Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Okay, so your argument is that he should disclose trade secrets/confidential information and face both civil and criminal litigation and ruin his life like Edward Snowden? Before your argument was that it doesn't matter if he quits because someone else will just replace his job. This doesn't seem like a reasonable sacrifice to demand of someone, especially given the prior argument.

The original point I was making is that the fact that someone else will take the job is not a reason to keep doing that job which you view as immoral. I guess he could go full whistleblower, but I don't really feel like that's a fair standard to have of people - that takes a lot of courage and is usually quite rare. I think it's fully legitimate to quit a job you disagree with on moral grounds. I can understand that people don't want to risk being sued by a rich and powerful corporation for leaking confidential information to the public, so bringing evidence to light can be hard to do. I can also understand criticizing him for this, but I don't think most people would even forgo the paycheck in the first place for their morals, so the bar is pretty low for me.

Comment · 1 month ago
He did that because what they were doing was illegal and there was a whistle blower program he could use to confront the issue, legally. That doesn't apply here. Not clear what you're suggesting he does differently.
Comment · 1 month ago
At this point the analogy has entirely collapsed, your job is to develop AI. Unless you're advocating for some kind of sabotage or something, I'm not sure what you're really suggesting he do. If he continues to do the work he's directly contributing to the problem and harm that it you see it to be causing. Nothing is going to change if you continue working there business as usual. It's by drawing a line in the sand and refusing to take part in the problem that you're actually doing something about it, not by compromising your morals.
Comment · 1 month ago
Well we're not debating the morality of it, the question is what he should do, given that he believes that it's immoral.

In your analogy the correct thing to do would be to call the authorities to help. The problem with the analogy is that there isn't a 911 number to call for this scenario. You need to appeal to the people who have the power to do something about the situation. Quitting in a very public way is one way to get someone with that authority to do something about it. I don't really see a better alternative.

Comment · 1 month ago
You missed the point.

> Just because someone else might be willing to do it isn't a reason to continue doing it.

Hence, someone filling the position after you leave isn't a reason to continue doing it, whereas the fact that it's an immoral thing to do is a reason to stop doing it.

Someone filling the position after you leave has no bearing on the reasons that are relevant to what you ought to do here. It's like deciding to not buy a ticket to see a movie because someone else is going to buy the ticket anyways even if you don't purchase the ticket. It has no relevance to whether you should watch the movie or not, just as someone else taking the job has no relevance to whether you ought to do the job.

Comment · 1 month ago
That's not necessarily true, and you can use that argument to justify doing any immoral job. Just because someone else might be willing to do it isn't a reason to continue doing it.
Comment · 1 month ago
There's no whistleblower program for this, they're not breaking any laws. What are you proposing he should do if not this?
Comment · 4 years ago
The point of mixed reality is that you can beam people into the space. So the people in the room could watch on a TV and be there in person if they wanted, while everyone else was there in VR.
Comment · 4 years ago
Obviously rust panic is not the same as a kernel panic. What you're taking for granted is that just because rust can catch a panic that it will. A simple overflow can cause a panic. When this happens, the panic might be caught before the kernel panics, but by then the program is probably already in an undefined state. It also might not be caught at all, and cause an actual kernel panic.
Comment · 4 years ago
As far as I'm aware there's no way to reliably catch all panics. catch_unwind does not catch all panics. Handlers don't stop the program from terminating abruptly.
Comment · 4 years ago
1. As far as i'm aware there's no way to reliably catch all panics. catch_unwind does not catch all panics. 2. The whole point is that consequences of a panic are worse than the consequences of memory corruption. That's how the kernel was designed. There was an explicit design decision not to kernel panic in every situation where a logic error occurs.
Comment · 4 years ago
Splint doesn't make C memory safe. What I meant is that it doesn't prevent the same problems that Rust does. Hence, you can add a linter to rust to prevent panics. You cannot add a linter to C to make it memory safe.
Comment · 4 years ago
Easy. Linus for being insufferable.
Comment · 4 years ago
I think you're missing the point Linus made. Panicking is safer from a memory safety perspective, but it's not from a kernel perspective. You'll lose all the file changes that are not saved, you'll risk having disk written in a bad state which can be catastrophic, etc.
Comment · 4 years ago
Linters can catch panics, linters for C won't catch memory issues which is what rust prevents.

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