pseudony

The trend is said to be declining wine- and alcohol consumption in general. But tariffs and US-Canada relations are also mentioned.

For my part, I loved a few Californian wines, but ever since Trump threatened to invade my country, I haven't bought a single bottle, and I never will.

I think that mirrors others here, those bottles seem to be going out of rotation entirely - and we generally mark whether a product comes from inside the EU now. Which, curiously, started when relations went sour.

Well they were sabotaging EUs goals of phasing out ICE vehicles. But at least this is something.

Still love you, Germany :)

Well, that would be avoidable if people applied the Mitchell and Webb test, asking themselves “are we the baddies?”.

If you know you are and don’t care, culture fit ! :)

For a number of years, pc publications around these parts actually shipped snapshots of websites on the bundled CD-ROM.

You couldn’t snapshot all, but you could definitely get a taste :)

Bye bye.

Would be great for us (Europeans).

On the other hand, were I an American interested in projecting power across the globe, not so much.

I wonder if it is more of this administration’s fantastic 5d chess. Amazing how quickly a bunch of infantile idiots can dismantle the incredibly powerful US empire of the 50’s and beyond.

But the US consumer is also quite self-centered. They will happily torch alliances and neighborly relations over perceived personal benefits. I doubt the US consumer would lift a finger for Taiwan. It will be a combination of weakness and indifference.

I think US fiscal policy and adventurism will manage this on its own. :)

And I could say the opposite. Anecdata, it isn’t really helpful.

Fact is still that wayland does some things better, and a bunch og other things worse.

I and presumably quite a few others with AMD AI or Apple Mac platforms are very impacted by this.

:)

It is very relevant and for a certain group of us, far more impactful to our work the next month(s) than any blog post could be.

Telling. Downvotes but actually no arguments. Fitting, because there are none.

Referring to a baseless prediction by Sam Altman that AI will become like electricity without any push-back? Who really thinks Sam is working toward that future?

He already worked to undo every early promise made (non-profit, open source models, strong governing board, strong ethics/alignment/security focus). He's flip-flopped on other things like first characterising Trump "an unprecedented threat to America", then contributing 1M USD to Trump's inaugural fund far exceeding his earlier political contributions. Lately OpenAI, under his supervision, has also been working with Anthropic to lobby regulators in Washington for restrictions on open weights models - why so if not to undermine a free market in favour of an oligopoly?

Beyond that, you have the simple fact that most of his personal wealth and very probably the fate of OpenAI hinges on AI inference NOT becoming an interchangeable commodity.

I mean.. Honestly. The naivete is downright astounding.

He also wanted to do a non-profit.

He even raised money on that premise.

He is a pathological liar, so is Dario. Don’t rely on the benevolence or truthfulness of these people.

They will say whatever is beneficial to say in the moment.

You can never please everyone , and some stdlibs can age like milk (see ocaml).

Having libraries allow the community to explore rather than saddling it with a bad default. See the number of http server frameworks etc.

The real solution here is not for the stdlib to become a black hole, swallowing up every half-way popular library a but rather for “rustaceans” to adopt a more security-conscious approach to writing programs- C programs typically have few and well-chosen dependencies. Some languages, like Odin, completely eschew package managers because they see the very real issues stemming from writing a program with scores or hundreds of dependencies.

Anyone have a larger collection of stories/anecdotes from the older days of computing?

Stories like this, and the Quake cd posted recently, are hugely interesting to me.

Another fata point for all those who sided with OpenAI and Anthrophics claims that they are somehow more responsible and careful and that others, especially those pursuing pesky open weights models are a danger.

Good thing my police doesn't look like this.

They look like hoodlums who walked through a prepper bazaar.

You mean Clojure, and he did. He is very enthusiastic about it, vastly preferring it to Java.

Fyi.

That math leaves out externalities when pricing gas, oil and coal. You may have heard of a few fires going on in Europe in addition to nuclear plants shutting down?

Beyond that, those resources are also the lifeline for a dictatorship in the east causing increase defense spending.

There definitely is no such thing as cheap gas, oil or coal for Europeans, all things considered

There are tools to generate bindings. They probably meant it as a marker of quality.

And in languages like zig or odin which are quite similar to C in many ways, writing bindings to C code really isn’t bad. It is so easy that I decided to write my own bindings in Odin to sqlite - bindings exist but it really was so very easy that I didn’t want to bring in a generator or another dependency.

I don’t know about that.

I think Libreoffice is easier to navigate than ribbon-era Office.

I think especially Gnome, but also Kde has better settings than Windows, which is spread across a new and a classical view (or more?).

I also think MacOS finder is worse than Windows/KDE/Gnome equivalents. When you strip so much away that people have to remember strange key combinations to jump/navigate to specific directories you have really gone too far.

And mobile UX (android and iphone) seem to me worse than any desktop system. Nothing is consistent (sharing data between apps), nothing ever seems settled (settings move around in the central settings apps every few releases).

We could argue in depth. Let me head it off a bit - taste is absolutely a thing, but consistency across releases is evidently a good thing unless you are constantly in a situation where your existing userbase is dwarfed by the prospective one. There’s a reason we hang on to diskette icons, don’t change from desktop to metro to ios style desktops every release and so on.

Last point: OSS software can be misguided, but it never seeks to bamboozle the user to make some corporate goal succeed. It won’t nefariously stuff files on a cloud or actively make it hard to export data or be incentivized to NOT interoperate with devices or programs shipped by competitors.

Honestly no need to read this drivel.

They have raised billions of dollars and are hoping to justify that by being a monopoly or oligopoly and their worst enemy- the pareto principle, is biting them in the ass. So now they’ll turn to policy to safeguard what they initially hoped could be achieved with money and technology.

It is that simple, they are the very definition of an unreliable source on this topic.

It is not universal. But imagine you enjoying a programming language (zig, odin, c, c++, …) and half the time some post/article about it comes up, 15% or so of the comments are “kindly” missionaries who just want to let you know how backwards you are, but that there is hope for you yet - as if anyone has been living under a rock solid enough to not hear about Rust.

Honestly, it gets tiresome and adds nothing useful to all these posts. And since those drive-by missionaries aren’t spreading the good word of ocaml/java/go/haskell but Rust - well, then eventually you tire of the Rust community. It has a missionary/redemption problem.

Yes. But what this discussion so often misses is.. So is the US.

The US needs military bases, it needs general market access, it wants to sell military equipment and so on and so on. The US is already being reckless with the relationship and diversification is underway, but how deep the split will be is in large part determined by how the US wants to behave going forward.

It's like a divorce, there aren't really any winners here (in terms of wealth, assets, ...). So it's a tightrope both need to walk, balancing each other's interests.

They have had many "good" ideas about one-sided deals of late - usually served with a "or else..." and then the "or else" happens anyway.

One wonders how many times that trick can be used. In fact, no need to wonder. Look around, the EU is busily spinning up arms industries, alternative payment platforms and expanding trade agreements with nearly everyone else.

Yes. The US can try. But while we haven't filed for divorce yet, we are definitely looking elsewhere.

> run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues

So. Rust evangelists ? :)

But yes, it is wild that people can honestly quote such drivel as evidence of the language and its philosophy being superior.

Each time I try to evaluate Rust, I do so on its own merits. Going online I am rapidly convinced that I don’t want to be in the same room as a large chunk of its userbase. Statements start to sound a bit like that one time I was dragged into a pentecostal meeting.

Sure thing :)

Just my opinion. It really depends. For systems- kind of software (low-level, DBs, file systems (also user-space)) no, I wouldn’t - if you manage memory with arenas and/or can plug in an allocator to tell you if you leaked memory (provided the codepath is triggered), I mostly get what I want with less mental overhead. Also, I very often want to interface with C libraries.

For games, again, I wouldn’t. I again strongly suspect I would and could organize my use of memory better.

I suspect Rust is best when you don’t want to interface with C code (except through bindings others wrote) and you’re maybe more doing applications development where C++ has also stood strong. I completely see how, theoretically, Rust can make a great language for an office suite, browser and so on.

That’s actually also when I tried Rust for a personal project. I wrote a desktop application and while I spoke to C code, I only did so through bindings others had written.

It was/is fine :) I still got a segfault bug though hehe.

Basically I liked Ocaml so I have huge appreciation for all that Rust tries to bring into the mainstream on that front. I am just not thinking that the borrow-checker makes it well placed to interop with C. It becomes much better for relatively isolated applications work.

- types rarely catch the interesting errors

- any GC'ed language can manage memory for you if you want

- My first rust project (a gui app in GTK) managed to segfault just fine in spite of Rust (no unsafe blocks on my part, not deliberately trying to break anything).

- I think the state of computer security has moved on still, we now rely on LLMs armed with various tools to pick apart and try to break our code AND to generate our code -- it is not at all obvious to me that banging your head against the borrow checker is a worthwhile tradeoff in this new world.

I program C for my day-job.

I see Rust encroaching in proposed transitions. It may even happen. That said, it is a poor match for it compared to something like Zig (or Odin). It's hard to make the new Rust code use existing allocator abstractions (so now you have two systems doling out memory, how do you reliably free composite objects with memory from both? How do they share?) and you increasingly have to either abandon any actual benefits of the borrow-checker, or invest increasingly heavily into sufficiently fat bindings to wrap your existing C/C++ in a way where the borrow-checker can assist you. That's before we consider the complexity of the language - I'd doubt a seasoned C programmer has much trouble deciphering Zig or Odin FFI bindings, but in the case of Rust? Yes, there is real friction.

Also if you really value predictable- and higher performance, being in more in control of memory allocations and cleanup is preferable. This is the direction both Zig and Odin cater to.

If you asked me what solves the most issues without adding too many new liabilities, I'd say Zig (or Odin). It would simply be much, much easier to transition a C codebase to either, and either would bring a much improved stdlib with pluggable allocators capable of leak-detection etc.

Look up a few comments, I do systems programming. I am aware, you are barking up the wrong tree, friend.

That said. You asked about C, which I use for my job. Most every large C code base end up abandoning the stdlib (such as it is) and inventing their own. Since they do, we aren’t as hurt by abandoning it as you would be in e.g. Rust - the rust stdlib is useful, the C stdlib is.. not great.

Once you abandon the stdlib, a likely first stop is writing your own routines for allocating and freeing memory. There are different approaches here, from glib’s or sqlite’s alloc and free routines to people writing an allocator abstraction (basically a struct with a vtable for allocating/realloc/free) and when you build your own “stdlib” around this abstraction, you are fine.

As for why you may want arenas vs other allocation strategies, that again deals with how often you are comfortable going across the user-space/kernel boundary and how clever you can be with your allocations or how much internal fragmentation you can accept.

As with all other stuff, it depends. But arenas are often great when you can assert that a series of objects share the same lifetime (death time, rather). In these cases, your amortize the syscall cost, have nearly no additional work to manage the memory (contrast to e.g. the complexity of jemalloc) and can free a series of objects in constant time.

Games ? Many have talked about it, but many also make their games work inside of Unity and so on, so, depends on the project.

My angle is systems programming, and there, it absolutely matter. If you are performance sensitive, then you try to avoid crossing the user-space -> kernel boundary more than you have to.

Eg, ask for lots of memory, manage with arenas.

Interestingly Odin and Zig both lean into this heavily. Rust went a different route but has tried later to bolt on pluggable allocators.

Having fun with this.

Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust).

Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and speaking to C from Odin is a pleasure.

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work.

To each their own. I had some fun with Rust too, but for me, Odin seems the most appealing :)