ChrisSD

On the "no comments" option:

> However, you won't be able to build a community with people interacting with one another.

I think that building a community and writing articles are different skill sets. Some very successful bloggers ("influencers" in modern slang) are able to do both but that's not the norm for most individuals.

Sure, it's fine when you're small and it's just a few people with similar interests. But once your audience starts to grow it can be really hard work to maintain a healthy community.

It's funny because of the number of physicists who loudly proclaim philosophy is either dead or at least useless (while also extolling the virtues of their own philosophy of science, with bonus points for mangling Popper).

You could submit a PR to their repo.

The fallacy is a favourite of the news media

"In the studio today we have someone who has been studying this topic at a reputable institution for decades. And to argue a different side we have someone who only learned about this topic ten minutes ago but nonetheless can be relied upon to have strong contrary opinions, no matter the subject."

Of course the reputable person could be wrong but listening to the guy spouting BS is not going to help discern the truth, which is almost certainly not anywhere in whatever "middle" was conjured up by the BS.

I would be cautions of claiming performance improvements without the benchmarks to back it up. The compiler is often very good at figuring out if a length is constant and optimizing appropriately. I suspect it'd be able to do it in the simple examples given. But maybe I'm wrong!

Admittedly it can be nice not to be at the mercy of the optimizer. And getting compiler errors instead of runtime panics is a really great benefit. But I've just become slightly wary of big performance claims these days. Perhaps I'm just getting too cynical.

Nitpick: With memory (un)safety, a crash is the optimal outcome when something goes wrong. The real problem is when it doesn't crash and the program continues on thinking everything is fine...

I find typing `&&` to be annoyingly difficult. I have to hold shift and hunt around for the `7` key (and probably hit `6` or `8` first). Whereas I can type "and" without looking or even really thinking about it.

Powershell has stopped doing that in that newer version. I think since 6 or 7. On Windows 10 you do have to install it separately though.

That's US only right? So it won't affect most users?

True, however...

> assuming the hardware and kernel do support it

Assuming kernel support is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. To put it another way, why is a syscall better than any other stable ABI? If both kernel and stable library are distributed together then why should it be considered different?

> However, there is one big elephant in the room: right now, there are a lot of platforms that do not fully support static linking because you have to dynamically link libc or other system interfaces. The only one I know of that supports static linking is Linux.

> The ironic thing is that operating systems only supported a stable syscall ABI, rather than requiring programs to dynamically link system libraries, they would have less problems with ABI breaks.

> With a statically-linked binary, you can copy it to another machine with a Linux that supports all of the needed syscalls, and it will just run.

I think this is a misunderstanding. With Linux there is a stable interface at the kernel boundary. Other OSes have their stable interfaces in user space. The difference is mostly irrelevant in this context. In one case you dynamically call into the kernel, in another case you dynamically link a user space library. Either way the code you're calling isn't static but the interface is.

Ah, this takes me back. HLA really helped me to learn the basics back in the day. To be honest nowadays my assembly skills are mainly read-only. Usually when I'm debugging some weird crash or looking to see how something gets optimized (or doesn't). Still, I'm very glad to have learned.

If nothing else, it rid me of the notion that C is "portable assembly".

But preserving the old solution is also important. Sometimes we have to maintain old versions so it's very helpful to be able to look up answer from that time.

The compiler doesn't know if the program contains UB or not. How could it? Sure it can have warnings for some well know UB patterns but it can't catch them all. There are dedicated tools designed to detect UB which are not only very slow but fail to be totally effective (they have both false positive and negatives).

So the compiler simply ignores this possibility and optimizes assuming the input is a valid C program.

Hm, I think "ignoring the situation completely with unpredictable results" pretty much covers everything. It's how optimizations generally work. Each optimization pass simply assumes there's no UB in the input and will optimize based on that assumption.

Optimizing compilers don't intentionally break programs with UB, they just ignore the possibility... with very unpredictable results.

Btw, naming calling does not help you make your case, whatever that may be. Neither does watching a fictional TV show. I'm really not inclined to continue this if this is the level of discourse.

Can you show me one instance of activist shareholders of a major company ousting a CEO via filling the board with shareholder nominated directors? And no, "imagining" it happening isn't evidence of it happening.

Huh? Even the headline uses the word "urges" and the article doesn't say that Loeb can "require" anything. All that happened is that:

> Loeb sent a letter to Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek

And made it an open letter to get press attention. Loeb is doing as I said in my last comment. He tried to get sections of the press on side.

Sure they can raise their voice but they're limited in what they can achieve, legally speaking. Especially in large companies with a lot of shareholders. Unless the companies by-laws give shareholders undue influence, which would be unusual.

It's true that activists can make a nuisance of themselves if there are enough of them but they basically have to hope to get sections of the press on their side and for the company to care about that. The risk, of course, is the bad press ends up hurting their own investment.

In short, they have no legal recourse unless the company mislead them in some way.

> I understand that these public companies are required to act in the best interests of shareholders

This is not true. Public companies are only required to be honest with shareholders, no more or less. The shareholders are free to invest elsewhere if the don't like how a company is run, or to exercise whatever voting rights they bought with the shares.

Well if we're talking hypotheticals then why not add a volunteer healthcare system? After all, if we can somehow manage a volunteer police force, judiciary, etc all without government then it should be possible to add healthcare to the mix.

In any case, my point was the distinction made in the OP is silly. Any "right" is only a right in so far as it can actually be put into practice and that costs someone, somewhere "energy".

Say I try to force you to do something. Who is to stop me doing that? It requires government and taxation to run a justice system. I.e. a ton of "energy".

Good post! It's an interesting role reversal. Usually Unix is all about passing raw strings around whereas Windows is much more comfortable with passing structured data (see also COM).

I would warn that "CommandLineToArgvW" does not necessarily do what the C runtime does. They are different implementations.

Also your main problem in that post seems to have been in using `cmd.exe` and DOS utilities. The command prompt is all about mimicking DOS and not breaking .bat files from 80s and 90s. It's essentially stuck in stasis. Powershell is the actively developed shell (now on version 7).

If ESNI is fundamentally flawed, how is it better than nothing at all? At that point isn't it just cargo cult "protection"?

Ok but I'm uncertain how submitting a link equates to shoving anything down people's throats?

> By that measure we should all leave C and convert kernel to C++.

Microsoft actually did do that in the 90's.

Ok but Microsoft's 4-6 years of support for their hardware has nothing to do with Windows 11.

Microsoft has made no secret of how long its hardware support lasts. If anything, the total of six years is longer than the Surface average of ~5.

The Windows 11 announcement changes nothing in this regard.

Edit: The first gen Surface Studio was also about five years (2016 - 2021).

Fun fact: the Surface Studio 2 is fully supported until October 2, 2024 with no need to replace the OS!

Not bad for a niche device released in 2018.

You can disable all the ads. Though it does require digging through the settings.

Anti-malware software is almost universally terrible. My advice is to use the one that comes with Windows (aka Windows Defender). It's not perfect but it's the least worst option.

Whatever you do, don't use McAfee. And definitely don't use some other random software you found online no matter what the reviews say. This type of software is always incredibly invasive. There is almost zero reason to give this much power over your system to another third party.