manholio

> remove the unsafe part from C/C++ bit by bit.

You cannot do that without breaking backward compatibility. If you maintain compatibility, what results is a sprawling meta-language with a large learning burden that has the theoretical ability to emulate a safe language, and which in practice will be used to mix both safe and unsafe idioms depending on the experience and discipline of the programmer, in an unholy mess that no static analyzer can prove as correct and no programmer can say they really fully understand.

Maybe I'm mistaken, I've last programmed in C++ a good number of years ago, but I have not encountered a (C++ programming paradigm, static linter) doublet that can prove data integrity and thread safety to an extent even close to the Rust compiler. And it would be useless for existing codebases anyhow.

Surely "nails in the coffin of C/C++" does not imply an all out effort to rewrite all this existing and working software from scratch.

The beast will die in the same sense Fortran or Cobol are dead: an outdated language that has no noticeable strengths in the modern world, used by a bunch of (difficult to hire) old timers to fix legacy systems.

What a wonderful excuse for a government to pay another 1 billion dollars on crapware to their cronies, who will outsource it to some incompetent software sweatshop on the other side of the world.

We can barely get governments to use open source even today, without restrictions. Hell, we can barely make them manage source code for commercial products they commission and pay for. I've walked into govt shops that were 100% binary dependent to the original software author, which never delivered source code and charged them trough the nose for the basic servicing.

Like it or not, the government and regulators represent us, we need individual accountability but harming the govt. directly harms ourselves firstly. The bureaucrats and the corrupt hardly care.

They won't legislate AI away, just training them on copyrighted works without attribution and license. As it should be.

Countries that don't do that will be just as successful in the world marketplace as are countries that don't respect copyright.

> That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material.

That's the only possible interpretation, really. AI models algorithmically remix input intellectual property en masse, without any significant amount of human creativity, the only thing copyright law protects. As such, the models themselves are wholly derived works, essentially a compressed and compact representation of the artistic features of the original works.

Legally, a AI model is equivalent to a huge tar.gz of copyrighted thumbnails: very limited fair use applies, only in some countries, and only in certain use contexts that generally don't harm the original author or out-compete them in the market place - the polar opposite of what AI models are.

When you are already in a deep hole, it's a good idea to stop digging.

How much time did it took you to understand all this? What chances does a beginner has to understand these subtle differences and learn the particular way your codebase uses std::span and not footgun themselves? How much productivity is lost to the sheer terror of such footguns - not actual bugs, but time and effort lost that did not move the product forward?

And most importantly, what is the point of accepting that huge cost instead of writing in a language where unsafe data access is impossible?

Just another nail in the long overdue C/C++ coffin. If not even these experts can get it right, under the best development conditions, public review and highest stakes, on a relatively small component with the most strict specifications, then no one can.

I think any legal theory that must equate people with machines to prove its point is dead in any real court. Laws are made by people for people, to protect people's interests, so the analogy is just about as effective as requiring a human to work 16 hours because a horse can, and both operate on similar principles.

Of course everything a human learns and produces is a derivative of real world input, some of it copyrighted. But people agreed that this transformation is a form of fair use, as long as the derived work is sufficiently creative - where the key implicit assumption is that creativity is a human ability that warrants protection. Both the creator and the learner enjoy protection because they are human.

In the AI case, the output of a program will certainly not receive protection by default - it will be protected only as a consequence of its human creator or user rights. It doesn't really matter how transformative and analogous to the human mind the program is, the output only deserves protection solely for its unique human created parts - the internal working and the extent of the craft embedded in a GPT3 text prompt. The first is unrelated directly to the work produced, and the second is laughable vs the artworks embedded in the model.

If in the future AI advances to the point where it can be granted natural rights, this could change, but we are far far from that point.

> AI are on the "infringing" rather than the "inventive" side of things

Does it really matter? Once you embed copyrighted works into your learning dataset, any model you ship and any "creation" of that model is by definition a derived work, must have a license from the original authors and must obey the terms of that license. The extent of derivation is immaterial.

The AI crowd is on a hard collision course with an army of gavels.

Depending on how you acquired the work, copyright most certainly does care.

> Except some, who always ask for "Senior Rust Developer" which I'd guess is still a limited supply market.

I've seen a role advertised for 750k/month. It makes sens: those who move fastest get to milk the crypto bubble and make out like bandits. Oh wait, exactly like bandits.

It makes sense because the latter is by definition a form of virtue signaling while the former is just presumed to be.

Virtue signaling involves intent, so a person pointing out something is, say, misogynistic might do it because they are really concerned about the topic and it's the way they feel, even taking the risk of an unpopular opinion. Whereas someone denouncing them for virtue signaling is overtly engaging in virtue signaling, i.e. publicly proclaiming their distaste or disinterest to the topic.

Unlike the first case, there is no larger public interest the denouncer claims to protect.

> his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution.

Can Copilot prove that and link to the source LGPL code whenever it reproduces more than half a line of code from such a source?

Because without that clear attribution trail, nobody in their right mind would contaminate their codebase with possibly stolen code. Hell, some bad actor might purposefully publish a proprietary base full of stolen LGPL code, and run scanners on other products until they get a Copilot "bite". When that happens and you get sued, good luck finding the original open source code both you and your aggressor derive from.

In other words, it's just another AI gimmick that randomly cuts and pastes human generated content that seems to fit the context, without any regards to making sense in a cohesive political framework:

>Modern machine learning systems are not based on biological and symbolic rules of old fashioned artificial intelligence, where you could uphold a principle of noncontradiction as you can in traditional logic.

He's quite full of himself (the show was called "Seinfeld" after all, before hardly anyone recognized that name), but I think that's part of the comedic persona, that's his routine, a snob successful man.

A thing I really find off-putting is the overt misogyny of the Seinfeld character in the series - he's a ladies man and has very little regard or respect for his romantic conquests, over 70 throughout the series, iirc. Jerry's love interests are a source of gags, but the fact that he's essentially a sexual addict if never addressed or mocked.

I realize the character is not the same as the comedian, but it's hard to disentangle the two, especially if he owns up to such a large influence on the final text. It's as if a woman was never involved in the writing so she could object to the disposable nature of Jerry's female companions. Is it a personal fantasy that's being projected, is it a comedic version of his real life? I don't know.

It's a specific meaning relating to the size of male genitalia after immersion in low temperature water.

"There's significant shrinkage, my friend".

Also works for "how many emojis iphone" but strangely not other platforms like Windows or Android.

It doesn't matter it's illegal, it can happen and people get away with it, and the fact that it can happen has deep reaching chilling effects even when it does not.

Look at the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist killed by two idiots who got paid 150.000€. The killer brothers are in jail and the rich asshole who ordered the killing is free. The fact that such a thing can happen in an EU country means that every shady business man can threaten and silence a journalist, not by killing them, just by hinting it could happen, and you will never learn anything about such cases.

I blame responsible disclosure. If your wide open infrastructure and customer data is not fair game for anyone who wants to host warez and bankrupt you, then the risk of security vulnerabilities is just another low priority business risk, we'll deal with it when it happens. It's not an existential risk.

> I would doubt Knuth would publish garbage

Rather, Knuth could publish some mediocre paper that would be instantly accepted by all the top journals, widely read, discussed and cited instead of more salient works on similar topics.

That's the problem really, excellence is rare while mediocrity is aplenty and academia is a numbers game. The mediocres with prodigious output will get the cites, tenure, TAs, lab assistants and budgets to do research and perhaps stumble onto some other mediocre result, reinforcing the cycle.

There is some talk about virtual energy providers that could agregate a large number of home users, receive an availability fee and only physically discharge during emergencies; that could work out economically and allow owners a positive revenue after depreciation, that could translate, for example, in lower prices for energy. That being said, I still think the whole fixed costs of the scheme (smart bidirectional meters, EV and charger support, coordination and administration costs etc.) would make it a money-losing proposal. A nice idea in theory, like say IP multicasting, but that cannot be made to work effectively in the real world.

The benefits of delayed charging are limited by the electric consumption of the transport sector. For an average family driving no more than 800 miles/month at 4 miles/kWh it works out less than 200kWh/month. If half of that charge is time flexible (with the rest being achieved at fastchargers or when the owner is in a hurry etc.), you get a 100 kWh/month dynamic load, a sizeable yet small fraction of the total household consumption. I would earmark that under smart-grid approaches, if correct pricing incentives are set at the meter it will happen automatically and not just for the EV charging loads.

> at basically no cost for the EV owner?

Only if you have a battery with unlimited charge cycles. This doesn't seem possible with current technology - and even if it were, manufacturers would still optimize for higher density and reasonable longevity after 100,000 miles. Most people would average a charging cycle a week, so they can't see the difference between a 2000 cycles battery and a 50,000 cycles one in the life of the car, but they can definitely feel the effects of range anxiety.

When you do daily or multiple times a day cycles, as is typical for grid applications, that's a completely different beast, for example a shallow charge cycle at 70% which increases the life 5x is much more profitable because it reduces overall battery replacement costs.

And when you factor in the much higher costs per Wh for car batteries, which are custom spare parts not mass produced commodity cells, you will find that the cost you incur in vehicle depreciation far exceeds the value you could earn from intra-day energy market speculation.

This is never going to happen. As a car owner, you are in a market competing with large providers of grid scale storage, that have large purchasing power, control over the battery chemistry and finer specifications of their hardware which is made to order for their needs etc. Meanwhile, you have a mobility-optimized low weight battery that has a single, monopoly supplier that will very likely treat the spare parts market as a profit center 5 years down the road.

You will never be able to compete because you cannot differentiate, the product is fungible so mass always wins. It's essentially the bitcoin mining rig drama, the going was good until large scale mining operations were set up, with optimized ASICs etc. After that, good luck destroying your graphics card and car battery for pennies on the dollar.

Both are probably true, some people get homeless due to addiction, and lack of a home keeps them relapsing, while also creating a social environment where other types of homeless persons - the mentally or physically disabled, elders, evacuees etc. - can get into drugs.

For a dealer, a dense community of chronic addicts is a cashcow, a market they can serve with much lower risk vs. catering to suburban teenage parties.

> needle exchanges... end up turning their neighborhood into the newest drug slum.

How do you suppose that happened? Do you think there was a severely addicted population that could not get their fix due to concerns of transmittable diseases? So were forced to quit cold turkey, at the height of their despair, for lack of sanitary injection paraphernalia? You surely realize how absurd that sounds, right?

Since you seem to be a well reasoned and articulate person, I'm genuinely curious how could a needle exchange program cause neighborhoods to turn into "drug slums"? Perhaps you are seeing a correlation with drug use that does not reveal any causality? Perhaps needle exchange programs induce normalization of drug use in a certain area, making addicts fell less rejected and thus attracting them there? But surely such a visible concentration of addicts in a certain area is just a symptom a much larger invisible problem and condemning those those affected to AIDS or Hep-C does nothing to solve the root cause?

Yes, that's exactly the model I'm referencing.

> how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago

That's easy to explain: exclusionary zoning, maximum density requirements, aesthetic rules etc are all forms of selection based on social status. Class and racial lines are strong and people strongly want to keep the "character" of their area, i.e to live near people of comparable social status.

I cannot shake the feeling that the bulk of those social benefits could be captured by offering a very compact "cage-home" like storage closet, that can be locked and allows sleeping and storing one's valuables, with access to bathroom and a minimal food preparation areas.

Nobody should be forced to sleep rough, in the cold and dirt, where they are vulnerable to rapes, theft and beatings, such a life turns the kindest soul into an animal. 20 sq. feet of lockable closet with a mattress and shelves to store one's minimal belongings could mean maintaining their humanity and preventing turning them into dangerous criminals.

This would be so cheap to offer that it could be a basic human right, I would certainly pay taxes for it before other stupidities promoted as measures against crime. It's definitely not an incentive to be poor, those who can afford can rent a larger space, it would be a minimal guaranteed, free baseline: no matter how bad you fail in life, you will still get to be treated like a human being.

True in the absolute, but you would expect that if those flows and influence would be so large, that fraction would increase too.

What's stopping a large scale privatization of the penal system? Could it be that there are incumbent interests too that compete with the private prisons, such as party appointees and horse trading in local politics which see that flow of public money as a vital resource? Could it be - since they seem to be winning the competition - that those interests in the public system have an even larger lobby power on crime prevention policies?

Not trying to take the side of the godawful private prison industry here, just tired of this simplistic leftist dichotomy: capital bad, state good. Policies are decided with political influence and power, and money is one of the many forms political power can take. A bad political system, set up to ignore the interests of society, will be gamed by both private interests and political insiders; the west tends to suffer from the first problem, but for most of the rest of the world it would be "a nice problem to have".

If so, provoking this Russian vengeance strike is the best feat of the Ukrainian army by a mile. If you can bleed 1 billion in military spending with the cost of a few deaths and an lorry filled with explosives, that's by far the most effective way to win a war: you will quickly bankrupt Russia while your own army is still able to fight.

Sounds much like the V2 rocket program used by Hitler to punish the British for their continental bombing incursions; it was largely irrelevant militarily but very expensive.

> I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps"

No. These companies were the first to get a critical mass in their respective markets or product categories. then they used that position to smother or buy out competitors and ensure their survival.

There is nothing mythical or extraordinary about what those companies did, just some mediocre people who were in the right place at the right time.