AlienRobot

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt" is a reason why people don't open-source more often.

I don't like Discourse because it's not paged. Infinite scrolling a thread just feels weird.

Keeping a PC running when you aren't doing anything with it sounds like a waste of electricity to me.

Electricity also wears down electronic components, so I think it also shortens the lifespan of your PC parts.

There are two kinds of people.

1. People who have no idea what decentralized is.

2. People who would try to figure exactly how decentralized something is.

If you are the latter, you would instantly question the data model of Bluesky and of Mastodon as well. If you are the former then that just sounds like a buzzword.

I think letting anyone make any TLD is a bigger mistake.

.zip .pdf .mp3

I'd like to thank Caribbean island of Anguilla for having a ccTLD that helps identify which websites aren't worth your time in one quick look.

Do you really expect us to read the terms of service of the service we use?!

I think they mean it's part of the standard library, instead of being a separate library.

You mean they went to the codex bug tracker, on github, and they don't know how to use git?

Well that is kind of ironic, isn't it?

Yeah, but you could also kill that business model without any legislation by simply... not visiting those websites.

You need to be more realist.

"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise"

Is 99.9% of all websites. So long as websites don't sell things, they will be having ads.

This includes Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Imgur, TikTok, Twitch, Youtube, etc. I think even Steam and other game platforms would fall into this category despite the fact they make money selling products. Naturally search engines also fall into this category.

Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.

It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead. In fact, most people don't want to go through the trouble of maintaining their own blog, dealing with spam, hosting, hacking attempts, software updates, etc., when they can just use tumblr and pin the responsibility on the platform anytime something bad happens.

It's really absurd that we've boiled the frog until "ads in smart TVs UIs are normal" and now the goalpost was moved to "recording the consumer to show more ads"

It used to be that real life was anonymous, then people started pointing cameras to everyone in public all the time. Now they want to deanonimize communications you make from inside your private residence.

Eventually you'll get a chip implanted in your brain that just sends everything you see and hear to the cloud. Because why not? Privacy doesn't matter anyway!

If service A asks you for a photo of your ID/face to confirm age

and service B asks for a photo of your ID/face to give you access to your account

that's basically using the same password in two places except you will never be able to rotate your password.

lol. And passwords must be hashed, right?

How is the public supposed to know how the black box of an online service handles their data?

That's not what I mean...

There is a mountain of code written in C that you can simply include in Zig without a wrapper dependency and without having to create the wrapper yourself.

With Zig, I can just import SDL.h and use it without writing a binding.

Can I do that in C3 or Odin?

I wonder if packed union also got/will get the same "logical bits" treatment?

To me it makes sense. If you don't know what endianness is, it doesn't make sense that a program you write in one programming language works for one target but doesn't work for the other.

I think endianness is the footgun that Zig is solving, rather than Zig being the one introducing a footgun when you deal with endianness.

I think it's because if it was someone else (e.g. Epic), they would have locked down the hardware and sold it like a console or smartphone where you can only install things from their app store.

Yes, but if I remember correctly I ran into some issues with it. It's been a long time ago so I don't remember what those issues were.

That just means it's poorly designed. There has to be a way to design this in such way it works.

Flatpak is probably the worst way to "have" this possible. It's completely opaque to both app and user. If you ever tried to run an .exe through flatpak'd bottles, you'll run into an issue where .dll's aren't found because you didn't install flatseal first to configure permissions. That's not operating-system level integration. That is actually very poor design that a user requires a separate app (flatseal) to configure how the sandbox works.

I was thinking about desktop OS's, actually.

You don't need to use that Windows API. You can just access any file you want. There is no reason a music player, for example, needs to access ~/Pictures. An arbitrary program requiring access to all your files is a huge red flag, but it's a red flag that users aren't allowed to see. Proper filesystem permissions would fix that.

One thing I miss from Windows is the tablet driver GUI. "cinnamon-settings wacom" doesn't let me map buttons to keys (important for software like FireAlpaca, which pans with the space key instead of supporting the middle mouse button like everybody else in the planet), and it also doesn't let me remap the tablet area to arbitrary screen coordinates. These are things I could do on Windows that I can't do through the GUI.

I wrote a Python script to do it using xsetwacom, but I don't know if it would work for anybody else. I don't know if xsetwacom is only for wacom tablets, or if xsetwacom is only for X11 (I'm not on Wayland yet).

Chromium has around the same market share as Windows, so at this point I feel people are targeting it as a web application development platform just as people target Windows.

I wish we had this in the operating system. It would solve an immense number of risks such as data deletion from bugs and even ransomware.

I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems.

Media only gives you super-hearing.

A situation in which a string is manipulated with buggy code that can remove the sentinel, e.g. the program uses strncpy, there is a bug in how it uses it, the hacker exploits the bug.

By contrast it's pretty unlikely for buggy code to mess the length. Add an element? +1. Remove an element? -1. Number of elements larger than capacity? Allocate a new array. Not much room for error.

That can't be true. If you have an array of pointers it can be terminated in NULL. But an array of integers can't have a NULL value, since NULL would probably be just 0 which is a normal integer.

The null in a linked list is the null in the .next field, right? That's the way you would implemented linked lists independent of language. It's not the .value that is null.

A string is an array of characters (well, for characters representable in one byte at least) that has a specific value to represent the end of string.

It would be like if Int::MAX was reduced by 1 to make space for an Int:NUL constant that represented the end of an integer array. Or if you were creating your own ENUM, let's say for NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, and you added a fifth enumeration called Direction.NUL for use in arrays.

>The problem now doubles with the introduction of UTF-8. Your string size is in bytes and you need to track characters separately.

That isn't really a problem.

The problem with null-terminated strings is specifically what happens when you reach the end of the allocated array and there ISN'T a NULL character.

Every string function is designed to keep going until it finds the NULL character, so if a hacker gets rid of the NULL character, he can exploit pretty much any standard string manipulation function being used elsewhere in the program to manipulate whatever memory comes AFTER the string data structure.

No other data structure works like this. You can't mess this up in an array, because no function that manipulates arrays is just going to keep going until there is a null. That would be stupid because it would require users of the function to add a NULL to the end of their arrays before passing it to the function, so instead we just pass the size of the array to everything. Strings are the only data structure that assume there will be a NULL at end.

By the way, I read once that if you use UTF-32 every code point will be 4 bytes, constantly, but even then a single code point isn't necessarily a single character. Text is just complicated.

At least it wasn't a crypto scam.