thyristan

> Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?

It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.

It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome.

It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basically do everything imaginable to site content. But with configurable permissions per site.

It should support saving the current state of a website including the exact rendering at that moment for archiving. It should also support annotations (like comments, emphasis, corrections) for that. And it should support diffs for those saved states.

And if you include "the browser" in that:

I want a properly usable bookmarks manager, not the crap that current browsers have. Every bookmark should include (optionally, but easily) the exact page state at the time of bookmarking. Same for history.

Sync everything to a configurable git repo: config, bookmarks, history, open windows/tabs, annotations and saved website snapshots.

I want easily usable mass operations, like "save me every PDF from this tab group", "save all the pictures and name them sometopic-somewebsite-date-id.jpg" or "print all tabs that started with this search and all sites visited from there as PDF printouts into the documentation folder".

I want the ability to watch a website for changes, so the browser visits in the background and notifies me if anything relevant is different (this could be a really hard thing to get right I guess...).

I want "network perspectives" (for lack of a better word): show me this website as it would look from my local address, over this VPN, with my language set to Portuguese, ..., easily switchable per tab.

I want completely configurable keybindings for everything, like vimperator, but also for the bookmark manager, settings, really everything.

And I want a pony ;)

Nope, not "anti-". The 5% are visible "bright" mass and energy. "Bright" meaning that we can see it through telescopes, by various wavelengths of light, particle emissions, gravity waves. The rest is "dark matter" and "dark energy", which just means that we see signs of it being there, because the bright matter around it behaves differently. But we don't directly see it in a telescope of any kind. Those "dark" things are stand-ins for our not understanding: Those could be real matter and energy that we just cannot see for some reason. Or those could be problems in our cosmological theories, like gravity working differently on large scales, the expansion of the universe being different, or physical constants changing over time. We just notice that things are off and that we should see more matter and more energy than we do.

Most theories that involve "dark matter" being ordinary matter like tons of neutron stars, huge clouds of dust, bazillions of asteroids or dark planets have been checked for and excluded. So if there were "dark matter" aliens, they really would be completely strange in that they aren't even made from the same kind of matter, but from maybe particles that we don't even know about. But if those hypothetical dark matter particles were capable of this kind of organisation, like clumping together into stars or planets, we would have probably seen those by now. So extremely strange, and improbable imho.

Btw. anti-matter is not "dark matter" in this sense, and dark matter being anti-matter was excluded very very early on by a simple observation: anti-matter and matter, when they come into contact, react in an annihilation reaction. E.g. an electron and anti-electron annihilate into two photons of a characteristic and exact 511keV energy. All other particles and their anti-particles also do this and exhibit their own characteristic energy. Any contact between a region of matter and region of anti-matter in space would radiate in these energy signatures, something which is very easy to detect. Dark matter is known to exist within galaxies, even within star systems, so this kind of contact zone would have to be there, and would be extremely visible to us.

Anti-energy doesn't exist in our current understanding of physics. Energy is always positive, and in quantum theories energy cannot even become zero, always slightly above zero.

Nuclear carpet bombing is only sensible for short-range attacks. On longer ranges, fast projectiles are the way to go, because you need to accelerate your weapon anyways. And by just putting all the energy and resources into acceleration, you do recycle the motion energy as destructive energy.

"Convicted" is a neutral, technical term meaning "a court found him guilty of that crime". "Condemned" can mean the same thing, with the added tone "the crime was particularly heinous or immoral, and he got served with a fitting, just and hard punishment". It includes a moral judgement about the crime and about the deservedness of the punishment. There are also meanings of "condemned" that are used in a religious context (so the same as above, but without the court of law) like "the sinner is condemned to hell for all eternity", "sisyphos was condemned to eternal useless labor". Metaphorically, it can also be used to describe someone without the power to exact punishment just telling off somebody for their immoral behaviour, like "the newspaper article condemned his doings as acts of barbarism".

The general difference is that "convicted" is neutral in tone. "Condemned" includes a particular tone, and religious and moral connotations, which might be unfitting in some cases.

Edit: Take the above with some grain of salt, might be at least incomplete, maybe somewhat wrong. After consulting the internet, I've found out that there are even more meanings and nuances, which I didn't know about. Sorry for being an arrogant non-native-speaker trying to score internet points ;)

There are no languages with good GUI frameworks except C, C++ and C#. All other bindings typically suck ass.

You may want some redundancy because needing both tapes increases the risk to your backup. You could just backup more often. You could use 4 locations, so you have redundand keystreams and redundant backup streams. But in general, storing the key stream follows the same necessities as storing the backup or some traditional encryption keys for a backup. But in general, your backup already is a redundancy, and you will usually do multiple backups in time intervals, so it really isn't that bad.

Btw, you really really need a fresh keystream for each and every backup. You will have as many keystream tapes as you have backup tapes. Re-using the OTP keystream enables a lot of attacks on OTP, e.g. by a simple chosen plaintext an attacker can get the keystream from the backup stream and then decrypt other backup streams with it. XORing similar backup streams also gives the attacker an idea which bits might have changed.

And there is a difference to storing things unencrypted in two locations: If an attacker, like some evil maid, steals a tape in one location, you just immediately destroy its corresponding tape in the other location. That way, the stolen tape will forever be useless to the attacker. Only an attacker that can steal a pair of corresponding tapes in both locations before the theft is noticed could get at the plaintext.

OTP can be useful especially for backups. Use a fast random number generator (real, not pseudo), write output to fill tape A. XOR the contents of tape A to your backup datastream and write result to Tape B. Store tape A and B in different locations.

Professional Engineers signed off on on broken dams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster ), leaking chemical plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster ), exploding reactors and how (not) to operate them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster ) and "high enough" sea walls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident ). There are a ton more examples. All highly unethical, most of the responsible engineers got away scot-free.

Licensed professions only serve to increase the scarcity of licensed professionals, drive up the price and thereby form an economic cartel. Neither does it prevent any of the aforementioned disasters, nor are the responsible professionals held liable.

"Licensed professionals" is one of those myths in software engineering cycles that won't die. A license won't make anyone competent. It will, however, provide them with an excuse to charge more, do less and ascribe any fuckups to "must be something else wrong, I did everything to board standards"...

I'd like to elaborate a little more on why "autistic masking" is different from "neurotypicals' masking".

For neurotypicals, masking is to exhibit behaviors that you subconciously know how to do because they are part of your natural range of behaviors. When a neurotypical is masking being friendly and happy in a social occasion (when they actually don't feel like it), they draw on their previous experience of having been friendly and happy in another social occasion. They know what it feels like, they know how to behave instinctively whey they really are happy and friendly, and faking it is only the effort of drawing from prior experience. For actors, this is called "the Method".

For autists, masking is emulating behaviors they wouldn't normally exhibit on any such occasion. They don't know how to do it, not subconciously, not instinctively. So they explicitly have to observe others, emulate their behavior on that occasion. That leads to two kinds of problems: First, they need to have observed this behavior, learned and practiced it, and need to know how to reproduce it correctly. Second, they need to recognize the occasion correctly, and not misinterpret their surroundings, the feelings and moods of others. And since autists also do have problems even interpreting their own emotional state (they do have emotions, but no intuitive way to know what they are at the moment) and even more the emotional state of others, the effort is far higher. Imagine an actor who is asked to play a totally alien role without any frame of reference and without prior experience, no do-overs and all the other people around him are also directors and constantly judging his performance and measuring it against their effortless instinct what it should look like.

But if the fraud secures the livelyhood of $bignum children and they would starve without their parents committing that fraud?

It only works because doctors have a self-governing body of other doctors as an oversight, usually called a chamber, board, Kammer, etc. This chamber is responsible for licensing doctors to perform medicine and has the power to withdraw that license upon violations of the Hippocratic Oath, other ethical violations and other professional misconduct or malpractice.

Unless you want this kind of arrangement for developers, the oath isn't any good.

Also, the Hippocratic Oath has tons of variants, nobody uses the original one anymore because there are things in there that went out of fashion over the last 2000 years. E.g. operating on people suffering from kidney stones used to be prohibited: "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone[...]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath ). Similar prohibitions exist nowadays for abortions or euthanasia, but only in some places. In others, doctors are free to or even required to perform those. In software development, I would imagine even more variety in the allowed/prohibited-list.

Alpine isn't a distro one would upgrade. It is usually used for throwaway containers, so the upgrade path is clear: throw the old one away, create a new one.

Any psychological disorder is treatment-worthy iff the patient suffers from it. So not just "you were diagnosed", but "you were diagnosed, have problems caused by it, suffer from those problems, and want relief". So yes to both, treatment can be intended to fix a problem that a patient suffers from that is just related to his perception of things. But it can also be intended to support your interactions with a hostile environment that you suffer from.

I know of some taking antidepressants (for obvious reasons, because depression is a common effect).

And I know of some taking ADHD meds for their co-morbid ADHD (autists have a higher probability for ADHD).

General-purpose benchmarks aren't worthless. They can be used to predict, in very broad strokes, what application performance might be. Especially if you don't really know what the applications would be, or if it is too tedious to use real application benchmarks.

But in your example, deciding between 24 cores with somewhat higher frequency or 32 cores with somewhat lower frequency based on some general-purpose benchmark is essentially pointless. The difference will be small enough that only the real application benchmark can tell you what you need to know. A general purpose benchmark will be no better than a coin toss, because the exact workings of the benchmark, the weightings of it's components into a score and the exact hardware you are running on will have interactions that will determine the decision to a far greater amount. You are right that there could be shared or separate caches, shared or separate memory channels. The benchmark might exercise those, or it might not. It might heat certain parts of the die more than others. It might just be the epitome of embarassingly parallel benchmarks, BogoMIPS, which is a loop executing NOPs. The predictive value of the general purpose benchmark is nil in those cases. The variability from the benchmark maker's choices will always necessarily introduce a bias and therefore a measurement uncertainty. And what you are trying to measure is usually smaller than that uncertainty. Therefore: No better than a coin toss.

The only valid benchmark for that is to use the application you intend to use as a benchmark. Even embarassingly parallel problems can have different characteristics depending on their use of memory and caches and the thermal characteristics of the CPU. Something that uses only L1 cache and registers will probably scale almost linearly in the number of cores, except for thermal influences. Something that uses L2, L3 caches or even main memory will be sublinear.

In related news, I also cannot import Bratwurst into the US ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter <- look at "Early work".

But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.

Sometimes with larger ICs you use superglue to stick the IC in place, so it doesn't shift when you transport it into the oven.

Sounds like half the story is missing. Either the chips were upside down, and somebody wanted to cover something up (which would be really stupid, because it is a really stupid problem and immediately obvious). Or the chips weren't upside down, and he was let go for being a stupid know-it-all (like maybe in 37 instances before this one).

Size. Pig hearts are the same size as human hearts, cow hearts are larger, so easier to cut up for parts. Chimp hearts are usually smaller.

Also, the risk of transmitting zoonosis is larger in primates than in other mammals, because with humans being primates as well, more viruses/prions/fungi might be infectious to both.

> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.

There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/

Maybe, but there is already that risk of some influence from other doctors, patients, nurses and general circumstances.

When an X-Ray is ordered, there is usually a suspected diagnosis in the order like "suspect sprain, pls exclude fracture", "suspect lung cancer". Patients will complain about symptoms or give the impression of a certain illness. Things like that already place a bias on the evaluation a radiologist does, but they are trained to look past that and be objective. No idea how often they succeed.

That's what I meant. There are no breaking changes. My config works the same as back then. I can use new features, but nothing forces me to use them, no "designer" decides I have to work differently after this update.

Required in that Nvidia would like to sell them to you. But customers seem to be hesitant and prefer x86-based DGX and similar systems. At least from what I've heard and seen.

IceWM hasn't changed in more than a decade. ;)

Even the "guaranteed measure of maintenance" is not guaranteed. You don't get an SLA on patches or bugfixes from microsoft. You don't get an uptime SLA. Its all "best effort" or worse "when we feel like it". And the few SLAs they give you, e.g. on cloud stuff, are useless because it basically is "get your money back for that month". And the SLA measurement is done by their own downtime announcements, so a complete joke. Software lifetimes exist and are published, but guess what? Within that lifetime, you get "updates", but nowhere do you get any kind of guarantee about what is updated, what is fixed, how fast, if ever.

And no kind of safety-oriented anything will run windows or any microsoft software. There is no windows edition of therac-25. The stuff you see in a hospital is normal workstation PCs for non-safety-relevant data entry and display. As soon as it becomes safety-relevant like controlling your heart-lung-machine, auto-dosing your medications, controlling the x-ray beam, you are far away from anything microsoft.

And actually, OSS is used more often in those safety-relevant settings. Why? Not because the OSS maintainers themselves would themselves provide any support, SLA or warranty. But because the nature of OSS provides third parties the possibility to certify, maintain and guarantee for their special 'safety-relevant-libxml2-fork'. Sometimes this is done by the device vendors themselves, sometimes they buy this from others. But it happens, and it is growing in frequency.

https://www.codethink.co.uk/news/trustable-software.html (Linux) https://access.redhat.com/en/compliance/iso-26262-asil-b (Linux) https://www.lynx.com/case-studies/secure-linux-medical-devic... (Linux) https://developer.arm.com/Tools%20and%20Software/Arm%20Compi... (clang/llvm)

There is tons more. Basically any compiler for safety-relevant embedded stuff is either clang or gcc under the hood. Linux is frequently encountered when the real-time requirements aren't too strict. With Linux also comes the usual Linux ecosystem of OSS libs and services. It won't look like your normal desktop OS, but quite a lot in that area is OSS.

Nothing at all from microsoft (except a useless BS certification "you can use Azure Devops as a code repo to store you ASIL-D code...").

Read your Microsoft licensing agreement. If you don't have one, read the EULA for OEM windows. The warranty, fitness for purpose and damages exclusion is not as extensive as what the grandparent cited, but it basically boils down to "as limited as legally possible, and the most damages you will get is your license fee back". You also won't get a binding requirements document anyways, so you don't even really know what the software microsoft sells you is fit for. At any point in time, there could be some knowledgebase article saying something like "oh, and btw, don't do this because it breaks", so per their warranty agreement you signed they are free from any responsibility simply by documenting the problem.

Really safety-critical stuff like ASIL-D, ISO26262, IEC61508 (and tons of other magic numbers) isn't something you can buy from microsoft. At best, you can sometimes get a reseller to sign something a little more binding, but with tons of restrictions that basically boil down to "use the microsoft stuff for the readout gauges, but the critical control part goes somewhere else".

Yes, but for a browser to be overtly reporting visited sites somewhere is often seen as dubious. Doing it stealthily by sending DNS queries less so, at least for less knowledgeable observers.

Query statistics is valuable data you can sell. Client DNS queries are in that regard similar to search queries and a default search engine setting, you can sell that to the highest bidder. So browser makers are incentivized to implement their own resolver with its own set of DNS servers instead of just the system ones. Either because they want to sell those statistics themselves. Or because they want to protect their users from the statistics collection of the underlying OS resolver or ISP resolver.