervous about doing the PhD because of the insane toxicity I've encountered and the pressure to do research in direct support of industry (which is probably exacerbated by NSF funding being impossible to get), but hopefully I'll find things to enjoy about it. The career prospects also seem tenuous, as a lot of outcomes seem to be "go through a brutal tenure process" or work for FAANG/adjacent (probably not even in research since places like MSR are difficult to get). But I would like the creative freedom a professorship might offer.

who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research

I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.

I'm not entirely sure how those companies are related to "AI-monied" after clicking on their websites.

AI monied interests that fund the FSF

Can you elaborate on who these interests are precisely?

Some of this is sort of a tangent, but:

When I was a student (and a student TA), what I heard or saw was that students were in CS for money, or their parents forced them to study it. Both of these things created some sort of extrinsic motivation that leads to cheating. In some cases (eg. in my high school) I heard parents would threaten to beat their children if they did not do well in their classes. So maybe that pressure continues in college. And for some, they just want an easy 6 figure job and are willing to take shortcuts. Students I know (some honest, some not) have mentioned they cheat on CS interviews or lie on their resume.

Additionally, I heard that multitides of parents would threaten to withhold tuition if their child failed a class. since the university is not well off, they acquiesce and make classes easier for students who aren't interested.

Yeah, I've been. They were pretty much what I was referring to in the comment.

I'd be curious what metropolitan area you live in for this to be true! If you're not comfortable sharing for privacy reasons, that's all right. But it seems like this is the case in inner-ring suburbs in the Northeast megalopolis.

It's reductive to say that people who aren't "copy-pasting tex and files across 3 RDP sessions deep" are not "working everyday." While Windows fits your use case, some people do use SSH for their real work as well, even if it is simpler.

Wow, I didn't expect to get a reply from you! I appreciate the transparency. Stuff like this somehow makes Oxide a desirable place to work to me!

Isn't Oxide Computer also funded by In-Q-Tel?

They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see.

Is this with JBIG2? I remember reading about JBIG2 also used in the FORCEDENTRY zero click exploit that which was (?) used in the Pegasus spyware. Unrelated tidbit, I guess.

The thing is, something like this is way outside of the budget of someone who isn't making a lot of money or has saved a lot in the first place. 438 dollars is a lot of money.

I like jujutsu simply because (despite my annoyances, which might be because I started using it 2 weeks ago) it's still faster than git.

I dislike this as well. I find it easier to keep track of branches with bookmarks, but my workflow still makes things cumbersome. I am usually working with the "megamerge" branches, and I usually want to add commits to my current branch instead of squashing my edits. However, adding commits means I have to add my commit, move my bookmark up to the branch tip (jj tug?), and then rebase the megamerge branch, versus doing nothing for squashing. I also find that when I mess up, I don't really love using `jj op log` to fix it. I want to not be in an environment where it's this easy to destroy history (I feel like git was on the other end of it).

To be fair, I have done things I don't really agree with in the past morally and I couldn't really stand myself or grow as a technologist. The lack of morality in what I did made me work slowly and poorly. So it makes things hard.

Well, the result of my search is that I'm going to join a PhD program instead (and seemingly not doing something that is a brains-for-cheap scheme to optimize Meta's AI accelerators). I also more or less gave up my interest in doing operating systems as a career for now in the process, as it felt like a mountain to build the embedded systems skills I would need to do something that was "good."

As a new grad, I think a lot of the companies that have respectable goals to me only hire at the senior level. So what am I supposed to do, go do something I deeply disagree with for a few years so I can eventually work on something respectable?

This selects for people who excel at taking tests. Sure, there may not be a better alternative, but as an empirical measure I learned just about nothing in my test heavy college courses, as I was incentivized to cram for the exams and purged everything immediately after the final (and midterm).

I’m sure we need people like that

Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry?

On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job?

(I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how people see this.)

No operating systems, no processor design,

Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.

Hah, I heard about this at VCF East this year, but didn't get to check out the exhibit. There was another MC server demo running on old Macs IIRC. Shame the event was cut short due to a bomb threat.

I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography.

So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.

How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.

I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims. To my knowledge, asymmetric cryptography is widely used. I have no opinions on the rest of the article, though.

I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.

For college aged kids, most people are definitely not doing their homework on their phone. Many are still using paper and pencil. The one person I know who did do their homework on their phone tried to evangelize it to their friends and got ridiculed for it.

I honestly think is it bad for you to be that morally insistent against "evil" companies.

Why is that? I broadly agree with the idea that even "evil" companies have parts that do good things or neutral things, but I am curious about your rationale.

Seeing this [1], I thought it was something related to taking assembly instructions in the original code, emitting C statements that match the instruction, and then compiling that C code.

[1] https://github.com/N64Recomp/N64Recomp

I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).

Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)

It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.