Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
You said that's not really true and the described exactly how it's true, what did you mean?
Comment · 1 year ago
I see what you mean now. The way you phrased it came off as much more a critique of the language used and/or the developers using it, rather than the simple fact of it being a rewrite of a complex tool.

Also does `sudo` not have a spec or any existing unit tests for the previous vulnerabilities that they can benefit from? I'd be pretty shocked if there wasn't a lot of regression testing and documentation available to anyone implementing something this vital.

Comment · 1 year ago
Transpilers in general tend to be significantly less well maintained and optimised than direct APIs
Comment · 1 year ago
> I am pretty sure the Rust version has a lot of logic bugs

What makes you say that? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely interested.

Comment · 2 years ago
It makes sense that a very popular language would be being used to make one of the most popular projects.
Comment · 2 years ago
You seem to think the issue is noise, but have you considered noise might just be the most noticeable symptom of general city living? i.e. having much less personal space, nature, privacy, and free time to spend in them?
Comment · 2 years ago
No no, maybe he's right and there are only 8536 ways to sort a deck of cards, the casinos have taken us all for fools!
Comment · 2 years ago
Well, 0 isn't really possible, but assuming you're just asking "What would the impact be on the world if me made matrix multiplication trivial" in the same way that people ask what making a room temperature superconductor would do for us.

The answer is quite a lot in computing terms, matrix multiplication is used everywhere, most notably at the moment, neural networks use almost entirely matrix multiplication, so their power consumption would drop almost entirely, and correspondingly we could scale them up enormously, your phone could run GPT5 locally as long as it had the storage space, high fidelity computer vision everywhere would become trivial, Google Glass might even become useful.

Previously very limited engineering simulations like weather forecasting would improve by leaps and bounds.

Basically everything would change all at once because we'd have effectively made p = np, any problem you can turn into a matrix multiplication (so basically most maths problems) would become solvable.

At the moment we use hardware like GPU's and TPU's in the case of AI to make matrix multiplication much quicker and the companies that make them have recently become some of the biggest in the world because it's so important to everything we do now to be able to multiply matrices quickly.

Comment · 2 years ago
> Most real world buttons are elevated off the surface to let us know it is pressable, but digital buttons now just have a white or colored pill shape around it. I can't recall the last time I saw a pill shaped button in the real world.

Well not really, real world buttons are elevated off the surface because of the practicalities of producing buttons and attaching them to a surface, some of the material has to be above the surface and some below for it to clamp on. Buttons are also usually produced as separate components and thus tend to be round or square because it's more mechanically simple and suits the most use cases, labels can be put around the button.

Computers have completely different mechanics, all buttons can be a bespoke size and shape, and they're inherently not tactile, the pill shape is just the easiest way to allow a button with variable width for variable font sized text, because it's easier to put the text on the button itself digitally than irl.

Comment · 2 years ago
Microsoft teams doesn't load slowly because of the animations, you can turn all of them off if you mess around with the settings and your windows registry enough. It loads slowly because MS have a huge incentive to keep adding features and almost no incentive to optimise it because the software is almost always purchased by large institutions, half of whom have vendor lock in already, and imposed on the people who actually use it day to day, who have no power to change it.
Comment · 2 years ago
I'm skeptical of the idea that anything is going to derive intelligence from the bottom up, but I'll be super impressed if that's how it goes.
Comment · 2 years ago
In theory that would work but compilers and toolchains are far too clever now and always liable to change, so there's no way to know that in the future it won't be optimised back into shortcutting and revealing the timings.
Comment · 2 years ago
A friend of mine has a literal heapmap, i.e. an infrared thermal camera, and that actually displays obvious outliers in striped red and white like digital camcorders show overexposed areas. It's really useful because it works both as an alert for hotspots, and also as a reminder to ignore them.
Comment · 4 years ago
Most of them are bullshit, and the ones that aren't are ripe and ready to be used to bullshit people.

Every new kind of forensics is treated like it's going to be the solution to solving crime, when what it really is, is yet another excuse not to put the time and effort into investigation, the one thing that actually solves crimes.

CCTV has the same problem, we think it will solve crimes, when it can actually do a lot, but we constantly see cases of crimes happening in public or on camera where the police haven't even taken the half hour it would take to ask local businesses for their footage. And when they even do _that_, then they don't rarely bother to follow up leads.

Policing is just an endless, endless stream of people with what are actually very important jobs who only go into it for exactly the wrong reasons.

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