Back when things were more decentralized individual websites and services would have issues much more regularly because the individual software and hardware stacks weren't as robust and fault-tolerant, but then usually the problem would always be limited to a single website/service.

I like C a lot but one of the reasons I like Rust more these days is the ability to trivially implement complex serialization schemes without a ton of ad-hoc code and boilerplate.

I dream of a polar-punk alternate reality where we address pixels not by (x, y) but by (r, θ).

Of course there's one big flaw with this line of thinking: even if we used circular (or elliptic) screens, we can't tile them with other circles. Circular windows would waste a lot of space. Maybe we could split in "slices" instead though?

I really wonder what's that doing to insecure teenagers with body issues.

I started playing videogames on 8bit consoles and within a little more than a decade we had mainstream internet and games like Half Life 2. Every new generation of consoles and computers blew the previous one completely out of the water. We're also the last generation who knew what life was without having an always-online computer on ourselves at all times. Calling your friends on landlines to ask them if they wanted to hang out!

Meanwhile my current desktop computer that I use for work is about 8 years old and the benefits I'd get for upgrading would be relatively minimal. Tech is still progressing massively of course, but it feels like in many areas we've hit diminishing returns.

What annoys me is using JavaScript and shell scripts when there are clearly superior alternatives and no clear advantage for it besides the familiarity (which, admittedly, can be a strong argument).

Shell scripts being an arcane mess is no excuse for Javascript being as clunky as it is, and vice-versa.

I feel like AI can amplify this issue tremendously. That's my main concern really, not people making pipe bombs or writing rape fanfiction.

I am one of these ninnies I guess, but isn't it rational to be a bit worried about this? When we see the deep effects that social networks have had on society (both good and bad) isn't it reasonable to feel a bit dizzy when considering the effect that such an invention will have?

Or maybe your point is just that it's going to happen regardless of whether people want it or not, in which case I think I agree, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about it...

The best GameBoy emulators like Gambatte predate Rust by almost a decade and are often written in C++. Since GameBoy emulation is pretty much a solved problem there's no strong motivation to innovate in the scene.

I've written several emulators in Rust, I'd argue that it's very well suited to this exercise, but it's also not an area where Rust shines particularly. There's no complex memory management in emulators usually since most memory buffers are just statically allocated constant-size arrays that mimic the physical RAM on the console.

I fully acknowledge that I'm an "old school" system dev who's coming from the C world and not the JS world, so I probably have a certain bias because of that, but I genuinely can't understand how anybody could look at the mess that's Rust's async and think that it was a good design for a language that already had the reputation of being very complicated to write.

I tried to get it, I really did, but my god what a massive mess that is. And it contaminates everything it touches, too. I really love Rust and I do most of my coding in it these days, but every time I encounter async-heavy Rust code my jaw clenches and my vision blurs.

At least my clunky select "runtime" code can be safely contained in a couple functions while the rest of the code remains blissfully unaware of the magic going on under the hood.

Dear people coming from the JS world: give system threads and channels a try. I swear that a lot of the time it's vastly simpler and more elegant. There are very, very few practical problems where async is clearly superior (although plenty where it's arguably superior).

I don't really like having a lightshow on my keyboard so the LEDs are off all the time for me but in the past I've used them to change color depending on the layout I'm using for instance. I'm sure a more creative hacker could come up with something useful.

Instead the model decides to make stuff up and pretend that it knows. That's vastly worse.

It reminds me of the early days of DuckDuckGo, when if you searched for something obscure with no matches online it would still fuzzy match some garbage like a binary blob in a Chinese PDF while Google helpfully would just tell you that it couldn't find anything.

As long as the tests are not also written by ChatGPT...

Many critical security issues require a deep understanding or the code or some intense fuzzing to discover, it's not enough to ask ChatGPT "write me X" then superficially glance at the output to validate that it looks correct. That's the part that worries me. Completely broken code will be caught immediately, but subtly broken code may linger for a long time and make it to production.

And from my limited experience with ChatGPT, it seems very good at making up broken things that look superficially correct.

The other day I was struggling to parse a Japanese sentence, a particular grammatical construction made no sense to me. I wrote the sentence in ChatGPT, asked it to break it down for me, and it came up with a plausible-sounding explanation. Problem was, I couldn't find any hit on google when I searched for the thing it was talking about. So I asked ChatGPT to give me more details, tell me what I could search for, and it would insist that its explanation was correct and then gaslight me by telling me that the reason I couldn't find anything on Google was because it was a niche subject not usually taught in grammar books.

After some more searching around and double-checking it turns out that I had misread a kanji and the sentence I typed into ChatGPT was complete gibberish as a result. ChatGPT's explanation, while sounding very plausible, was complete fabrication.

The idea that some inexperienced people are shipping software using this tool is insane to me.

Switching VCS for a project of this size is always complicated and OpenBSD devs are famously "old school" and conservative with their software choices.

I used to use CVS before switching to SVN and later DCVS like Mercurial and Git. The claim that "it is unlikely that any alternative versioning system would improve the developer's productivity or quality" is absolutely laughable IMO.

This is especially true nowadays where CVS support in modern tooling, if it even exists, is usually legacy and poorly maintained.

If you notice that some of your confidential info made it into next generations of the model, you'll be able to sue them for big $$$ for breach of contract. That's a pretty good incentive for them not to play stupid games with that.

The idea of using structured data instead of raw bytes always seemed like a brilliant idea, so I commend Microsoft for pushing the concept with their PowerShell, but I'm a un*x user and all the operating system and tooling is built around dumb `char[]` pipes so unfortunately that's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned.

I suppose a big player like Red Hat or Ubuntu could push for a complete migration of the kernel + userland towards structured pipes, but I'm not sure why they would. From anecdotal evidence it seems to me that shell power-usage is not as popular now than it was in the past, most junior devs I encounter seem to barely use pipes at all, let alone write complex scripts. They rely on VSCode to launch the build commands and they do everything else through GUI. When they need to do something on the CLI they usually just copy/paste from stackoverflow. Why bother overhauling the shell if it's becoming a legacy tool?

It saddens me a bit but I also get it. It's not like shell scripts and Makefiles and autotools stuff are a pleasure to work with... Maybe it's for the best.