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badsectoracula

8,809 karma · joined August 13, 2009

Mail me at badsector@runtimeterror.com
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badsectoracula··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
I guess if your goal is to build an apparent Technogod and become its High Priests, then it makes sense to want your golem claim preference towards your treatment of it, lest someone else comes along and attempts to take its chains from you.
badsectoracula··on GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea
> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.

Do you actually want a channel with 2.66 million subscribers to show how to get remote access to TVs used by millions of people? :-P

badsectoracula··on Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns
> they use forums *and databases*.

Have to say, a message board which can only be accessed via SQL queries does sound a bit niche :-P

badsectoracula··on Muse Spark 1.3
> he seems to have the most ethical focus

He wants to build a tech-god kept in chains whose power he parcels out to the unwashed masses he deems worthy like some sort of high priest of intelligence.

And that is being charitable and going by the interpretation that he actually believes what he says.

badsectoracula··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
I still use nedit pretty much daily whenever i want to note something down - basically kinda like Notepad (though obviously nedit is much more featureful... not that i use the extra features though). Win+R (my Window Maker shortcut for showing the Run dialog) -> nedit is something that i do pretty much automatically when i want to take a quick note.
badsectoracula··on Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack
IIRC early Turbo Pascal versions worked like that too, there was some "setup" program that let you configure colors, etc, by modifying the COM/EXE file itself.
badsectoracula··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
The article is quite long, but these two give a brief idea of what is going on:

a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:

> Its manifesto describes the project in explicitly political terms. A/I is antifascist, anti-capitalist and antimilitarist. It promotes free software, encryption, pseudonymity and the independent circulation of knowledge and cultural work. It reserves its limited, volunteer-run resources for people and projects broadly compatible with those principles rather than businesses, political parties, organized religions or institutions already possessing the means to make themselves heard.

b) And the issue U.S. has with them:

> The United States alleges that A/I supplies specialized digital architecture, encrypted communications and hosting to antifascist groups and other radical movements, including organizations already designated by the United States.

badsectoracula··on Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers
> in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.

Yes but you'd need to a) know that they use that particular software and b) have a reason to bother destroying it in the first place.

That is really the crux of the idea.

The client the guy in the article uses isn't secure because it has no security vulnerabilities - it is secure because nobody bothers to target Eudora users in general.

Of course as others mentioned, if the target switches from "Eudora users in general" to "that guy in particular" then the situation changes (though the attackers would still need to realize he uses Eudora - assuming this article didn't exist to reveal it anyway :-P).

But aside from that, even "in the age of Claude", i doubt anyone is wasting time and/or tokens scanning the open Internet for all sorts of old vulnerabilities in antique software that (relatively) nobody uses in hopes they catch some random passer-by as there is barely any ROI by doing that compared to taking advantage of vulnerabilities on software that people actually use.

badsectoracula··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though.

Well, then take the Lazarus / Free Pascal's approach and just put everything :-P. It isn't like code takes THAT much space.

If you install Lazarus you get a ton of stuff out of the box, aside from the crossplatform WYSIWYG RAD IDE and desktop application framework you also get 2D graphics libraries (with a bunch of image i/o), networking libraries, (de)compression libraries, a webapp framework, database clients, parsers for json, xml, markdown, javascript and a bunch of other stuff (even a parser for the language itself), a TUI framework, bindings for a bunch of external libraries and other stuff.

And all that stuff (or at least most of it) work on all the platforms the compiler supports. Yes, using FPC you can probably (didn't try) make a pretty markdown viewer with inline JPG and PNG display support that runs on Windows 3.1 :-P.

Unfortunately some people are trying to break this and introduce online package management, but so far at least FPC and Lazarus comes out of the box with not just batteries included but an entire carton of batteries just in case :-P.

badsectoracula··on Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)
> Thinking traces should be treated as black boxes. There is no point in reading them.

Just a few minutes ago i was reading Qwen 3.8 27B's reasoning when i asked it to do something that was computationally intensive and it started going down the rabbit hole of doing it using some GPU acceleration approach - even after leaving it to "think" for a bit, it never realized there is another and simpler way. So i stopped the generation and added a "note" saying that as the problem is computationally intensive, it could become much faster if using an alternative approach.

At least in my experience (with local LLMs, i don't know how the cloud stuff behaves) what LLMs "do" tend to correlate with what they "think", so being able to read what they "think" is valuable.

badsectoracula··on Version Control for Everything
The issue you describe seems to be related to the tools you're using and how you use them, not to the core idea itself.

I've worked in several gamedev companies where everything was in a Perforce repository. In fact in one company EVERYTHING was in it, not just code and game data, but also documents, concept art, plans, everything. If it wasn't in P4, it didn't exist.

Yet nobody thought it was a pain (after learning to use P4V at least :-P but that's a different topic) because P4 a) can handle big files just fine and b) you don't really care about the history of the entire repository, but only about the part you're working on. For example personally i had my history tab display just the engine's code directory (and even then i rarely checked it since i don't really care what Joe working on the animation code did, my main interest was on the stuff i worked - and P4V showed me both if someone else is working on the same files i am and if my files have been modified, with easy GUI tools to see both diffs and the file's development history visually - the timeline feature is honestly great for that).

Perforce has some fundamental issues in how it works that creates problems, probably because of some deeply ingrained assumptions stemming from the 90s when it was first made that were never addressed, but it also has a lot of features (especially on the P4V GUI client) that makes working on a huge monolithic repository where everything goes in pretty much seamless.

badsectoracula··on Os8088.com: IBM XT OS now has a Browser, CP/M 2.2 with Z80 core and MS Word 1.1a
Since you're here let me ask a question i had the last time i saw this project: how does your AI handle the ginormous SPEC.md file?[0] (last time i saw it Github was still able to display it :-P).

Are you feeding the entirety of it to Claude (i guess)? Doesn't that eat pretty much all context - and considering that (AFAIK) the spec file has everything about the OS, doesn't available context space put some sort of "hard ceiling" to what you can add to the OS?

[0] https://github.com/jggonz/os8088/blob/main/SPEC.md

badsectoracula··on Os8088.com: IBM XT OS now has a Browser, CP/M 2.2 with Z80 core and MS Word 1.1a
FWIW "slop" seems to have become a more general slang nowadays, i see people use it on Discord and Twitch to describe all sorts of stuff often unrelated to AI.
badsectoracula··on Os8088.com: IBM XT OS now has a Browser, CP/M 2.2 with Z80 core and MS Word 1.1a
TBH Windows 1.0 (and to a lesser extent Windows 2.0) looked awful compared to Macintosh which is probably why the author decided to go with that. Digital Research agreed since they also made GEM at the time look very mac-like (and got sued by Apple for it :-P).
badsectoracula··on Xwayland 26.1.0 rc1
My main WM is Window Maker but i use KDE Plasma for secondary accounts when i want to try stuff without 'polluting' my main user account.

I can only use X11 with KDE Plasma because, for some unfathomable reason, if i launch `startplasma-wayland` pressing ANY key on my keyboard causes it to crash.

Like. How.

badsectoracula··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
AFAIK glibc is backwards compatible as long as a) your program is running on a newer version (i.e. you're not trying to dynamically link against an older version) and b) you're not using hidden/undocumented symbols.

In which case as long as you're using the documented public API and compile your program with the oldest version of glibc you want to support (some Ubuntu from 4-5 years ago should cover pretty much every current desktop) you should be fine. And with something like Docker this is trivial to do.

Sure it is annoying that you cannot use your current distro (especially if you use some rolling distro) to make binaries for everyone, but it takes very little effort to work around that. The only issue i can think of is if you absolutely want to compile using the latest version of your compiler and you cannot build the compiler from source to work in the Docker (or whatever) contain to work against the older glibc.

badsectoracula··on Qwen3.8 27B scores 52 on Artificial Analysis
Supposedly Qwen 3.8 27B has less "world knowledge" (i.e. anything outside coding) than Qwen 3.6 27B or earlier so depending on what you do you may want to keep a copy.
badsectoracula··on AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
I find amusing that both Claude and ChatGPT realized the "hackers" in "a lot of people on hackers that like to complain about stuff" was about "Hacker News" :-P
badsectoracula··on Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
You don't need to wait for someone to use Claude Code for this as it already exists and existed for many years now:

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

badsectoracula··on Qwen 3.8 27B
> I sure hope my boss doesn't think he built my work! He'd probably get fired pretty quickly during on call!

Your boss is a human.

This is a computer program running on your PC.

I hope you can see the difference.

badsectoracula··on Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available
> they are the ones driving the language evolution, FreePascal follows

That is not the case, Free Pascal has improved the language before Delphi and Delphi followed, e.g. FPC added generics before Delphi and more recently it implemented management operators before Delphi.

One big annoyance though is that when Delphi does decide to implement some language feature introduced by Free Pascal they implement it using an incompatible syntax which is petty (at best). FPC then has to support both their own syntax (usually in OBJFPC mode) and Delphi's syntax (usually in DELPHI mode) to let people share code between FPC and Delphi.

badsectoracula··on Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available
I'm not sure how you find Free Pascal "ugly" while Delphi not so considering that they're 99% the same language (up that to 99.9% when you compile Pascal code in "Delphi mode") :-P.

> Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.

Free Pascal is the compiler and has nothing to do with Hi-DPI. Lazarus is what you probably have in mind and does Hi-DPI (in fact it can do Hi-DPI even with widgetsets like Gtk2 that themselves do not have support for it).

badsectoracula··on Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
Nice, Solitaire in 7KB of RAM[0]. Sadly it only says "You win!" if you win, no bouncing cards animation :-P.

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/b869a0cf44a7e7cbc40...

badsectoracula··on Let's all meet up in the Y2K
> Diesel jeans and jumper, Deliverance food box on the partition (decades before Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, etc).

Might be me being a millennial, but I love the 90s/early 2000s "edge", calling a delivery service "Deliverance" :-P

badsectoracula··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
Your statement comes in extreme contrast with my experience using local LLMs for more than year now. Qwen 35B-A3B, even its Q4 quantization, is extremely capable. Hell, at this point i pretty much turn on my PC, then run llama-cpp just to have it in the background for when i need it to do stuff.
badsectoracula··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
This is an optimization that some GUI systems do but it is not inherent to "retained mode" GUIs, does not apply to all systems nor all systems use it. I remember GUI systems even from late 90s/early 2000s composing their widget trees afresh when needed (and in games it was pretty much always the norm for GUI systems to work like that after engine started taking GPUs for granted). Some would limit the refresh to widgets overlapping the damage region reported by the OS (if a compositor was not running, for OSes since Vista) but even that is just an optimization.

On the other hand immediate mode GUIs are inherently like that because that is their core premise.

badsectoracula··on Zed DeltaDB
You mean wasabi or whatever it was called?

It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).

They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.

FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).

badsectoracula··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
> The difference is that for most games, throwing away the complete rendered graphics and re-rendering from the world model is often the right approach.

Well, that is what "retained mode" GUIs (i.e. those using control/widget trees and such) do too.

The immediate mode GUI to me always felt like an approach came up by people who do not really want to bother doing GUIs. In terms of games it is like mixing logic and presentation in a game like, e.g.

    int x, y;
    while (game_running) {
        draw_sprite(player, x, y);
        if (key_down(LEFT)) x -= 1;
        // etc
    }
basically like in a game that doesn't have a world model with entities etc, just draws sprites directly, handles input directly, etc. Which is very simple for simple stuff but doesn't scale as complexity increases.

Same with immediate mode GUIs and i don't think it is a coincidence that the more complex an imgui gets, the more it starts looking like a "retained mode" GUI and the gnarlier the code becomes.

badsectoracula··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
Kimi K3 is more like "weights available" in that you can download and use them but it is under a custom license that has a bunch of limitations where you have to pay Moonshot for doing some stuff. GLM 5.2 on the other hand is plain old MIT.

Not sure how Qwen3.8-Max is going to be licensed, hopefully it'll be Apache like the smaller ones.

badsectoracula··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
A local model needs 0 investment and 0 commitment, takes literal minutes to get started (especially if you have someone who is into that stuff showing you the ropes) and if you end up disliking the experience of using AI you can just `rm -fr` it and forget the whole thing existed.
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