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zamalekon .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types

I'm part of The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce. In all seriousness, whatever suits the task well. Rust is for passion projects where I want to enjoy coding something; I find Go to be more of a direct competitor to C# - but it has the edge due to lacking exceptions (which is 15 years wasted of my life, never again). I'm always searching for something better, though.

zamalekon .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types

When I cared about C# (which is no longer the case), I was lightly involved in the discussion for this and sibling features - mostly theorycrafting exactly your ask: the JIT team very succinctly expressed extreme disinterest in adding support of any kind.

The C# compiler could do it to a degree, but there would be too many caveats to make it actually useful. Unless the JIT team has a change of heart, you're probably never going to see this.

zamalekon At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

> ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight.

ICE is a proto-gestapo for what it's worth - including having a way to report unwanted ethnicities. They answer to the sovereign and are not accountable to the law of the people.

zamalekon AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

What they charge people says nothing about what it costs them. Off the top of my head, one confounding factor is trying to win back marketshare from Anthropic.

We will only know the actually situation once Anthropic goes public and we can look at their books.

zamalekon Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

What I don't get about tailwind is: why not just use the style attribute at the point?

zamalekon I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

> Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can't do already.

This is an illusion, I assure you. On a side project of mine with behavior that's very hard to translate into an algorithm (never mind code), after a few failed attempts between the both of us, I figured it out. I gave the AI (Opus) an extremely specific algorithm with detailed tests. All completely and utterly ignored (including the tests), like I never even said it. It proudly declared the work done without ever having written the tests that would have proved that wrong - it basically wrote code that didn't change behavior at all, it just gave the illusion of looking busy.

That's just a single extreme example that comes to mind, but I've had it ignore me at least 4-5 times a day this week.

If you think agents are fixing things reliably then you simply haven't noticed that they are "looking busy."

zamalekon DeepSeek V4: The Open-Source Model Frontier Labs Feared

It's not really plausible to host at home, unless you have deep pockets. What you/we win here is a model that doesn't suddenly become worse like the proprietary ones have been doing, and you can choose a provider from a competitive market.

zamalekon Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

> they sure as hell would be comparing.

You're implying that Gamers Nexus is some form of Linux outlet/content creator. They aren't, they only started doing Linux content this year/late last year (and only plan to do it rarely).

You've taking a surprisingly hostile stance on the one (at the time of writing) pro-Linux comment that suggests that it might not be ready for everyone, and to wait if it's not a good fit.

And it isn't beef wellington vs bread and water. It's 80% lean beef vs 82% lean beef, in the majority of cases (and in either direction). And "suitable for your purposes" also means that 160FPS is really fine if your screen is 144Hz - doesn't matter if Windows does 180FPS (unless you're doing something competitive or extremely latency sensitive).

I think Microsoft can do fine without people tilting at windmills for them.

zamalekon Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

Windows and Linux trade punches in terms of overall experience. What I've seen around is that if Linux has worse FPS, it tends to have more consistent pacing (it generally has better pacing - but not always, I had to abandon Once Human).

Gamer's Nexus has a pretty extensive benchmark video: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Cx5Q1a-lMMm14H4i . They refuse to compare to Windows, and it kinda makes sense: if it's satisfactory on Linux for your demands then who cares what Windows can do?

Here's a less professional, but direct comparison https://youtu.be/Giois6VtLPM?si=XFaVUMbea3u0AmP. An extremely important thing to note: AMD GPU. I personally have no idea what NVIDIA is like, but it sounds like their drivers are still all over the place.

And kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't work, though some (e.g. EAC) run in user mode if the developer allows it. Make sure to check ProtonDB for the games you care about. I have personally never had a good experience with Linux builds of games, so I just always use Proton now - but maybe I'm cursed because others have passionately disagreed with my experience. Either way, if a Linux game is broken/bad, try forcing it into Proton.

I don't want to say, "switch now" because it still has rough edges in terms of gaming. Better for you to have a great experience and stick around, than hate it and leave for good. Only you can figure out if it needs more time to cook based on some very light (ProtonDB) research.

I last used a Windows machine about a year ago, and I can say with confidence that the average desktop experience is significantly superior to the barrage of bullshit that Windows puts you through.

zamalekon Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

Yeah i got a CC1 due to price alone (Prusa was out of my range but obviously vastly preferred), and then they started trying to pull bullshit with firmware. They backed off after outrage, but don't forget that this is exactly what Bambu initially tried to do - so it will be the first and last Elegoo that I purchase.

Printer is great though. I've never used a Bambu, but after a thorough round of Orca calibration this (at the time) newbie was able to get some really decent PCTG and even PA-CF prints.

Web interface can't hold a stable video stream.

zamalekon Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

> Louis Rossmann posted a video saying he'd pledge $10,000 to help the open source dev fight Bambu's legal threats. And I'd happily chip in too, but that's only useful if the dev wants to put himself back in Bambu's crosshairs.

Louis Rossmann has decided to put himself in the crosshairs instead, with a video goading Bambu: https://youtu.be/1jhRqgHxEP8?si=BwfoCKxujd0XwNJ0

Here's what I don't get. How is infra load any different between someone using their slicer build, and someone using their code in another slicer (or a fork)? It's still (ultimately) the same human making the same requests. If they can't handle the load then the solution is to obviously carefully manage the supply of the printers, if your infra is incapable of handling more than 3 users (accurate figure going by the tone of their blog post), then don't have more than 3 of your printers in the wild at any single time. Problem solved.

zamalekon Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

Is the idea here to add function calling to models that don't have it, or even improve function calling (qwen quirks)?

zamalekon CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler

Debugging (gdb, but GUI frontends exist for gdb in general): https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIP/en/latest/how-to/debu...

Fortran: https://github.com/ROCm/hipfort

Python (not sure about JIT): https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/hip-python/en/latest/

zamalekon Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

Obviously this is bad in general, but what's the threat profile here? Google already has the content of your emails and I guarantee they have pinned down your fingerprint unless you're using Snowden-level counter-int.

Protest this by using a paid email provider. My $60 yearly payment just went through today, is that honestly too much for the typical person around here?

zamalekon CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler

My sentiment matches your exactly. I'm sick and tired of CUDA - but it's really not going to change.

Could maybe be forked with some dynamic smarts, HIP is basically 1:1 with CUDA: https://github.com/amd/amd-lab-notes/blob/release/hipify%2Fs...

zamalekon Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX

FWIW, if you want frontier-level performance, as it was a few months back, Deepseek v4 and K2.6 are there. Almost zero chance you can run them locally, but you do have choice in terms of providers.

Qwen-coder-next is considered SOTA for things you could actually run locally.

zamalekon Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

Associating dark matter with epicycles is unfair, but it's still a risk (CDM, WDM, SIDM, and probably more by next year). In that light, of course it has more observations (by virtue of creating branches to explain incompatible observations) - but counterpoint is that it has made some predictions.

My stance is that anyone pointing at it in either light probably isn't taking everything into account. It's an incredibly immature theory space - are we going to get 20 more branches of it (making it modern epicycles), or are we going to see one of the current branches pay off?

zamalekon Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust

Ah good point, complete brain fart on my part.

zamalekon Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust

You only allocate on box futures, which are much more rare than naked futures - generally only used where object safety (essentially dyn support) is required. Even then some workarounds exist.

Edit: and tasks.

zamalekon Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust

Tokio is a general purpose async runtime. Much the same could probably be said for async-std (except IIRC they do have a barebones reactor for you to build your own on). In general, a general-purpose async runtime will do worse for highly specific tasks than a purpose-built one (especially e.g. NUMA).

I think avoiding async entirely might be a mistake, and I'm not entirely convinced anything better than a general-purpose async runtime might exist for a JS runtime (it itself is general purpose after all).

Avoiding std::fs is fucking bizarre to me: it's completely sync and is a really lightweight abstraction over syscalls.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

> possibility into a binding obligation

I never said "binding obligation," that is the first time "binding" has appeared in this discussion and was introduced by you. Once again claiming things I have never said. Doing what you are free to do can still be a shitty thing to do.

I am a bluffing moron who knows nothing, you win.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

> You are strongly implying that keeping the vulnerability secret is following of what you quoted.

Please don't put words in my mouth when I have clearly stated the contrary. I used the word "disclosure," that is very different to keeping things secret.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

That's still extremely different to this in one of the GP comments:

> There is no such thing as "the responsible disclosure protocol".

And yes, I admit I got dragged down to their level and beat myself with a dumb stick in the process.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

> Is that a rule?

No, it's commonly followed practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_vulnerability_disc...

I'm all for lighting a fire under the developer's ass, but we live in an imperfect world and the biggest problem that we have is end-users. We may have applied the mitigation on day 0, and updated as soon as the kernel landed in our distro - and if some of us didn't then we've even got savvy users in that "don't update fast enough group" (which is fine, which is human, but is said imperfection).

Major distros should at least have gotten a few days of notice for something this catastrophic. It doesn't help that the kernel is fixed if "normies" aren't able to access it on day 0. For reference, the standard is 30 for the developer to fix and 90 for it to land on machines. Even 30+7 would have been a substantial improvement.

Ethical security research involves ethics, and maybe they aren't referenced in university/college any more - but here's what I was taught: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics .

> 1.1 Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.

> [...] Computing professionals should consider whether the results of their efforts will [...] and will be broadly accessible.

> 1.2 Avoid harm.

> (Honestly, all of it)

> 2.3 Know and respect existing rules pertaining to professional work.

> 3.1 Ensure that the public good is the central concern during all professional computing work.

> People—including users, customers, colleagues, and others affected directly or indirectly—should always be the central concern in computing.

Maybe other code of ethics for CS exist; I'd like to know which ethics these ethical researchers were following.

zamalekon Grok 4.3

Grok was supposed to be the uncensored frontier model. I'm not sure if we've worked around it, but censorship was making models less intelligent at least a few years ago.

xAI have been caught making it agree with everything Elon says, which is a form of censorship, so we can no longer trust that it's truly uncensored: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

Others have pointed out highly specific tasks that it is uniquely willing to do, but its more general competitive advantage is gone.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

From elsewhere.[1]

> You: No, I wouldn't, because my own preferences are towards immediate disclosure.

And there it is. You could have said "I don't think responsible disclosure is a good idea" and moved on, but now we have whatever the fuck this is.

Bluffing sure as hell beats incapable of being wrong. I'll take it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47969417

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

Tons of distros were not informed.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_vulnerability_disc...

> In computer security, coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD, sometimes known as responsible disclosure)

I guess you can learn something new after 36 years.

If you are referring to what you quoted, your pedantry and sharpshooting would result in an incomplete English sentence: "that's why we have the responsible disclosure" is missing a noun. Now that we are firmly in worthless pedantry:

Protocol (n):

1.a. a system of rules that explain the correct conduct and procedures to be followed in formal situations

1.b. a set of conventions governing the treatment and especially the formatting of data in an electronic communications system

If you don't like what I said or disagree, poke holes in factual inaccuracies. However, in the reality that I am pretty sure we all share, responsible disclosure is a well established protocol that is followed by many security researchers, and was imperfectly followed here.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

Yes, and that's why we have the responsible disclosure protocol. It wasn't correctly followed here.

zamalekon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

The disclosure was more about marketing than security. From the disclosure page:

> Is your software AI-era safe?

> Copy Fail was surfaced by Xint Code about an hour of scan time against the Linux crypto/ subsystem. [...]

> [Try Xint Code]

More chaos makes their product seem even more attractive.