Depressingly plausible scenario. Software needs to become a licensed engineering field with professional liability or something soon!

I would think an Astrophotographer needs to know which distant objects in the night sky are going to be illuminated and/or washed out when, so maybe that’s what it’s referring to? I.e. the joke is not that he knows where the sun is pointing on Earth, but that he knows where in the observable galaxy the light will be best for his needs?

Local Privilege Escalation - i.e. someone who is already a non-admin user (whether through other hacks or normally) on your computer getting admin privileges.

My understanding is that they’re withholding part of their source code (which is forbidden by AGPLv3 as described in the article) so that they can keep lock people with their devices into their cloud services (and of course corresponding subscription fees, privacy nightmares, etc.), rather than having the printers able to receive files and print them themselves.

Does the livestock figure include the water being used to grow their feed? Probably not because of course there’s no guarantee that their feed is Texas sourced. But there are just SO many examples of already too dry places having astronomical amounts of water given (read: stolen legally) to farm stupidly water intensive crops that are only good for feeding livestock like alfalfa.

To add two numbers, for example, it constructs the midpoint between them, then doubles the distance from the origin.

It’s basically a self-defined system of arithmetic, with no actual numbers. e.g. rather than 1 + 2 = 3, you have [radius of unit circle A] + [radius of 2 unit circle B] = [length of 3 unit line C]. I’ll confess I don’t totally understand how you can extend that to the point that it can correctly implement RSA, but I believe it can be done based on other achievements with unquantified geometry I’ve witnessed in the past.

For example, this excellent video about constructing flags using only the shape drawing tools of PowerPoint without ever applying external measurements to the shapes.

Servo has been picked back up by a community of devs outside of Mozilla (currently housed in the Linux Foundation Europe) and has been gaining momentum since 2023, to the point it seems to be moving faster now than when Mozilla was funding it.

https://servo.org/about/

The number of times I’ve seen people link to this thread while completely misunderstanding the context of it drives me nuts. The issue isn’t being able to export keys, it’s that KeepassXC was making it trivial to export keys in plaintext with no user warning/verification, which fundamentally undermines the biggest security advantage of passkeys - phishing resistance. In other words, if users can be easily talked through exporting their keys via a simple in-app flow that gives them no warning about the danger of what they’re doing, then they will do that and be scammed horribly by it.

The person who raised the issue was asking KeepasXC to come up with a better solution for exporting keys - originally he asked them to wait for the now standardized process that every passkey provider uses, but then they settled on showing the user an explicit warning about the danger of plaintext exports in the meantime.

If you choose to read the most hostile and uncharitable subtext into every word a person writes in public, you can misunderstand what he’s saying. Otherwise, this is a pretty cut-and-dry example of a person genuinely trying to support the interests of end users.

How long has it been since you used Teams? I’m no apologist, I have plenty of gripes with that piece of crap software, but this seems like a crazy stretch. Teams makes it almost trivial to embed code blocks with syntax highlighting for a wide array of languages, which can be easily copied out of Teams or opened in a separate viewer for easier reading.

Thank god Temporal is finally in Stage 3, and already rolled out in Firefox. I can’t wait to be done with JS’s Date forever.

I agree, except that we are legally not allowed to control the software on our phones in lots of cases. Notifications, ads, upgrades, etc. are all controlled by the manufacturer and it’s illegal to override their software on the device you own.

Add to that that specific pieces of software are becoming increasingly necessary to function in society, and you start to see that it’s not really a matter of individual choice, anymore than people shopping at walmart can be blamed for buying processed, sugary foods when that’s 90% of what walmart stocks (And all they promote), and walmart is the only affordable option in their community.

Congratulations, you’ve illustrated the difference between syntax and semantics. But any competent compiler also handles semantics (just in a separate phase of compilation), because that’s necessary for any useful conversion to machine code, not to mention optimizations.

Except an LLM has no way to roll anything random, it will just predict the most likely text for a random roll, which isn’t remotely the same thing.

I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.

Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.

My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.

For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.

For anyone interested in learning more about bloom filters, this is a technical but extremely accessible and easy to follow introduction to them, including some excellent interactive visualizations: https://samwho.dev/bloom-filters/

It’s not just a proposal, it’s already fully defined and almost completely implemented - I believe they’re just waiting on a standards update from ISO for time zone stuff.

I think they’re referring to the fact that Edge runs on the Chromium engine which, as the name implies, is a Google product.

Flatpak is definitely the way to go if you’re still getting started in your Linux journey.

The reason that flatpak apps are typically more up to date is because they are most often managed by the actual developer of the app. In contrast, the default apps in the Pop shop (which are deb packages, but that’s not super important) are managed and updated by popos itself (and/or Ubuntu/Debian that popos is built on), which is why they’re often slower to update. The developer has little to no day of when these packages are updated, and usually most packages are frozen between major releases of the distro.

This is, in part, a correlation. To some extent, compiled Rust is fast because compiling Rust is slow. That is, Rust does a lot of work (static analysis) at compile time so that the runtime binary is as fast as possible.