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caspper69

728 karma · joined July 29, 2018

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caspper69··on MartyPC is a cross-platform emulator of early PCs written in Rust
I write Rust code. I don’t mind it. But the truth is, I use very little of the language.

I visit the Discord, and I see all the crazy overcomplicated shit these people are writing.

If I had to try and make heads or tails of some of that shit I’d go crazy.

I actually think some of it is actual trolling by Rust itself.

And yes, the people are toxic. It’s like they really believe C and C++ and everyone else did literally everything wrong. And some of their justifications are seriously weak sauce.

And remember, I like Rust. At least the parts I use. But it’s easily going to eclipse C++ in complexity if it continues the way it has been operating.

caspper69··on Zig’s io.threaded is neat
The breaking changes version to version. Zig tends to be quite liberal about moving forward, as should be expected at its version level. It simply outpaces the llms datasets.
caspper69··on Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong
I feel like this article means well, but assembly or machine level types are not the same. Sure, the assembler and cpu will execute the instruction with the given type, but the next instruction can use a different instruction with different types and no one will be any the wiser. So one operation’s uint64 is another operation’s int64.

The type data in assembly doesn’t live with the data itself, nor are types for data stored anywhere.

I get the point but I think it just misses the mark.

caspper69··on Setting Up a New Windows Laptop in 2026
Step 1: download windows media tool

Step 2: create iso with said tool

Step 3: use rufus to make iso into bootable usb with the installation options you want

Step 4: reformat & install

Step 5: Drivers

Step 6: chrome and/or firefox

Step 7: o365

???

Profit

caspper69··on I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
There’s a reason people say don’t meet your heroes.

No matter how elevated they are in your mind, they’re still just people. One pants leg at a time and all.

caspper69··on Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time
Ah yes, the lulz, the great American pastime.
caspper69··on Squillions: How money laundering won
Yes, duffel bags full.

But it doesn't take too many cash purchases that are not inline with your tax returns before somebody is going to start snooping around.

edit: although sometimes, a lot longer than one might expect.

caspper69··on What's gonna happen to software engineers?
Maybe not the actual quality, but if I put a $50k Rolex on the table and a $50 Timex, 98/100 people will choose the Rolex, right or wrong.
caspper69··on What's gonna happen to software engineers?
Wow. At least I know who downvoted me.

Maybe you should take a step back and realize that sofware developers themselves are not the primary purchasers of most software. The average joe or jane purchaser doesn't have some magical AI slop detector, especially if the UI is well done.

caspper69··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
One of my favorite phrases is “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Even if all signs point to impending doom, at the end of the day if people are still buying, stocks will hold their value.

caspper69··on What's gonna happen to software engineers?
The difference, and I think we as an industry will have to reconcile this depending on how advanced llms get, is that you don’t see the quality in handmade code like you do in a high end watch or a luxury automobile or appliance. The veneer might be identical. It’s going to be tough to convince people that handmade software has added value or quality over slop. I still believe it does right now, but that might not always be true. And this is an industry that has pumped out a lot of sloppy code for decades, even before it was actual slop.
caspper69··on Improving C# Memory Safety
Yes, many people instinctively stay away from anything microsoft (except github, typescript and npm). But the stack is solid. I’m always reminded of Stack Overflow and how they built on asp.net and like 7 servers and it scaled very well for years.

Everyone has what they like and what they’re familiar with, and for better or worse, especially for startups it’s rarely .net. But I couldn’t imagine e.g. using js instead on the back end, but that’s just me.

caspper69··on Improving C# Memory Safety
They are aligning more closely with the Rust 2024 model for unsafety, which requires inner annotations at the point of unsafety in addition to notation of the function (unless it is the safe-unsafe boundary) plus it imposes a requirement for a SAFETY doc notation for describing the specific invariants the caller must enforce to uphold the safety guarantees. Not terribly onerous in my opinion. I maintain a few native library wrappers on nuget, so I will have to do some updates around IntPtr usage, but this doesn’t seem like it will be terribly painful in my case. Thankfully I don’t do much marshalling. Plus you get a nifty badge on nuget for making your library safe.

The blurb toward the end about Rent/return makes me a bit nervous though. They say they’re not going full borrow checker, but rent at least sounds an awful lot like borrow to me. Details were basically non-existent though.

I guess I wonder what the end game is here though. The more they make C# like Rust with a GC, the less incentive people have to use C# except maybe to support legacy work. I am still far more comfortable in C# than Rust, and I believe C# is superior for e.g. web, but over time this advantage could be lessened quite a bit as the Rust ecosystem continues to grow.

caspper69··on Google changes its search box
It's been over for years. Google scares companies into bidding against each other just to be seen. It's a complete farce & a racket. It's the pay to play web.
caspper69··on Microsoft Exchange, Windows 11 hacked on second day of Pwn2Own
That's ironic given the active 0-day exploits going on in the wild right now: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/05/15/exploited-exc...
caspper69··on Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
OS Development has halted in 1970 at this point. I know everybody loves Unix, but it has the same problem as Windows- namely that anything you run under your user context has access to your whole user context. And it will continue to be a scourge until/if we ever figure out how to make capabilities ergonomic. I've been racking my brain for 30 years to try and do it, but they just make certain things very painful.
caspper69··on Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
They still prioritize developers, look at .NET Core, Typescript, NPM, Github (lol), but the problem is that they're not Windows exclusive enclaves anymore. In fact, I'd bet most people now deploy (and probably develop) .NET Core on non-Windows machines.
caspper69··on Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
What good does A/B testing do if both options are shit?
caspper69··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
I share the sentiment unless you're working in an area where Python's library ecosystem is simply the better choice.

When I vibe, it's C# all the way. Not a popular opinion on HN, but the LLMs are trained heavily on the language and are very, very good at it, plus with the 1-file-per-class organization, it can stay pretty clean. I mean, v10 LTS was just released, with all kinds of new language features, EFCore is still the best ORM I've ever used, with full support for SQLite, Postgres, MySql, etc. It just makes writing and reviewing code a pleasure. And the LLMs don't f*ck it up.

caspper69··on The surprisingly complex journey to text-selectable client-side generated PDFs
You would think that, but PDF is not really a format for text. It's a format that describes typography and graphics layout & formatting. It's not uncommon for a text pdf to not contain all of the text it renders (due to ligatures).
caspper69··on CPanel and WHM Authentication Bypass – CVE-2026-41940
I think you misunderstood. My comment was meant to imply that people would be extra careful about all new software for a while. I know cpanel isn't unproven. It's been around forever.
caspper69··on CPanel and WHM Authentication Bypass – CVE-2026-41940
This flurry of activity is certainly going to have people be more apprehensive about unproven software that may be of dubious prominence. My question amid all of this is who else knew about these long-standing vulnerabilities?
caspper69··on I quit drinking for a year
I quit for 9 years and went back to drinking. I do it once every few months now, just to have a beer or three with old friends. But I didn't get dragged back in, in fact, it's been 2 months since I drank again. Just had to learn to live my life without it.
caspper69··on Inverting the Xorshift128 random number generator
I agree. .NET is the opposite of Go. Calls to System.Random use Xoshiro128++ under the hood (as of .NET 6 I believe). On the other hand, calls to RandomNumberGenerator.GetBytes() are cryptographically secure, using the Windows kernel cryptographic provider on Windows and /dev/urandom (chacha20) on Linux and arc4random_buf() on MacOS (which also uses chacha20 under the hood).

I ported around 20 RNGs to C# (all non-cs), and there are tons of uses for non-cryptographic RNGs, so I'm a little torn. I guess in modern development most people who need an RNG need it for crypto purposes (I would guess salts, keys and nonces mostly), but I'd hate to see all the Xoshiros, Mersenne Twisters, PCGs, and MWCs, etc. go the way of the dodo simply because they are not deemed fit for crypto purposes. Games, simulations, non-cryptographic hashes all need deterministic and high performance RNGs, and don't need all of the cryptographic guarantees.

To top it off, there is no standard definition of what makes an RNG cryptographically secure, so it's a slightly loaded question anyway. Everything I've read says an algo needs the following properties: forward secrecy (unable to guess future outputs given the current state), backward secrecy (if I know current outputs, I shouldn't be able to recover previous internal state or previous outputs), and the output must be indistinguishable from true random bits, even with a chosen-input attack. This is where I politely defer to the expert mathematicians and cryptographers, because I'm not equipped to perform such an analysis.

I can understand why things have developed this way though- people have needed random numbers far longer than they've needed cryptographically secure random numbers, so the default is the non-cryptographically secure variant. A language created tomorrow would likely follow in Go's footsteps and default to the cryptographically secure.

caspper69··on Does OLAP Need an ORM
LINQ? Just throwing it out there; obviously not everybody can or wants to run a C#/.NET stack, but entity framework (core) is about as close as you can get to the perl and regex integration. I think Ruby on Rails gets there too, but I'm not a RoR guy, so I can't comment.
caspper69··on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
This is disappointing. 4o has been performing great for me, and now I see I only have access to the 5-level models. Already it's not as good. More verbose with technical wording, but it adds very little to what I'm using GPT for.
caspper69··on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
I hear this a lot, and I do seem to remember back when I first got Windows 11 I might have seen something stupid like Candy Crush, but I'll be honest, I literally never see ads anywhere in the OS. Truth be told I hardly ever use the start menu since they ruined it, but this complaint about ads everywhere make it sound like a typical webpage. I just don't see it. Maybe because I'm on Win11 Pro?
caspper69··on Show HN: My self-written hobby OS is finally running on my vintage IBM ThinkPad
Nice job. Impressive.
caspper69··on The problem with "vibe coding"
If I had to guess, probably a couple hundred lines a day, maybe more if I get in a groove or have a deadline.

But with an LLM, that number goes to about 500 or so, 200 of which are real code and not definitions of some kind. Truthfully, that’s where the LLMs shine. I have this enum with 50 variants, and need to build a dictionary (with further constraints and more complex objects). That shit takes forever even with cut & paste, unless you code with code, and those one-offs aren’t my cup of tea anymore.

caspper69··on The problem with "vibe coding"
I am in the middle of my third AI assisted project. I disagree ~90%.

If you prompt an LLM like an architect and feed it code rather than expecting it to write your code, both ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet do a great job. Do they mess up? Regularly. But the key is to guide the LLM and not let the LLM guide you, otherwise you'll end up in purgatory.

It takes some time to get used to what types of prompts work. Remember, LLMs are just tools; used in a naive way, they can be a drain, but used effectively they can be great. The typing speed alone is something I could never match.

But just like anything, you have to know what you're doing. Don't go slapping together a bunch of source files that they spit out. Be specific, be firm, tell it what to review first, what's important and what is not. Mention specific algorithms. Detail exactly how you want something to fit together, or describe shortcomings or pitfalls. I'll be damned if they don't get it most of the time.

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