Yeah…

Human mistakes tend to 1) look like mistakes, and 2) are surrounded by lots of hints that the author had trouble with that section of code.

AI mistakes tend to 1) look like regular code, and 2) look just as confident and effort-ful as the rest of the code.

Tech bosses have well and truly lost it.

Consider that:

• Code is primarily to communicate from human-to-human, and only incidentally for computers to execute
• A codebase that is 30+ years old has an absolute shitload of learnings incorporated into it, much of it very subtle
• Languages are, in fact, different. So some things cannot be directly translated with exactly the same semantics, so devs will need to fully understand the intent and resolve ambiguities
• A million lines per month is a lot of text for someone to successfully interpret and translate without losing any subtleties

Why?

The language itself is… fine. It has some bad decisions baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And it has a pretty mature security model, which is a big help for embedded devices.

And given that so many embedded devices these days are talking to cloud services — that are probably running JS, but are at least communicating via JSON — being able to share some cross-platform code or tooling can help things go quicker and/or safer.

Edit: This is probably not a route for teams that are chronically tight on memory and choose to solve that by spending hundreds of dev-hours on optimizing code rather than adding BOM cost. But for teams that could stand to increase BOM cost as long as the savings on dev-hours make up for it… it could be an option.

Why would you expect that?

I’m down, but RISC-V has a looooot of ground to make up first. Last I checked, total number of RISC-V devices in existence was an order of magnitude less than what Qualcomm produces in a year.

Molly White’s coverage:

…maintained that they were merely developing privacy-preserving software, and that they were not responsible for criminal use of the software. Prosecutors have argued that the developers actively intended the software to be used for criminal purposes, pointing to marketing aimed at “Dark/Grey Market participants” and those engaged in “Illicit activity”.

Judge Cote cited a letter to the court in which Rodriguez continued to say that he was merely motivated by a desire to protect financial privacy and not “a desire to facilitate criminal activity” as evidence that Rodriguez “has not come to terms with what he did. … The letter indicated to me that you were very much still operating in a world with moral blinders on.”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-96/#samourai-wallet

Year of ARM Linux gaming when? 2028?

iPhone’s design is more secure than Android (partly because of OS+hardware integration that just isn’t practical in a multi-vendor space), but they still have plenty of zero-days in their implementation. iPhone 7 is old enough that official security patch support is EOL, though Apple has still shipped some critical fixes past EOL.

You should have a “fake” network interface for your VPN connection. Your client should allow you to declare that it can only use a specific network interface (probably by binding to its specific IP instead of 0.0.0.0). So it’ll never even be aware of a world outside the VPN.

You can run Linux on ARM. I do. And let’s not act like x86 wasn’t full of Microsoft-led efforts to undermine Linux. Anyone who’s had to disembowel their BIOS settings to the tune of “Your PC will be unsafe! Are you sure you want to run a LEGACY OS???” is familiar.

I’m not a huge fan of the idea of buying CPU+GPU+RAM+mobo all as one unit. But like… that’s what tends to happen. Audio cards, SATA drives, network cards, these things all used to be separated until motherboards offered features to streamline things.

The real problem is not form factor, but lack of competition. If there were 10-15 Qualcomms out there, offering different combos and a la carte options, there’d be no problem. It’s only because there are a tiny number of dominant players in the space that technical consolidation automatically translates to abusing consumers.

Well… modularity is kinda coming to an end anyway, regardless of supply chain moves. Apple’s M series has shown that op decoders and unified memory are the low-hanging fruit for overall system performance improvements, and that means less modularity.

I think Valve sees the writing on the wall and is trying to get ahead of the game via FEX and the Steam Frame. Intel and AMD are pretty much stuck playing Nvidia’s game at this point, and Qualcomm has an incredible opportunity here. I’m still rooting for RISC-V, and I think it may end up being the long-term winner in like 10-15 years time.

But either way, x86-style modularity is not long for this world. From a purely technical standpoint, I think that’s good. Adding the political and economic situation into the mix… well… fuck, we’re mega-fucked. About the only thing we have going for us as consumers is the fact that this is already headed towards a reset. So if we do gain some leverage, we can make a big change all at once. If we don’t though… things will get much worse.

Yeah, we need to be careful about distinguishing policy objectives from policy language.

“Hold megacorps responsible for harmful algorithms” is a good policy objective.

How we hold them responsible is an open question. Legal recourse is just one option. And it’s an option that risks collateral damage.

But why are they able to profit from harmful products in the first place? Lack of meaningful competition.

It really all comes back to the enshittification thesis. Unless we force these firms to open themselves up to competition, they have no reason to stop abusing their customers.

“We’ll get sued” gives them a reason. “They’ll switch to a competitor’s service” also gives them a reason, and one they’re more likely to respect — if they see it as a real possibility.

Doing the O last cuz the dementia got im for just a second.

“Fuck the C_ps… What was it? Caps? Cups?”

Ethel: “COPS”

“WHERE?!”

Be really obnoxious about the ballot format in the Florida 2000 election until they either fix it or news outlets do a good job educating people about how to correctly vote for Gore

Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.

• loads more slowly on HDD
• now small enough for your SSD

It costs 400,000 treats to feed this cat… for 12 seconds.

These guys live in a bubble, huffing each others’ farts

You must have done something bad to deserve this. Trying thinking about everything bad you’ve ever done. That’ll help.