jasomill

You want to talk about hard truths?

It's incredibly naive to assume a world that rapidly transitions to 95% unemployment would in any way resemble the status quo.

I don't have children, but if a thing's worth doing, it's generally worth doing poorly, even if ideally it would be done well.

I've created a thousand useful hacks that would make AI slop look like high art, that would not have been useful at all had they been polished to a high shine.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

On a VM host, only root will be able to mount filesystems or make block-level writes to already-mounted filesystems. So LPE via a filesystem you'd need an exploit that can be triggered by writing to an already mounted filesystem with filesystem operations only as a non-root user.

As I understand it, even commonly-used filesystems aren't considered hardened against arbitrary malicious data, the party line is to use userspace filesystems to mount untrusted volumes.

If this is a consensus viewpoint, it'll likely be priced into the IPO.

I'm cautiously bullish on AI in general, and I wouldn't touch an AI stock with a 100m pole, because there are way too many uncautiously bullish investors in the market.

We have, for example, no idea what the long-term implications of AI effectively training on its own output is. Recursive self-improvement is not a law of nature. If anything, the opposite: the overwhelming majority of species are extinct. Evolution is as much a story of dead ends as survival of the fittest. So betting on any one narrow path of AI development to survive seems extraordinarily risky from a biological standpoint.

MacApp provided me with an crash course in Object Pascal, just in time for Apple to throw it all away in favor of C++. Fortunately I was a voracious reader of programming language books at the time, so I was already familiar with OO concepts from learning about languages like Smalltalk that I never had a chance to use at the time.

I missed out on Turbo Pascal for Windows — I had moved on to mostly Mac development by then, and by the time I started working on Windows again, Visual C++ was firmly entrenched, my employer was a C/C++ shop, and I was comfortable with C++ from the Mac — but I was a big fan of Turbo Pascal for DOS (and Apple's Object Pascal on the 68k Mac).

There’s a good example of a model that won’t scale.

Even firsthand experience is biased in many ways.

This doesn't meant that some sources of information aren't more trustworthy than others, or that you can't get a reasonable idea of what's going on by combining information from multiple independent sources.

For instance, I'd generally trust a statement of fact consistently reported by multiple wire services over conflicting information from official government sources, and I'd never trust any one source to tell "the whole truth", to the extent such a thing is even possible.

I believe they were referring to Cloudflare, not the hardware.

But yes, if nation states are part of your threat model, the safest practical way to acquire hardware is probably brick-and-mortar retail, and only after installing a sophisticated home security system, also acquired at retail, and thoroughly sweeping your house for existing bugs once it's installed.

Maybe it's because I've been using UNIX systems for many years, but this seems more tedious that simply using built-in tools to do the same thing, which has the added bonus of having at least some concept of how you might fix things when you inevitably break them.

https://xkcd.com/349/

UEFI also provides block device and SCSI passthrough interfaces, and you're free to write your own drivers and poke storage controllers directly if you prefer, or for that matter, call ExitBootServices and then do anything the hardware itself allows.

It's as close to the metal as you're likely to get on a modern UEFI system short of a firmware hack.

If you intend to use PiHole, why is your DHCP server configuring a non-PiHole DNS server?

And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?

Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.

I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.

Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS with its own network stack and the pre-boot networking environment is no longer required.

The fact that there's only a single trivial code change in the past 3 years is good enough evidence for me.

If I were a mobster under government surveillance, why would I carry a mobile phone while discussing the family business, or intentionally allow anyone in my vicinity to do so, any more than I'd have such a conversation with someone I knew was wearing a wire?

Maybe so, but unless you imagine a vast conspiracy of rich fucks pulling the strings of hardware vendors and/or governments worldwide, the former will still want to sell to a larger market even if some of their largest customers would prefer otherwise.

I find it hard to believe that at least a robust hybrid model won't be. There's just too much money to be made selling hardware at relatively high margins to customers with limited market power to keep hardware vendors out of consumer and small business markets indefinitely.

Sure, but unless you're integrating the devices into a product to sell, an increase from $4 to $10 hurts a lot less than an increase from $80 to $200. I wouldn't change my mind about buying one or a few Pi Zeroes for hobby projects over $6/unit, but I may well consider a different platform over $120/unit.

Fortunately for me, I already have a stack of criminally underutilized Pi 3, 4, and 5 units on a shelf from a past (non-hobby) project. No 16GB, but multiple 8GB units, and 8GB is enough for most anything I can imagine wanting to do on a Pi.

Why would component vendors allow shortages to continue indefinitely for the benefit of hyperscalers and AI companies, especially given what may be years of pent-up demand in other markets?

And why would the game industry, considered as a whole, want to incur higher costs to exclusively deliver its product in a way that provides less value to the majority of its customers, many who won’t be willing to pay the higher prices required to maintain similar profits?

Recompilation at most threatens platform exclusivity as a business model. Otherwise, it’s just piracy with extra steps.

At most, I expect to see already existing trends towards more live service components and microtransactions continue, with digital delivery only and a required online component in many cases, but with most if not all of the actual game code and assets hosted and running locally.

As for non-gaming applications, content creation and a software development are two examples where "cloud native" workflows remain cost-ineffective in many market segments in spite of hardware price increases, and will remain so as long as cloud providers continue to nickel-and-dime customers for IOPS and compute.

A credit-card sized system seems like it would require a very small screen, a very small battery, or both.

With that said, add NFC, maybe a USB-A connector made accessible by part of the card folding back, and some UI mechanism to select TKIP codes, and a device like that could make an nice universal hardware security token.

To be fair, you're comparing a Pi Zero which I can still walk into Micro Center and buy for $10 today to a 16GB Pi 5, where the insane 3× price hike is almost entirely due to the RAM: I can buy an 8GB Pi 5 for $175, less than half the price of the 16GB model, again quoting in stock prices at my nearest Micro Center.

For reference, the cheapest 16GB LPDDR4 (not 4X as used in the Pi 5) DIMM in stock is more than $150, which is about what I paid for the 64GB of DDR4 in my desktop a couple years ago.

Dynamic vs static linking is mostly a red herring for desktop GUI application development unless you want to integrate into something like Linux distro package managers, as dynamic libraries on Mac and Windows can be self-contained within the application bundle/directory with no disadvantage beyond marginally longer startup time, and you can do similar things with Flatpak and friends on Linux.

The real difference is that Rust provides a package repository with a unified build system that's as simple to use as NPM or NuGet.

vcpkg which is similar exists today, but it didn't in 2015 when Discord started, still isn't anywhere near as comprehensive as package repositories for languages where package management is part of the standard toolchain, and the underlying build systems are far messier under the hood.

It can also be helpful in development to use libraries built from source as part of the application's build process, at least as an easily-accessible option, which wasn't common practice in most C/C++ ecosystems historically where different libraries used different build systems and if you wanted to integrate them into something like a Visual Studio solution for easy reference to source code during development and debugging you were often on your own.

Also:

- local latency is lower than network latency

- latency is important for action games

Is it really? Slop clones of games have been a thing for ages, I’d expext the market to be reasonably resistant by now.

A better example is Spec Ops: The Line, which was removed from online stores in 2024 and remains unavailable to this day.

This is hardly a Mac-specific problem: countless devices require or recommend booting to DOS, an EFI shell, or from a custom vendor-supplied boot imnage to update firmware, or to the system's firmware setup utility, even on Windows PCs and x86 Linux, and given the wide variety of PC hardware, even in cases where native OS firmware update tools exist, they may not always work.

In other words, think of macOS as a somewhat bloated vendor-supplied firmware update tool. "Premium" is subjective, but I wouldn't personally limit my options for SSDs or storage controllers to those that supply Linux firmware update tools, so why should I do so with laptops?

And dual booting to a small native OS partition and auto-updating is hardly less convenient than manually downloading firmware, creating an appropriately configured USB boot disk, and installing it by rebooting and invoking a vendor-supplied tool by hand from a DOS or EFI command prompt.

"Becoming obsolete" due to increased efficiency could lead to sigificant economic and political unrest, but there's no fundamental reason it must.

Yes, basically a vastly more difficult and dangerous version of not letting young children play with matches, which will hopefully teach us many object lessons about safety and security long before it acquires launch codes or the means to use them.

This is trivially true for any theorem with a proof that can be automatically verified in finite time, but does not preclude the universe lacking a suitable combination of monkeys, typewriters, and time to do so.

Brute force is certainly the wrong way to put it, but that doesn't mean it's easy to distinguish superhuman effort from superhuman intelligence, or, in the words of Thomas Edison, perspiration from inspiration.

Especially as the pure gruntwork involved in acquiring the knowledge required to merely understand the details of the mathematics involved represent at least a significant fraction of a human lifetime.

And unless this human process of knowledge acquisition continues, eventually no one will be left to understand and attach any significance to the results machines produce.