We embedded third party auditors in that crypto exchange so I’m curious exactly how inscrutable tiktok really are.

I mean the accusations are that they’re too beyond oversight and we can’t confidently audit the data, so giving us a button to stop them when we can’t see what they’re doing would be a joke. But I’m skeptical that it’s as difficult to lock down their data as we make it seem.

Tiktok offered us the ability to shut them down? To avoid being shut down. By us. Woe to the vanquished I guess.

The Shinzo Abe situations are always weird to me. One or more people decided to do this, in the sense that the buck stops somewhere.

It’s easy to find addresses, workplaces, family members, an itinerary.

It’s like in order to make it to these positions you need to have a defective brain that allows you to hurt lots of other people while ignoring how easy it is for one of them to reach out and touch you. I’d need constant anxiety meds.

There are tracing programs that let you see when a program makes system calls to read and write files, control hardware, etc. It might be easiest to run it and see what it does in a VM sandbox. Process Monitor looks like a strace equivalent on windows.

It’s new to me, I think it’s saying that your system is built up by you declaring what you want in a file, a single source that everything comes from.

It’s atomic because each action the system takes is carefully completed rather than bailing out and requiring you to fix something.

It’s immutable meaning you declare how you want things to be set up and then critical changes stem from those declarations and nothing else. You would obviously generate preferences, save data, etc. but the files that make the system / packages work are carefully locked.

It’s like the concept of flatpaks + structured system defining + modern common sense OS operations?

And because corporations aren’t people, here’s the CEOs that ran things during 2014:

Hans Vestberg (b 1965) Verizon

Randall Lynn Stephenson (b 1960) AT&T

Glen F Post (b 1952) CenturyLink

We let these people act with impunity in our society but it doesn’t need to be this way. Look at how Elon, who thrives on attention, flips out over being tracked and heckled. They stole hundreds of billions from us but we don’t even act like it.

No problem. I’m no guru and I’m currently on Zig but I think learning some Rust is a really fast way to hone skills that are implied by other languages.

You use lifetimes to annotate parameters and return values in order to tell the compiler about how long things must last for your function to be valid. You can link a specific input with the output, or explicitly separate them. If you don’t give lifetimes the language uses some basic rules to do it for you. If it can’t, eg it’s ambiguous, then it’s a compile error and you need to do it manually.

It’s one of the harder concepts of rust to explain succinctly. But imagine you had a function that took strA and strB, used strB to find a subsection of strA, and then return a slice of strA. That slice is tied to strA. You would use 'a annotation for strA and the return value, and 'b for strB.

Rust compiler will detect the lifetime being shorter than expected.

Also, ownership semantics. Think c++ move semantics. Only one person is left with a good value, the previous owners just have garbage data they can’t use anymore. If you created a thing on the heap and then gave it away, you wouldn’t have it anymore to free at the end. If you want to have “multiple owners” then you need ref counting and such, which also stops this problem of premature freeing.

Edit: one more thing: reference rules. You can have many read-only references to a thing, or one mutable reference. Unless you’re doing crazy things, the compiler simply won’t let you have references to a thing, and then via one of those references free that thing, thereby invalidating the other references.

I’m someone who grew up on Windows but switched to Linux and holy shit was it so much nicer. I don’t know if Windows massively improved or if people are just incapable of comparing something new with something they already know. Because Windows is hard.

99/100 basic users need someone to unfuck their windows install after what, one, two years?

Every time you need to do something non standard you’re basically going from training wheels to “good luck, deputy sysadmin.”

Broken registry. Orphaned cruft.

Malware, spyware.

Nearly all guns will have a legal upstream source, so it stands to reason that taxes can directly impact people selling guns used in crimes, indirectly impacts those who sell them under the table, extracts money from gun owners who as a class aren’t being as responsible as they should, and fundamentally reduces the amount of guns in circulation.

What opening is that? Legal’s mate is fun to go for (1350 blitz on lichess), but I only ever reach that kind of position as white.

Oh, your god said we should do that? But my god is a super god times infinity and he says the opposite.

Just goes to show you that for every kid that is mature for their age, there’s 100s of adults that never left the playground.

By roll coal types I mean people who feel indignation when told they’re doing something harmful to the environment. There’s usually a bit of eye rolling involved.

I think we should compare dogs and cats to good pets to own, rather than pretending the choices are “big powerful dog” and “environment destroyer 3000.”

After all, both are safe in theory, but irresponsible pet owners ruin it. You can’t expect everyone to correctly take care of certain dog breeds, you can’t expect the majority of cat owners to give up the “proud to roll coal” attitude towards their cat + the environment.

Let’s just have pet spiders or something.

Japan was completely blockaded, which is such a profound thing in war that it’s really all you need to defeat “nuking was necessary” arguments.

And they were completely resource starved, another profoundly important detail of a war machine.

And the fanaticism + “they will die to the last man, woman, and child” is grossly misrepresented in the context of nukes.

But these details aren’t relevant to how Palestinians and the situation in Gaza is portrayed. No siree.

We could have lab grown organic automatons, controlled via LLMs embedded in a neuralink. They will be considered non-human and therefore may serve as emergency rations. At the discretion of the tank commander they can be detached and used for eg minefield discovery, targeting consensus, or as “meat shields” as it were.

It feels Kafkaesque. “Hello, I’m against genocide. Do I stand in line to be labeled a terrorist simp? Should I stand in the Nazi line? Just wondering what label I’ll need to own.”

Droped is the past tense of drape.

When a computer reads some signal, the 0s and 1s in it’s memory is the data. The data must be processed so that the computer can understand it.

This computer is using threads to read neuron activity. It must necessarily receive data because if it didn’t it wouldn’t be reading neuron activity. They’re the same thing.

This data is processed so that the computer can make sense of the brain. Once it understands some activity it generates signals that can control external devices.

Here’s an example. Imagine a device that monitors the heart and does something to fix a problem. The device would get data on the heart and process the data so that it can perform it’s function.

Wouldn’t monitoring health concerns and mitigating data loss be extremely important in these scenarios?

Put it this way: If you took a thread talking about some tech from a joke community, and a thread about the same topic from a generic technology community, you won’t be able to tell them apart. People will bring the same energy and mindset to both. Jokes and “lol get rekt company I hate” will be pushed to the top, because they totally contribute to the discussion, while basic observations like “removing functionality is bad” will be pushed down. 👍