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redcannon218

23 karma · joined December 9, 2024

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redcannon218··on Rust is a great fit for the agentic era
TL;DR: Programming agents need strong typing and compiler-enforced correctness to get feedback.
redcannon218··on Why I Use a Dumbphone in 2025 (and Why You Should Too)
The claims about privacy are, at best, dubious.

While it's true that there are less opportunities to track you through leaky / malicious apps, "dumbphones" remain, well, phones, with data retention laws in almost all countries in the world (and the subsequent leaks / hacks, see the recent Salt typhoon events for a good example) plus extra vulnerabilities due to poorly-developed Operating Systems.

redcannon218··on AES and ChaCha
My benchmarks are not public, but on AMD EPYC processors ChaCha12 (5 GB / s) is faster than hardware-accelerated AES-256-GCM (3.5 GB / s).

Unfortunately, this is comparing apples to oranges because AES-256-GCM is authenticated, so you will need a MAC with ChaCha12 (usually Poly1305) which finally makes ChaCha12 in AEAD mode slower than AES-256-GCM.

But the real question is: What is fast enough?

I believe that between 1 and 2 GB / s per core for an AEAD is fast enough as I/O will be your bottleneck way before that.

This is why I will always favor a ChaCha20/ChaCha12-based AEAD over AES and its many footguns.

redcannon218··on Evolving Scala
I need to hash something, one way or another, in virtually 100% of my projects. Where is SHA-256 in the standard library?
redcannon218··on Evolving Scala
But Go has proven that the ecosystem is way more important than the language.

It's time to shift priorities.

redcannon218··on Evolving Scala
Please see my edit
redcannon218··on Evolving Scala
Unfortunately Rust is making the exact same mistake.

Edit: It focuses too much on the language instead of the ecosystem.

redcannon218··on Pixel 9a: The latest A-series phone with Google AI smarts at an unbeatable value
Serious question: does "AI" in a product description make you want to buy it more, or less?