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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • I admit to not knowing how running an open source project goes, but wanting more contributors seems like the wrong metric compared to better contributors.

    I understand the pitfalls of C are not limited to segmentation faults, but I suspect it would be more productive to fix C by including some of Rust’s better ideas than to throw it away, as seems to be the current trend.

    I don’t think Rust is wholly bad, to be clear, but it seems over-engineered to me, and the fact its useful new features don’t even completely work (see rust-cve) isn’t very encouraging.

    I would recommend listening to Jonathan Blow’s opinion on Rust, which I tend to agree with. I personally think I’m just going to stick with C until Rust either becomes the standard, or I retire and let the next generation worry about that.


  • Why do you want sophisticated code ? That word seems out of place from the other two to me.

    Rust doesn’t introduce the same problems as C, but it sure does introduce a lot of other problems in making code overly complicated. Lifetimes and async are both leaky abstractions (and don’t even work as advertised, as rust-cve recently demonstrated), macros can hide control flow…

    C is unsafe, sure, but also doesn’t pretend to be safe. C is also stupid simple, and that’s a good thing : you can’t just slap ArcMutexes around, because by the time you know how to code them yourself you also know why you shouldn’t do that.

    I hope Rust can reach a point where its safety model can be formally proven, and we have a formal specification and a stable ABI so we don’t have to hard-compile every crate into the binary.

    But I personally expect something with some of Rust’s ideas, but cleaned up, to do that instead. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if C itself ends up absorbing some of Rust’s core ideas in an upcoming standard.


  • The improvement here is switching from interpreted to compiled. It could have been C, Zig, Odin, or even C++ (but thank Satan it isn’t C++)

    I’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding. I’m generally distrustful of languages without a standardized specification, and I don’t really like that Rust has been added to the Linux Kernel. Torvalds giving in to public opinion isn’t something I thought I’d live to see…

    I get the segmentation fault thing, but to be blunt, that sounds like a skill issue more than an actual computer science problem.

    Maybe if things were less rushed and quality control was regarded more highly, we wouldn’t have such insanities as an email client (or an anything client) written in JavaScript in the first place.

    Rust is likely going to suffer the same problem as JS, where people indirectly include 6,000 crates and end up with 30 critical CVEs in their email client that they can’t even fix because the affected crate was abandoned 5 years ago…







  • This is pointless nitpicking. I agree with the definition, but presenting it this way is not useful. None of them think menopause removes your sex, that is not what anyone means by “sex change”. Not us, not them. I’m not lending credence to anything.

    “Sex” as it is usually defined is the ability to either be fertilized and bear children, or fertilize someone who can. To my knowledge, no human who has ever possessed either ability has ever possessed the other one. We are getting close to making one of those possible, though (in the MtF direction).

    This is what they mean when they say sex can’t change, and this is what they think you’re telling them is possible.

    The other things you mention, which may scientifically be part of sex, is not what anyone means in casual conversation. Those may change, voluntarily or not, yes. But the main thing people mean when they talk about someone’s “sex” cannot change yet, although it can be lost, or never obtained at all.



  • Being trans myself, I will gladly tell you no one can change their biological sex yet (meaning, reproductive sex). I do hope science gets there though !

    I don’t even think anyone can change their gender ! Some people’s gender changes on its own, but I’ve just always been a woman ; and most trans people are like me.

    The thing we actually disagree about is whether someone’s gender and biological sex can be separate. But it’s just a scientific fact that they are.




  • We don’t know. However, no one cares about your personal photos ; no one will ever attempt to hack you specifically unless you’re a high value target (in which case, stop hosting your photos anywhere immediately)

    The only thing that could get your photos is if an undiscovered backdoor is exploited by someone doing some sort of a mass attack. As far as I know, they’re pretty rare, because people with the means to do them generally have a specific set of people they care about (which you are unlikely to be a part of).