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DSMan195276

2,634 karma · joined August 9, 2013

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DSMan195276··on The hand-drawn hits that Hollywood isn't making
IMO the article is being a little unfair to being highly misleading by only talking about box-office numbers, they're a much more complicated discussion than the article treats them (especially so since it includes a number of pandemic years). Additionally it's ignoring the reason _why_ CG is so popular and there's so many flops - you can make then a lot quicker than hand-drawn animation.

Tons of hugely successful CG movies came out in the past few years that are not mentioned in the article (Inside Out 2, Frozen 2, Mario movie, Moana 2, Spider-man, etc.) - all of those movies had a higher box-office gross than every hand-drawn animated movie ever except for the Lion King in '94. I'm not saying they're _better_, but rather that box office numbers aren't a great reason to argue for hand-drawn animation, I don't think Disney and other companies are very concerned about the flops when the successes rake in so much money.

DSMan195276··on Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s
"Operating system" has no real technical definition, it's a term that doesn't cleanly map to all the stuff we call "operating systems" today. Even the "technical" definition you gave is murky, that definition does not care _where_ the software is running. It easily encompass software running outside of the Linux kernel, much of it is expected to be there for the system to function properly and support various kinds of programs.

This thing is distributed as an installable OS image and has pretty specialized software for make it manage your programs and data in a pretty specific way, IMO that's good enough to call it an operating system.

DSMan195276··on Memory is slow, Disk is fast – Part 1
It costs more because it's less dense than DRAM - the same transistor count that produces 2GB of DRAM can only fit a fraction of that in SRAM because it's 6 transistors per SRAM cell vs. 1 + capacitor for a DRAM cell.

Power usage is also generally worse since the SRAM cells use continuous power to hold their state, while DRAM cells only use power during read/write/refresh (relying on the caps to hold their charge for a short time while not actively powered).

DSMan195276··on Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s
As an alternative you can still buy small flash drives in bulk (Amazon has listings of 128MB ones for less than a dollar per drive). They don't look as good as SD cards on their own but you could rip out the internals and place them in 3d printed enclosures, which could be an even better result.

I would assume the quality of those things is not great, but the design of this system means they're basically read-only so that should hopefully help them survive longer.

DSMan195276··on How we rooted Copilot
IMO if they truly don't consider it dangerous then they shouldn't have considered it a vulnerability at all, just a non-security bug. Labeling it a moderate vuln and not paying just seems like a bad middle ground to me, as though they haven't really decided if restricted root permissions is part of the security model or not.
DSMan195276··on How we rooted Copilot
The problem is that you're encouraging people to keep stuff like this to themselves until they can use it to perform an exploit that they'd get paid for, which is the opposite of what Microsoft wants - they'd much rather you report it now so that if an exploit does get found that requires root they would potentially be protected.

The simple question for Microsoft to answer is - does it matter to them if attackers have root access on the container? If the answer is yes then the bug bounty for root access should at least pay something to encourage reporting. If the answer is no then this shouldn't have been marked as a vulnerability because root access is not considered a security issue.

DSMan195276··on Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration
The real myth here is that the BIOS did nothing more than load 512 bytes and start executing. It was already doing tons of stuff to configure hardware and provide information to OSs well before UEFI came along.
DSMan195276··on Zorin OS
I would add - I don't mind them describing it like that, the questionable part is how the advertising heavily implies that to get access to that software you have to buy the "Pro" version. The software is of course free and available to install on the "non-pro" version, it just doesn't get installed during installation, and they're definitely betting on people not knowing this detail and buying "Pro" to get the listed software.
DSMan195276··on Some bits on malloc(0) in C being allowed to return NULL
Something separate that occurred to me - many systems have empty sections of address space, those addresses can't back `malloc(1)` allocations but they could back `malloc(0)` allocations with a unique address. I doubt any C runtime out there will actually do that, but in theory it could be done.
DSMan195276··on Some bits on malloc(0) in C being allowed to return NULL
> allocating a few bytes that weren't asked for.

FWIW the alignment guarantees of `malloc()` mean it often will have to allocate more than you ask for (before C23 anyway). You can't 'legally' use this space, but `malloc()` also can't repurpose it for other allocations because it's not suitably aligned.

That said I still agree it's a hack compared to just using `malloc(1)` for this purpose, it's well-defined and functionally equivalent if you're looking for a unique address. The fact that you don't know what `malloc(0)` is going to do makes it pretty useless anyway.

DSMan195276··on Microsoft Edit
Agree 100%, that's the biggest difference I feel whenever I'm doing remote Powershell vs. ssh, it always feels like a struggle just to make basic file modifications.
DSMan195276··on Was laid off from Microsoft after 23 years, and I'm still going into the office
The title is a bait and switch, he lives in Denmark where he gets 6 months notice and he's still getting paid.
DSMan195276··on Bruteforcing the phone number of any Google user
> You designed something inherently insecure.

That describes most/all software older than a decade with no updates applied. How many libraries was Google Reader using that now have known vulns? I'm guessing it's more than zero.

This is the same logic as "just don't write bugs", if it was that easy everybody would already be doing it.

DSMan195276··on What was Radiant AI, anyway?
I wasn't making a comparison, I was just commenting on procedural generation in general. It clearly can be fun and interesting if done well since some games have managed to achieve that.

Whether it's possible to do well in the kind of game Starfield is I don't know, I never claimed it was. I even said as much in the last line of my comment, that perhaps the kind of game Starfield is makes this approach not work.

DSMan195276··on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs
> If the restaurant buys e.g. a fancy oven or a delivery truck, it can't expense 100% of that cost in year 1, it has to spread that cost over the lifetime of the oven or truck.

The difference of course is that you'll have a truck or oven that can be sold. If you could count the full value in the first year then you could sell and buy one each year to reduce your taxes without actually changing anything.

Thus if we want to go that route for software the salary of the R&D employees should be counted against the value of the software they created (As in, the value were it to be sold wholesale to another company). The time spent by the employees is not an asset, once you pay the employees for their time it's gone even if they generated nothing of value. The actual value is that of the software, but that's obviously not easily assigned a value.

DSMan195276··on What was Radiant AI, anyway?
> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them.

I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.

I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things. Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted my time by just wandering around a map.

Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft is, probably not so much for Starfield.

DSMan195276··on "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
IMO the problem is that, at least right now, the AI can't examine the patient itself, it has to be fed information from the doctor. This step means bad doctors are likely to provide the AI with bad information and reduce it's effectiveness (or cause the AI to re-enforce the biases of the doctor by only feeding it the information they see as relevant).
DSMan195276··on Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?
Smelling like pot in a park doesn't mean you smoked in that park though, you can walk through a park smelling like cigarettes too.
DSMan195276··on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups
To add on to this, the issue in the article is really more about one-way tickets than single passenger, if you buy a round-trip ticket for that flight the difference in price goes away. In fact, a single passenger round-trip ticket that includes the flight in the article is cheaper than buying the one-way ticket on its own (as in, both tickets _together_ are less than the one-way, it's cheaper to buy the round-trip and skip the return flight). Google suggests that one-way tickets get uniquely screwed because they're often used for business-related travel, but I don't really see anything definitive.

You can also get screwed in the other direction where groups are more expensive - airlines will sometimes bump every ticket in a group to a higher fare level even if they still list one or two tickets at a cheaper price for smaller groups.

DSMan195276··on In the Network of the Conclav: How we "guessed" the Pope using network science
I would add, this wasn't really a prediction anyway, they listed 14 total people across three separate top 5 lists. That's a pretty sizeable chunk of the total people who had a chance of being elected pope and they didn't try to make a unified list or assign percentages of getting elected.
DSMan195276··on I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
Well to be fair, that's not the full license notice, that's only the last paragraph. There should a couple more above that one and the first paragraph says the version of GPL in use. That said I think the license notice is also just a suggested one, it's not required that you use that _exact_ text.
DSMan195276··on Why Does My eBPF Program Work on One Kernel but Fail on Another?
Well from a certain POV it's like stabilizing APIs internal to your application - nobody else should be calling them so "stabilizing" them just creates unnecessary maintenance work. Obviously in practice certain things like eBPF or externally-maintained drivers can break this model, but then they don't really want people doing those things vs. merging code into the kernel.
DSMan195276··on Tesla created secret team to suppress driving range complaints (2023)
The difference is that I can fill my gas tank to 100% in a few minutes almost anywhere, no planning is necessary.
DSMan195276··on How to distrust a CA without any certificate errors
To me that's an odd position to take, ultimately if the user is using Mozilla's root CA list then they're trusting Mozilla to determine which certs should be valid. If non-browser programs using the list are trusting certs that Mozilla says shouldn't be trusted then that's not a good result.

Now of course the issue is that the information can't be encoded into the bundle, but I'm saying that's a bug and not a feature.

DSMan195276··on Gig workers worked more but earned less in 2024: study
If you have 1000 people making $1 along with one person making $1000, the average is about $2 - so 99.9% of people are making less than the average.
DSMan195276··on Tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO
The catch is that it costs them more to acquire the laptops so (in theory) they can't acquire as many of them to sell if they start from the same amount of money. Which is ok on the surface, but makes them a worse investment because they return less money back to you for the same amount put in.

Ex. If they only have $1M to spend, the tariffs mean they can only buy ~1800 laptops to sell instead of 2000, so if the profit of $500 stayed the same then the company is making less money than it did before. If they instead bump the margin for each laptop to $550 then they make the same amount of money as before even though they're selling less laptops.

Of course in an actual version it's messier because the math doesn't work out that cleanly. If it costs $800 to make a laptop you sell for $1000 then it now costs 880 with a 10% tariff. To keep the 20% margin the new price would be $1056, only a 5% increase in the final price.

DSMan195276··on Rust kernel policy
IMO you're comparing apples and oranges. The GNU C extensions are 'stable' when using GCC, they're just not part of the regular C language, plenty of them are still in wide use in the kernel. Unstable Rust features in comparison are explicitly in a state where they could be changed/broken or removed in any later release.
DSMan195276··on Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel
I'll bite and play devils advocate here - both of those are not a solution to his problem. Ultimately he's the maintainer and he gets the emails if X driver is broken, so because of that he doesn't want to rely on another group to maintain the 'Rust half' of his part of the code. It's also a system that works until it doesn't, the biggest rule of the kernel is no breaking userspace - at some point in the future it won't matter if it's his C changes breaking the Rust drivers, it's still his changes that have to be rolled back if the Rust code isn't updated.

And to clarify I'm not saying he's right or wrong or acting good or bad. I have however expected R4L to ultimately fall apart because of this exact issue, the maintainers have never been on board with maintaining Rust code and that hasn't changed. While that remains the case the project is going to be stuck at a wall - to the point that if they're confident they can maintain the Rust code themselves they should just fork it and do that. If it works well enough they'll eventually be too popular to ignore with people choosing to write their new modules in Rust instead.

DSMan195276··on The New York Times Has Spent $10.8M in Its Legal Battle with OpenAI So Far
They're missing my point because I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm saying that it's messy and things like the required prompt may sway the judge and/or jury one way or the other. If you provide ChatGPT an entire copyrighted text in the prompt and then go "ah-ha, the response violated my copyright", a judge and/or jury probably won't be very impressed with you. If instead you just ask ChatGPT "please produce chapter 1 of my latest book" and it does, then ChatGPT is not looking so great.
DSMan195276··on The New York Times Has Spent $10.8M in Its Legal Battle with OpenAI So Far
So if I go on ChatGPT, copy in a chapter from a book and then ask it to repeat the chapter back to me, is ChatGPT violating the copyright of the book I just fed it?
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