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- Comment on Also, you have been turned into a worm. 3 days ago:
If we are now considering philosophical intellectual exercises to be memes then this description is accurate.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 1 week ago:
You can’t prove that Godzilla’s bones aren’t hollow ballast tanks that can be emptied and filled as needed.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 1 week ago:
Ordinary biomatter is very close to the density of water to begin with. That’s why having a little air in your lungs is enough to be the difference between sinking and floating.
If Godzilla’s biomatter under 1atm of pressure has a density close to water then being able to compress or expand an empty chamber inside his body by even just a tiny percentage of his ordinary overall volume could be the difference between floating at sea level or sinking to extreme depths.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 1 week ago:
“Lungs aren’t really inside” is not an argument that I thought I’d be confronted with.
If you find that your lungs are not inside your body then I urge you to seek immediate medical attention.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 1 week ago:
You’d be right if the cavity is only compressing other organs inside the body without changing the overall volume, but I don’t know why you seem to insist on making that assumption.
I thought it would be clear from my original description, via the analogy with lungs, that the cavity would not squish the internal organs but rather expand the overall volume of the body.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 1 week ago:
My head canon for sea-based Kaiju is they have a sack of muscles somewhere inside their body that can expand a cavity, kind of like the diaphragm expands the lungs, except instead of taking in air it just creates a volume of vacuum inside of them. This makes them extremely bouyant relative to the surrounding sea pressure, so they rapidly ascend and can casually float like a boat near the surface.
But if they ever want to dive again, they just let that cavity collapse and all their bouyancy goes away.
- Comment on Connected cars’ illegal data collection and use now on FTC’s “radar” 1 month ago:
I’m disappointed to learn that she was born British so she can never run for president in America.
… Not that the FTC chair is known to be a pipeline to the presidency, but I’m ready to turn over every stone at this point.
- Comment on Risk your life with this one easy trick! 1 month ago:
I feel like this is rapidly approaching the “is water wet?” conundrum.
- Comment on Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two 1 month ago:
Life insurance premiums are about to skyrocket for Boeing whistleblowers.
- Comment on Are you prepared for the ramifications of windows 10 EoL? 2 months ago:
Sounds like there are going to be a lot of machines running a fresh install of Linux next year. Microsoft really does ♥️ Linux.
- Comment on Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks 2 months ago:
Except it’s actually an “Every language and library that provides this feature” problem because literally no one was aware that this sanitization problem even existed, and Rust is among the first to actually fix it.
- Comment on Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks 2 months ago:
The entire problem with cmd.exe was not known and so obviously not documented when the Rust standard library developers were implementing the API, and the same goes for the standard library developers of every other language. Rust was among the first to fix this problem in their API, with many other languages opting to just document the issues instead of actually protecting users from it.
To take all this information and distill it down to trumpeting “Rust has a CVSS level 10 security vulnerability!!” without context is stupidity at best and maliciously disingenuous at worst.
Nitpicking whether the statement can be construed as true within a certain framing just demonstrates malicious intent when the reality is that users of Python and Java, whose standard libraries have taken a position of Won’t Fix, are in a FAR more dangerous position than Rust users who are actually in the safest position of anyone in any language ecosystem besides perhaps Haskell.
- Comment on Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks 2 months ago:
Because this is the status of the bug across the standard libraries of various languages, per this article and others:
- Erlang (documentation update)
- Go (documentation update)
- Haskell (patch available)
- Java (won’t fix)
- Node.js (patch will be available)
- PHP (patch will be available)
- Python (documentation update)
- Ruby (documentation update)
Notably C and C++ are missing from this list because their standard libraries don’t even offer this capability. Half of these standard libraries are responding to the issue by just warning you about it in the function documentation. Rust is one of the few that actually prevents the attack from happening.
The original BatBadBut bug report used JavaScript to illustrate the vulnerability.
- Comment on Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks 2 months ago:
If the issue exists in the standard library of every language that provides this capability and Rust’s standard library is the first to fix it, how is it a Rust issue?
It would be more accurate to say that it’s an issue in almost every language EXCEPT Rust at this point.
The only reason it isn’t being called a C or C++ issue is because their standard libraries don’t even attempt to offer this capability. But you can bet that all sorts of C/C++ libraries that do offer this, like Qt, will also be having this issue.
- Comment on Sanity checking an idea for editing yaml without wanting to throw my laptop out the window 2 months ago:
All JSON is valid YAML, so after you’ve converted the file to JSON, just… save it with a YAML file extension and call it a day…?
- Comment on Brazil is fighting dengue with bacteria-infected mosquitos 3 months ago:
Congratulations, you’re halfway there! Just two more times and you’ll never catch it again 😁
- Comment on Boeing: Last Week Tonight 3 months ago:
Beyond personal safety concerns, I want to boycott Boeing whole sale. Make the whole brand toxic to airlines, period. Make airlines decide that they lose too much business to their use of Boeing to ever use their planes again. If Boeing doesn’t totally collapse, other airplane makers will eventually follow their example.
- Comment on So, we gotta trick the rich into letting us eat them. 5 months ago:
I’m sorry to have to tell you that Chris Diamantopoulos and Dino Stamatopoulos are two different people despite how incredibly similar their names are. And by “similar” I guess I mean “Greek”.
- Comment on Maestro, a Linux compatible kernel written in Rust. 5 months ago:
I’ve had the privilege of switching from C++ to Rust almost completely in my professional work. I can tell you in no uncertain terms, the language itself makes an enormous difference.
When I was doing highly concurrent multi-threaded programming in C++, I would sometimes have to waste entire weeks hunting down subtle data race bugs, despite the fact that I have a solid understanding of concurrency and multithreading. In some cases the bugs would originate in third party libraries that I was using, even though those libraries came from credible sources like Microsoft, Google, and GNU.
Switching to Rust, those bugs are gone. By the time my code compiles there’s at 95% chance that it will work exactly the way it’s intended to without any debugging. The remaining 5% is silly little logic accidents like saying
if condition { … }
when I meant to sayif !condition { … }
and those bugs are trivially caught by writing a few simple unit tests (and Rust also makes it easier to write unit tests than any other language I know of).When I see my colleagues struggle with debugging problems in their JavaScript, Python, or C++ code, almost every time it turns out to be something that would’ve been trivially caught by the Rust compiler.
By no means does using Rust guarantee that your code will be completely bug free. But the language alone gets you so close to that goal that it hardly takes any special effort beyond compiling to get all the way there.
I think this is a huge reason that the ecosystem grows as quickly as it does: it’s so easy to write code that you can feel confident enough about to publish for anyone to use that many people go ahead and do that, and others feel confident using the work of others because the compiler does so much to ensure quality. It creates a virtuous cycle where people can develop faster by taking advantage of other people’s efforts and then release their own effort back into the community.
- Comment on Maestro, a Linux compatible kernel written in Rust. 5 months ago:
Whenever people complain that in Rust “the compiler is tough to beat”, the real problem is that individual’s mindset.
I had this problem as well when I first started playing with Rust. I thought I was very smart and that I know exactly what I’m doing when I’m programming, so if the compiler is complaining so much about my code, it’s just being a dumb jerk.
But if you stick with it instead of giving into your initial frustration, you’ll realize that the truth is the compiler is your friend and is saving you from innumerable subtle bugs that you’d be putting into your code if you were using any other language.
When you realize that the 1.5x time+effort you need to spend to satisfy the Rust compiler is saving you 5x-50x time+effort that you’d have to spend debugging your program if you had written it in any other language, you’ll come to appreciate the strictness of the compiler instead of resenting it.
There’s a reason us crustaceans are so zealous and the ecosystem is growing so rapidly, and it’s not because we’re super smart or have some unusually high work ethic. It’s because the language and the tooling is legitimately really good for producing high quality software at a rapid pace.
There’s going to be an inflection point where the people who keep dismissing Rust are going to be left behind by the entire tech industry because there’s no other language that allows an ordinary developer to produce as high quality software as quickly that can work across EVERY platform, including web (via compiling to web assembly). I won’t pretend I can predict exactly when that inflection point will happen, but it will definitely happen.
- Comment on OpenAI investors push to bring Altman back as CEO one day after he was ousted by board 7 months ago:
You have that totally backwards.
The board (which is the board of the non-profit) wanted the company to be more focused on its mission and less profit-driven. Altman is the one that’s been letting Microsoft get its tendrils around OpenAI and push a narrative that everything must be closed off and profit focused.
- Comment on Crispr gene editing shown to permanently lower hereditary high cholesterol 7 months ago:
That’s explained by the muscle memory of the sleeve that he’s in. A mouth that has only practiced pronouncing American English will not have the neural pathways to pronounce words in a Japanese way. The consciousness and memories transfer but the sleeve doesn’t change.
It’s a convenient plot device but also it fits the narrative cleanly.
- Comment on TikTok says it’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine — The company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion 7 months ago:
The difference is that for one side the “violations of the Geneva convention” are not being carried out by the duly elected government 🤔
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
Mirror universe Janeway would use the caretaker technology to conquer the Delta Quadrant and become the Borg queen without even being assimilated.
- Comment on is Rust really that powerful / intuitive? 9 months ago:
Using visual studio code this only happens if the library has thorough type annotation. While that’s becoming more popular, it’s not enforced at the language level so lots of libraries have enormous gaps in the autocomplete.
- Comment on is Rust really that powerful / intuitive? 9 months ago:
It only took me ~2 weeks of playing with Rust before it became my scripting language of choice over Python (which I had been using casually for ~5 years by that point).
The initial setup for Rust can be whipped up with
$ cargo init
. You’re right that there’s more setup boilerplate because of the mandatoryCargo.toml
and directory structure, butcargo init
will provide all that in a snap.As for the domain specific boilerplate, I actually find that Rust is better at that than Python in almost all cases. I feel that Rust’s
clap
is much simpler, more reliable, and less boilerplate than Python’s argparse. Python might win in cases where there’s a very mature domain specific package that you need which isn’t available in the Rust ecosystem, but that’s becoming rare as crates.io grows.And then when it comes to the actual “scripting”, very often my IDE’s intellisense can practically fill in the Rust code for me. One keystroke per word and it knows what function I want, or I can quickly scroll through the recommendations until I find what I’m looking for. Meanwhile with Python I always have to consult docs to find any API that isn’t part of the basic standard library. As a result I’ll often get the scripting done faster in Rust than in Python.
It does absolutely take some time to reach that point, though. Most programmers will definitely feel significant discomfort with Rust initially, but that’s just because you need to deprogram your brain from the bad habits that other languages encourage. There’s a tipping point in that deprogramming where all the other languages start to feel uncomfortable because you know it won’t let you write as good quality of code as Rust would.