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Sorry, but that had me laughing out loud.

No, they haven't.

I should know, I check those companies for a living. This is one of the most often flagged issues: unaudited Node.js dependencies. "Oh but we don't have the manpower to do that, think about how much code that is".


> 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'

I like to go with the simpler "I hold lots of sensitive data for people who trust me: my family, my friends, my employer. One would have to be a sociopath to disclose other people's secrets without their consent."


Faith Ekstrand has an impressive track record of compiler work and has written a few blog posts[1], [1a]. Her Mastodon[2] is also worth a follow.

SPIR-V is important in the compute shader space, especially because DXIL and Metal's AIR are similar. I'm going to link three articles critical of SPIR-V: [3], [4], [5].

WebGPU [6] is interesting for a number of reasons, largely because they're trying to actually nail down the semantics, and also make it safe (see the uniformity analysis [7] in particular, which is a very "compiler" approach to a GPU-specific problem). Both Tint and naga projects are open source, with lots of high quality discussion in the issue trackers.

Shader languages suck, and we really need a good one. Promising approaches are Circle [8] (which is C++ based, very advanced but not open source), and Slang [9] (an evolution of HLSL). The Vcc work (also related to [4]) is worth studying.

Best of luck! This is a fascinating, if frustrating, space, and there's lots of room to improve things.

[1]: https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/

[1a]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/04/25/re-c...

[2]: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gfxstrand

[3]: https://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html

[4]: https://xol.io/blah/the-trouble-with-spirv/

[5]: https://themaister.net/blog/2022/08/21/my-personal-hell-of-t...

[6]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb

[7]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/WD-WGSL-20220505/#uniformity-over...

[8]: https://www.circle-lang.org/site/index.html

[9]: https://github.com/shader-slang/slang


> What counts as “safety”? Which places in the world are truly safe for LGBTQIA+ community? How much of a city, or state, or country needs to be LGBTQIA+ hostile for the whole of it to be declared unworthy of PSF support?

What a cheap shot. You don't need a safetyometer or something to determine that a country where same sex relationship is punishable by life imprisonment is unsafe for homosexuals or bisexuals.


> meme-ing with little actual specific policy substance behind it.

This is a good point. Can we really say for certain that “bombing noncombatant countries both during a war and after a treaty was signed” is a war crime, and even if it were would “coming up with the whole idea” even count as contributing to something like that? It is confusing stuff like this that has led to no person ever being convicted for war crimes — the concept is too nebulous and complex to nail down.

Surely if Kissinger were a war criminal he would have said so in the books that he wrote


My biggest mistake was following the traditional single variable definition of substitution. I now understand that modern CS definitions of substitution typically substitute all (free) variables simultaneously. For variables that you don't want to substitute, you are required to explicitly map them back to themselves.

Chapter 7 of my thesis <https://r6.ca/thesis.pdf> has some more comments. With a bit more care using Prop/Set maybe one could compute explicitly what these Goedel sentences are (similar to <https://web.archive.org/web/20160528092209/http://tachyos.or...>). Maybe using Robinson Q instead of Hodel's obscure NN system would have been better, or maybe with a bit more abstraction it would be easier to apply the proof to other axioms systems, such as ZF, which don't use the same language that PA does. And maybe making sure the Second Incompleteness could follow more easily would be good (which has since been formalized elsewhere).


>This does not mean that the «masses» are excused from cultivating themselves

I think the persons who pick up our shit and clean our offices and make food for us and stuff do have a lot of excuses of not having the time and energy for "cultivation"at the level of people whose job is to read and study.


Halogens that are already tightly bound will not suddenly unbind and go off causing trouble.

This is why, in general, bromine is more trouble than chlorine is more trouble than fluorine: bromine can't bind as tightly to begin with, so it gets loose more easily. Fluorine is so reactive that elemental fluorine is just not a problem unless something has gone Truly Wrong. It can't be used as a chemical weapon in the same way chlorine can, for example.


In an era where having customer support at all is not a given, paying real human beings to offer customer support through ASL is pretty next level.

Because hiring humans to write misinformation costs more money than $20/mo? Like what are you even trying to say?

Before LLMs, a $3000 camera had fake reviews on Amazon, and you got fake news about politicians. But you can safely assume "bg3 silver ingot" information is likely real, since hiring someone to make up silver ignot will never make the money back.

No any more.


Yawn. Non-telco(*1) Tier 1 provider declines to carry routes for an entity they don't like. Happens all the time. This is why you buy from a Tier 2 instead and bypass DFZ(*2) politics.

Drop routes from spammers: Spamhaus DROP list. Drop routes from DDoS sources? All the time.

Even Google wasn't reachable from Cogent over IPv6 for years because of a business dispute. For all we know someone working at HE was targeted by KF and this is a security response (also generally allowed even if you are a regulated provider).

*1: Cogent & HE thread the needle around being a common carrier (they don't sell voice or TDM service) or a broadband provider, which is why KF's WA state complaint will fail (WA's law only applies to mass-market retail providers, which HE is not).

*2: Tier 1 does not mean "best carrier" it means "carrier that doesn't pay another carrier for routes." DFZ literally means default-free zone as in they don't have a default route to another provider.


It took me a long time to come around to using ad blockers. For a long time, my feeling was, "if you don't like ads don't use the web. You owe it to those websites to look at their ads".

But then the ads just go so resource intense that I came around and finally installed an ad blocker.

This however still feels one step too far. The ad blocker protects me from the resource utilization of ads. But if you're already blocking the ads, then the tracking shouldn't work anyway.

How do you justify using their resources unnecessarily? Doesn't something like this make you no better than the advertiser?


I'm not sure how to get this through to you; but let's try.

Imagine that every time you go through airport security, a full body scan is made of your kids and wife and they are sent around to a thousand or so unknown people (most of whom aren't even directly employed by the government) for salacious reasons or to be mocked. Now, there's a law that protects your kids scans from being sent anywhere (like HIPPA for doctors!), but incidentally it's a government institution and thus, according to themselves they do not need to follow the law. - despite that law existing for the only purpose of protecting your kids from the government.

When the information gets out that this is happening (this part happened before Snowden btw), everyone involved, including the head of the organisation, knowingly lies to the "Oversight committee" which is democratically elected, is transparent and wants to protect your kids. The "Oversight Committee" have no choice than to just trust airport security at their word, for "security" reasons. (this was one of the things proven to have happened in the Snowden leaks: IE; General Alexander knowingly lied to the US Senate).

Lying to the "Oversight committe" in this case is also a crime, but such flagrant disregard for the law has become pretty standard.

This is what we're discussing here, not just that there was laws being broken, not that there was surveillance after all: their job is surveillance.

The fact is here: that you, dear citizen have a right to privacy enshrined in the constitution. The reason that protection exists at all is to protect the very democracy that you uphold: freedom of expression.

A rogue government agency that lies to your democratically elected leaders, that breaks laws indiscriminately and does so under a thick blanket of secrecy -- while wielding a very powerful hammer to discredit and chase people to the ends of the earth -- that's what was exposed.

Not "the good guys". If they were "good" they wouldn't be lying to the US Senate. They wouldn't be assassinating the character of the people that expose them- these things would have clear answers and when exposed people would shrug.

Remember: people are using tools like XKeyscore to spy on people they personally know (ex-lovers, spouses etc; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog... )

You can't defend it by saying "it's national secrecy". Tell me how spying on your ex is in the national interest? Tell me why there can't be oversight?

Disgusting, and so is anyone who defends it.


If you want a technical document, try BCP #188 aka RFC 7258 "Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack". That's a Best Common Practice document (ie it describes what the Internet Community should do) about the wide use of surveillance technologies such as "middle boxes" and it makes it clear that these are necessarily an attack in practical terms and therefore new Internet technologies should be designed to mitigate this attack.

BCP #188 made it easy to say why EDCO's arguments for RSA KEX in TLS 1.3 were unactionable. ECDO (the Enterprise Data Centre Operators, mostly big banks and similar outfits) wanted to use the obsolete RSA key exchange method in TLS 1.3, and sent somebody to argue for this right at the end of the process, years after it was removed - because otherwise they'd have to do a bunch of work, and who wants to do work? Well, too bad, RSA KEX makes surveillance really easy, so we got rid of it.


An extension user could theoretically be willing to pay for the value the extension provides them. The malicious actors sending these emails are willing to pay for the value that a user's data provides them. These two numbers are not related in any way, and the value of user data will often be much higher than the value of the extension's functionality.

There is no way for monetization to solve this, because the two potential customers are not purchasing the same product.


> A typical case from this time... the case of Edna Long, ...they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). ...Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.”

This practice is widespread today minus the slave-labor component in the form of the guardianship system, underwhich people who work as "guardians" give kickbacks to healthcare providers to identify wealthy geriatrics. The guardian, once one of these victims is identified, has them declared incompetent (even if the victims are still living independently with no apparent problems), and then takes over all their financial resources and complete control over their healthcare. The end result is the elderly person or couple is forced into a nursing home against their will; their family will be barred from visiting or corresponding with them; and the guardian walks away with a percentage of their net worth (with the reminder going to the cost of the nursing home). In states that are popular destinations for retirees like Nevada, the court system sees families who oppose this fraud/practice as evidence in favor of it happening, with judges & guardians often arguing that it shows the next of kin(s) are only concerned with money and that's why they don't want their (up until now healthy and independent) retired parent going into a bottom barrel nursing home.

> What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse.

What they want, is a way for socially undesirables (an intentionally vague and flexible category) removed from society in a way that avoids the guilty emotions invoked by executing them.

The asylum system in the US was not dismantled because people like Edna Long had their inter-generational wealth stolen from their children/grandchildren. It was dismantled because in the 1960s it was shown that these places were engaging in torture. The journalist who broke the Pennhurst story (that culminated in the ending of the asylum system in the US) wanted to have the grounds turned into a museum modeled after the Holocaust Museum because he had uncovered how things like, full mouth tooth removal was being used as a routine punishment method, among other things.

The cruelty towards these people was the goal itself. People were warehoused in feces without clothing instead of employing enough staff to change people & do the laundry often enough.

I have been to the house of Pennhurst's head psychologist from the "bad years." When he went into a nursing home a contractor bought his Federalist era farm to use it as his own-home and found that the doctor had gone insane from the guilt that his career had given him; he lived his last decades off the grid with no heating, electricity or running water; had a hole in the decaying roof that he had dragged a 19th century clawfoot tub under to collect water, and filtered the rainwater through old bedsheets and used that for cooking/drinking. The farm, with brush & grass 3ft thick grew over everything; the barn filled with a massive dragon's hoard pile of intellectual books (many of which I got to keep as souvenirs), while the hidden loft had been turned into some kind of computer & photography studio with restraints, camera arrays and so on.

I forget whose case it was, but sometime after Kaczynski was sent to ADX Florence, there was a criminal who was sentenced to join him there. The judge remarked at sentencing that they were to be sent "where people's souls go to die" or something to that effect. That. Was the real purpose of our state Asylums.


This brings to mind one of my rules about conservative panics:

If laws against witchcraft are removed and/or witchcraft is destigmatized and then all the sudden there appears to be an explosion of witches, the explanation is probably not that hordes of people are adopting witchcraft.

I'll leave it to the reader to guess the simplest and most likely explanation.


> stopping the gas injections proved nearly inposs

Aka we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas :/

Seriously. To this day we're letting fossil fuel companies get away with literal murder. Acting like change is impossible is a view those companies actively promote. Don't fall for it.


Top 10 Countries with the highest rate of incarceration 2022

United States — 629

Rwanda — 580

Turkmenistan — 576

El Salvador — 564

Cuba — 510

Palau — 478

British Virgin Islands (U.K. territory) — 477

Thailand — 445

Panama — 423

Saint Kitts and Nevis — 423

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...


Okay, maybe I'm missing something here, but how? Per wikipedia (1), opus is licenesed under bsd license. More relevant, on their own site(2) they tout opus as "a totally open, royalty-free" codec.

My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it? Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech? Do hardware makers use it? Or do Dolby and Fraunhofer have patents so broad that they cover anything encoding audio?

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) (2) https://opus-codec.org/


No, really, it can't. Feed it a checkerboard input and you'll get gray on the way out. It's horizontally processed at a lower resolution internally. Might be 960x1080 at 30FPS, and it can't do it at 60FPS at all. Yes, you're going to get 1920x1080 JPEG bitstreams out the USB end, but it's not actually 1920x1080.

I suspect this happens because it doesn't actually have enough internal RAM to buffer a full 1080p frame (this chip uses on-die RAM, so probably SRAM since they wouldn't go for a fancy EDRAM process, and SRAM is expensive by capacity).


I am someone who does give a shit about not wanting to reward assholes.

There is one thing I think is worth noting. There's always all of this talk about, "It's the talent that matters, not the social justice stance of a developer. Keep the talented assholes; don't hire for social justice posturing!"

Well, I'm waiting to see all of those displaced "talented assholes" band together to create a product so compelling it will *prove* they were replaced by inferior developers for "social justice" reasons. By now there should be so many uber-talented people who aren't given their fair shake because of their abhorent political/social beliefs.

Or maybe... just maybe... those assholes talk a big game (as assholes often do), but aren't as indispensible as they believe themselves to be?


It’s always Eternal September:

“ In March 2003, the American country band the Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks, publicly criticized President George W. Bush and the imminent Allied invasion of Iraq…

After the statement was reported by the British newspaper The Guardian, it led to backlash from American country listeners, who were mostly right-wing and supported the war. The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations, received death threats, and were criticized by other country musicians. The backlash damaged sales of the Dixie Chicks' music and concert tickets and lost them corporate sponsorship.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy


For those unaware, this is in the form of the old Radio Yerevan joke:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him.[1]

[1]http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000810.h...


For those who may find this a little foreign, from what I could gather, "Rationality" refers to a post-new-age new techno-religion originating in Northern California, whose soteriology focuses on artificial intelligence as the source of redemption or damnation, whose eschatology comprises of an event called Singularity, which is the accelerated formation of an artificial intelligence entity or entities, and whose normative doctrine focuses on Bayes' formula as a guiding principle and a particularly technical form of utilitarianism as an organising moral principle. Rationality has several institutions, two of which are named MIRI and CFAR, dedicated to studying the eschatological and normative aspects of the creed, respectively. The website, lesswrong, is a primary publication of Rationality, and its founding canonical texts include a Harry Potter fan fiction novella. It is one of many religions that grew in Northern California over the past sixty years or so, and far from the strangest one.

Idiotic comment.

The proportion of world population from India and China has been almost constant throughout history. They have not "bred more" than the rest of the world.

6-8 children was the norm even in developed countries in the past, economic prosperity and education changed that. European colonization actively prevented both from occurring in these countries, keeping birth rate high.

Post independence, both countries have decreased birth rates drastically, India is at replacement and still decreasing, China below replacement.

Stop using that stupid racist argument.


One ray of light is that Mike Pall is working on luajit again https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT which at this point is a fork of mainline Lua in terms of version history

So change the business model. In the words of Robert Heinlein:

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."

http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Hei...


How many times does this need to be repeated?

Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?

As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716

DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...

Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”

Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.

It's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right Incel GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.)

Edit: And do you acknowledge that Brendan wanted to cancel many same sex marriages in California? And do you agree or disagree with him that those marriages should have been canceled? Because he got what he paid for, Proposition 8 passed, and those marriages WERE canceled. Which is worse: canceling one job, or thousands of marriages?

Edit 2: It's pretty rich that Brendan would claim to be the one suffering from a hostile work environment, when he was the one who wanted to destroy the marriages of his co-workers and users. Was it too much for him to bear facing the dirty looks of his co-workers who he didn't believe deserved the same rights as he enjoyed? Bullies are always playing the victim.

Breaking apart other people's marriages sounds more like "destructive separation" to me.


One example I quote from EFF's post Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life [1] on the topic:

We’ve already seen this mission creep in action. One of the technologies originally built to scan and hash child sexual abuse imagery has been repurposed to create a database of “terrorist” content [2] that companies can contribute to and access for the purpose of banning such content. The database, managed by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) [3], is troublingly without external oversight, despite calls from civil society [4]. While it’s therefore impossible to know whether the database has overreached, we do know that platforms regularly flag critical content [5] as “terrorism,” including documentation of violence and repression, counterspeech, art, and satire.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...

[2]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/one-database-rule-them...

[3]: https://gifct.org/

[4]: https://cdt.org/insights/human-rights-ngos-in-coalition-lett...

[5]: https://www.eff.org/wp/caught-net-impact-extremist-speech-re...


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