grumpyprole

4,485 karma · joined June 30, 2015

grumpyproleon Was the Stone Age the Wood Age?

Works fine in Minecraft!

grumpyproleon Read Satya Nadella's Microsoft memo on putting security first

The UK has "Windows for Warships" (TM)

grumpyproleon Read Satya Nadella's Microsoft memo on putting security first

Yes, to put C++ first is not putting security first. So which is it?

grumpyproleon Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

Either the original M-Disc BDR marketing was bullsh*t or this response is. Whichever way it is, it doesn't make Verbatim look good.

grumpyproleon Zilog Z80 CPU – Modern, free and open source silicon clone

The 65C02 came out in 1983, so I think we've had plenty of time to document and workaround these issues!

grumpyproleon Everything Google's Python team were responsible for

One can only assume they want less Python in the company.

grumpyproleon Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

You'd have to ask Rob Pike. My own example of a brilliant language is Haskell, but it's not without problems.

grumpyproleon Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

> Go is an engineer’s language.

No, Ada/Spark is an example of a good engineers language. Go is a mediocre effort at best. Rob Pikes defence is that it was designed for junior Googlers who "aren't capable of understanding a brilliant language". Yes that's a real quote.

grumpyproleon Coroutines and effects

> They cannot add it in other people's libraries.

Does it matter that much how the internals of someone else's library are implemented? The tooling will tell you the types anyway and module interfaces will have type signatures.

> Python's ubiquity is unfortunate,

Well that we can agree on!

grumpyproleon Coroutines and effects

> but he made me realize that effect systems (like that found in Koka) and coroutines (like Rust’s async functions or generators) are in some ways isomorphic to one another.

It's a shame this was not explored before going down the Async route. I believe Effect handlers would have been a better fit for a systems language. IMHO a Monadic approach really needs something expressive like a functional language in order to work well.

grumpyproleon Coroutines and effects

Being hard to maintain and having no static types at all, did not stop Python rising to conqueror the world. Type inference allows us to at least give those users the succinctness they are used to, if not the semantics. Those who like explicit types can add as many annotations as they need in OCaml.

grumpyproleon Meta.ai Oh My

Amazing for fiction, sure.

grumpyproleon Meta.ai Oh My

> Worse than an encyclopedia

That's a gross understatement. I'd prefer something like "misinformation presented as truth"

grumpyproleon Meta.ai Oh My

Can we just be a bit more honest and describe these products appropriately? How about "state-of-the-art in Generative Artificial Bollocks".

grumpyproleon XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis

Interesting! So perhaps not really effective obfuscation after all!

grumpyproleon XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis

Those who caught it were indeed very clever. But the attacker did make mistakes, particularly the Valgrind issues and large performance regression. That ultimately is what raised suspicions.

grumpyproleon Vala Programming Language

Git gui is often in a separate package that you will need to install

grumpyproleon WinBtrfs – an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

Are you sure brtfs is supported in production by your commercial Linux distribution? I would be surprised if this is true. RedHat and Ubuntu do not support it.

grumpyproleon WinBtrfs – an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

Facebook presumably uses xz in production too and that is a hobby project (as we all recently found out). My understanding is that development of Btrfs was not sponsored by any company and was entirely a "community effort". It certainly would explain why it's perpetually unfinished.

grumpyproleon WinBtrfs – an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

Unfortunately you got what you payed for! :) No one in the Linux world appears to be seriously investing in engineering a robust and reliable filesystem, with e.g. correctness proofs. We have only hobby projects.

grumpyproleon WinBtrfs – an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

It's unfortunately a very common anecdote over the last 10 years (and a similar experience to my own). And to be honest, it's a red flag with how this critical system component is being developed.

grumpyproleon The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

Yes, although they have clearly not always been committed to the Mac Pro over the years, it still exists and the pricing is certainly workstation like.

grumpyproleon The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

> The market would have exploded

Absolutely, they could have been where Nvidia is now!

grumpyproleon A first look at Europe's alternative iPhone app stores

Well I guess there's more freedom in the US for Apple to do whatever they like!

grumpyproleon XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."

It baffles me why something as complex as xz is apparently needed. The code for bzip2 is tiny and would need a small fraction of one person to maintain.

grumpyproleon Xz: A microcosm of the interactions in open source projects

Are these customers or additional attackers who have never posted before and will never post again?

grumpyproleon Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise

I would start restoring trust by reverting all this guys commits. It's the best way to be sure.

grumpyproleon Type Inference Was a Mistake

> Type inference is only for variable bindings inside the function body. This is a lot more tractable.

Type inference inside a function body, is still type inference. Type inference gives us options and can sometimes improve readability. I find the title and premise of this article rather silly.

grumpyproleon Why choose async/await over threads?

> Hm, yes, but is that complexity really avoided if it's in the language/runtime?

Complexity can be abstracted away and this is still a worthwhile goal. Otherwise, we'd all still be studying Intel CPU documentation.

grumpyproleon How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

Korngold Symphony 1 in F# Major, the 2nd movement really sounds like John Williams when the horns come in.