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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2068 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 31, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Shower thought: an impregnation fetish is not strictly speaking a fetish.

I have long speculated along the lines of that if these guys are truly as ruthless as they are reputed to be they're going to figure out a way on how to use smartphones to promote the so called 'breeding kink' in impressionable teens of both sexes under their jurisdictions.

So... what's the Elon deficit reduction strategy here? Get like 5-10% of the government to resign, maybe fire another 5-10%, then go to congress and say look we can spend 10-20% less on salaries, go ahead and pass a reduced budget through reconciliation?

This actually sounds not too crazy.

Hopefully losing 10-20% of the work force doesn't cause a corresponding 10-20% reduction in government revenues but... it's kind of hard to see how it would.

EDIT: maybe something's wrong with me but I consider this topic fun and not weighty which is why I posted it here in the Friday thread. Seems like it has created a more typical CW thread discussion. My bad.

Build up industry and slash costs and pensions allowing boomers to expire in the style they've become accustomed to.

Or maybe just get to enough compute that you can sell Boomers on living more austere lifestyles for the greater glory of the US of A. I believe once we get AGI the better models are going to be able to market welcoming Palestinian immigration to the Israeli settler movement so convincing boomers to live more frugally seems like a no brainer.

Payroll expenses are about 5% of federal spending. Laying off half of the employees would have only a minimal effect on total spending.

Right, though I meant more like the general sketch of the strategy. Congress authorizes spending and revenues are raised and they don't stop being raised just because the executive stops spending it.

So, if it's politically impossible for Congress to pass a bill that cuts expenses by 20%, can it be done in reverse? The executive stops spending 20%, damage done, they own it. But then Congress can just rubber stamp the reduction after the fact? And since it's revenue neutral (negative actually) it only needs the reconciliation process to pass (simple, filibuster proof majority)?

Anything's possible, because laws aren't real, but the President has a constitutional mandate to "take care that the laws be executed faithfully," which includes making the expenditures specified in law. Anyone who's "harmed" by the reduction in spending (e.g. by getting laid off, or by not getting the benefit of the legally mandated spending) has standing to sue, and contrary to the histrionic claims of the left, I think the conservative majority on the Court actually cares about upholding the law.

How has your country devolved into this? You are letting an unelected bilionaire do whatever he wants? And you are ok with that? 'It sounds not too crazy' no it actually sounds absolutely nuts to anyone with a functioning brain. Even if the federal system is that bloated you think musk , with no specialized knowledge, and a bunch of his yes men will fix it without fucking up your country?

Is it fair to call him unelected when Trump was elected and everyone seemed to understand that "power to Elon" was part of the platform? The power held by Elon now surely is still less than the total power held by all members of the federal workforce who are not directly elected under a "normal" administration; why was that not grounds for concern?

Well, in a functional organization you would say we have $4 trillion in revenues and $6 trillion in expenses, year over year. This is obviously unsustainable. We need to cut $2 trillion in expenses or we go bankrupt.

So you ask every department head to produce plans to cut their spending by one third. It's hard but they do it and you implement the cuts and layoffs and move on.

That's not the government we have though.

In our government such a process would take years and the conclusion would be that we can't cut anything. The "experts" would not comply. They probably don't even know how to comply, because they've been shielded from "efficiency or death" forces their whole lives.

Faced with this, you can do it in reverse. Randomly shoot big holes in the agencies. Then drip money back into them. It'll be now be clear what roles were most essential and should be filled back in first.

Is this ideal? No. But what's even more not ideal is the current trajectory.

He was elected. We elected Trump and Elon’s presence is Trump’s will. Elon was important for getting Trump elected, too.

We now know control of the U.S. government's infrastructure has a price tag: About $300 million.

EDIT: Several of you missed the point of my post: Elon donated that amount to get into Trump's good graces to form a faux agency currently wreaking unnecessary damage to the government.

No, you don't. If Biden admin wasn't such a nest of total incompetents Trump would never have won. Ditto for the Uniparty hating the US citizen and wishing him to just die quietly.

If they weren' like that Trump would have no openings to exploit.

Also, it was much, much cheaper to be a functionary in the Biden white house with arguably more control over a smaller subset of federal policy.

One of the unsettling things about democracy is complete randos (and their delegates) can be elected and take control of the entire country despite having built none of it, yes.

I mean, if you ignore the price tag on the DNCs efforts. About $1 billion. If you are going to reduce it to "Whoever spends more buys America", you gotta include that the losing party spent almost 3x more on their failed bid. So perhaps there was a bit more to it than that.

Anybody play Diablo 4? I have a bunch of boss mats on this season and would be happy to run ppl through.

I got it for free with my 4090, but never got around to playing it. I finally beat Diablo I and II last year with a buddy. What are boss mats?

Boss materials. For endgame bosses you have to farm items to summon them

Typically people group up because you know if we both have mats and we alternate summoning the boss, we get 2x the loot.

Would love to have you join! It’s a great game imo. I’d be happy to help you get your bearings.

Interesting! Just how much grinding is there? After I beat Diablo 2 LoD end boss I lost interest in getting any better loot on the next difficulty up, I’d rather play a new class however that means playing through it again at base difficulty.

I just got the game a week ago, been having a good time so far! Will DM you.

I don't normally watch war or action movies, but I watched Black Hawk Down (2001) last night. And it's fantastic. Ridley Scott used to really know how to make movies. He's made several that figure somewhere on my top 50 list. Blade Runner, Gladiator, Spy Game (edit: this is by the other Scott), Kingdom of Heaven, and Black Hawk Down. In recent years he has shat the bed, reportedly , with both Napoleon and Gladiator 2 (haven't watched them myself and don't know if I will). Did he fall into some ideological trap or what happened?

Anyhow, I was both thrilled and touched by BHD. The music is fantastic (Hans Zimmer). And the cast has so many good actors. Might actually watch it again with the commentary track on.

Kingdom of Heaven only recovered acclaim with the Director's Cut. It outlined backstory about the motivations of critical characters that was otherwise nonsensical and told a better story.

I don't think such a rework is possible for Napoleon or Gladiator 2.

All Ridley Scott movies are deemed hack-work crap when they first come out. Then 10 years after that they are pretty solid overlooked diamonds in the rough. Ten or twenty years after that they are modern classics. I suspect that will happen to Napoleon and the others.

Gladiator was the second highest grossing film of 2000 and was nominated for 12 Oscars and won 5 including best picture and best actor. That's not hack worthy crap by any means.

All Ridley Scott movies are deemed hack-work crap when they first come out.

Simply incorrect.

True but with huge caveats. Sometimes it isn't really the same movie that's being reexamined; the movie is "better" because Scott released a new cut that people preferred. Kingdom of Heaven is a very notorious example, probably Blade Runner too, though I think it was vastly better received than KoH.

Movies like Exodus haven't become better received in time. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are still highly divisive (depending on where you stand Prometheus may have aged worse because of what Alien: Covenant did to its dangling plot threads).

Movies like Gladiator and American Gangster were well received at the time.

I recall Gladiator was fairly well-received when it came out. I mean it got five Oscars including for best pic.

Napoleon was crap.

Ridley Scott is 87. I imagine that he's been handing off duties on the film that he used to manage himself.

Ideology has little to do with it I think. He doesn't give a shit about accuracy in general if it contradicts what he wants to do - one of the major complaints about Napoleon afaict. Gladiator certainly wasn't historically accurate and yet was very good.

Scott imo has always been a high variance director. The problem with Gladiator 2 and some of his other stuff -compared to The Last Duel for example - is that the script is awful.

The new problem he has though is that he's old and seems to want to bang out movies while he can and so just takes the path of least resistance. A cinematographer of his was complaining about it recently iirc.

Gladiator also had a messy script but he and Crowe pulled something amazing from it. He may simply not have the stamina to do that any more.

I read that recently Scott prefers to put a ton of cameras at lots of different angles around a scene, which ostensibly lets the actors have more freedom to move around and not worry about blocking, but also gets so much coverage that he can do far fewer takes and then edit everything together in post. This makes his filmmaking super fast for the scale, but also renders a lot of his shots and scenes less interesting and well-crafted.

Might be a combination of the factors brought up by you and @Loquat

Over confident director with little time left, no one vetoing him, decaying fluid intelligence due to age, lacking in stamina as well and thus taking the path of least resistance instead of taking the time for a complicated decision making process on each point of difficulty...

I can't speak for Scott in particular, but there's a known issue where a creative type gets too successful and then starts being allowed to do whatever they want, with nobody around to tell them, "this one thing is dumb and your movie/book/etc will be better without it," and it turns out they really did produce better work when they were subject to external veto.

What's a piece of media made recently that you genuinely, uncontrollably laughed at?

Feel like I've been in a comedy desert for years and wondering if I'm just not looking in the right places.

Big Fat Quiz of the Year from last month was the last thing I really belly laughed at.

Tires was hilarious, as @cjet79 said. Also while it's not new, I just recently watched Derry Girls for the first time and it was quite funny as well.

Past decade - MDE world peace

The Tim Dillon Show during its peak (somewhere between 2019-2022) seemed made in a lab with explicit purpose of making me laugh.

Tim Dillon best hits in my opinion: the corporate steak house rant, 'best podcaster in the world', 'leaving austin', describing 'big mike' to Joe Rogan, the unaired TBS tournament of laughs material, his rant on gin martinis.

The first episode of Brooklynn 99.

Well there is this: https://instagram.com/p/DA8kWHdPBRw/

But for something longer format the rehab stories from John Mulaney: Baby J were hilarious.

Anthony Jeselnik is great, his jokes pretty much all follow the same bait-and-switch format, but they always land, the bit on Eric Clapton's son always gets me

Hundreds of Beavers

Ari Schaffir standup. Both "Jew" and "Americas Sweetheart"

The Netflix series Tires.

Gilly and Keeves skit comedy. Season 2 was especially awesome.

Made recently... hmm. I'm almost coming up blank.

I thought Banshees of Inisherin was great, but I don't think my laughter was uncontrollable.

I keep being somewhat amazed by what R1 can do. It's really, really good at writing. Anyway:

Question: how do I buy API access? Deepseek's order page seems down. Perplexity.AI is really expensive going the obvious route. Anyone knows something about that.

Answer: probably the best way is using OpenRouter.ai . There's some free API access too, but it's kind of slow.

Question: did anyone manage to get the R1 model, which uses some novel form of selective quantisation and can allegedly run at a modest speed on a 4090 running?

Answer: .. yeah, you can run a dynamically quantised R1 but the speed is going to be <1 token.

Some fun stuff:

Youtube video: How to make an AI girlfriend smarter than you using deepeseek.

Must see. Guy jailbreaks Deepseek by telling it to roleplay as Gemini and talk about Tianamen. It shitposts with the best.

After following the guide: setting up WSL2, installing uv, installing vllm we got DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B running on a 4090. Must have made some major error as it runs at only .6 t/s which is only sufficient for very, very old people. Should run at perhaps 4-6 at least judging by what others have seen. Update: no error. Unless you have god-tier CPU/memory you can expect <3 tokens from big models. You need GPUs for more token /s.

Also people, just use Docker images with Text Generator Inference.. it's probably as good as vllm and it can also (allegedly) handle dynamically quantized LLMs which means you can load a better model into less memory and run it. vllm struggles with that.

I haven't tried fiddling with local models (v-card too weak) but I'll second the mention of openrouter.ai below, the DeepSeek/DeepInfra providers still work with periodic hitches but seem to slowly unshitten themselves. Notably, some OR providers also host R1 for literally free - the real deal far as I can tell, too, at least I see no difference between free and paid except the free one is limited by OR's overall limit of free model requests per day (100? don't know for sure). FWIW I've been doing some pretty cringe things over OR for the past month and so far received no warnings or anything, I'm not sure they moderate at all.

some pretty cringe things over OR fo

You mean especially cringe or just the run of the mill cringe of using Skynet's prepubescent phase to generate erotic stimuli or pleasant daydreams?

Everyone's doing that. According to OpenRouter stats seems like 5% of the tokens they're serving are going towards such ends. I guess there's also a fair amount of non-erotic roleplay there too, though.

I haven't tried fiddling with local models (v-card too weak)

It seems to be kinda a problem. The biggest difference between the 14b r1 reasoners and the 32b ones is supposedly that the latter write much better. But loading the 32b is quite hard, it doesn't fit into a 4090, you need several.

Between not needing to spend most of your waking time using it, running the stuff locally is probably only of people whose ERP is actually criminal. I imagine there is drama about underage ERP out there right ?

You mean especially cringe or just the run of the mill cringe of using Skynet's prepubescent phase to generate erotic stimuli or pleasant daydreams?

I don't delineate "degrees" of cringe, the base level as it were is already enough for me to sidestep the topic of chatbots IRL whenever it comes up and generally hide my power level. Tbh I have no idea how people openly post chatlogs, if my chats somehow got leaked and connected to my identity I'd unironically commit sudoku he says, continuing to use openrouter. I'm not cut out to be a proper degen.

I imagine there is drama about underage ERP out there right ?

Well, yeah. There's also the recent FUZZ incident - chub dot ai (formerly unmoderated, made by and for 4chuds; now normie-fying with alarming speed as Lore courts the janitorai zoomer audience) has at some point implemented some kind of automatic tagging system that targets suspected underage/loli cards, replaces the card image with a black square and adds a FUZZ tag that prevents the card from showing up in search results outside NSFL and partly locks the card from editing. Essentially a shadowban.

Predictably, this has caused thread-wide meltdowns and cries of INTERNET CENCORSHIP (a meme from the characterai coomageddon era when people were redacting their bots en masse - quickly prompting "temporary" editing restrictions which, as it often is with temporary restrictions, remain policy to this day). IIRC Lore is a britbong and thus might be actually legally culpable for the CSAM-by-technicality hosted on his platform.

if my chats somehow got leaked and connected to my identity

Tbh I've been wondering what % of people genuinely have embarrassing interests in this regard. My own are mildly novel and generally considered bad but tbh a thorough audit of DMs and forum posts out there would indicate that I understand the difference between IRL and fantasy and been known to tell girls online to please think about themselves and their parents before doing self-destructive things people find hot.

Tbh I've been wondering what % of people genuinely have embarrassing interests in this regard.

...Let's just say I am literally the guy from this meme, except the split skews more like 70/30, and I'm not telling which side is the majority.

a thorough audit of DMs and forum posts

You seem to be making the erroneous assumption that an outraged mob would make such an audit.

I honestly can't think of a single time a mob related incident happened in this context.

I don't even use AI chatbots, but I've been keeping a bunch of cards bookmarked as the cunny in the coalmine for normification. They're all still there, and the list is visible on characterhub.org without an account. You're saying that if they've got the fire symbol in the tags they basically can't be searched?

And yes, the UK has gone completely insane on this. Guy needs to divest or get the hell out right away, because they're giving people longer sentences for "problematic drawings" than for gangraping girls and selling them as kebab meat.

the list is visible on characterhub.org

Yes, keyword being on characterhub - something of an "open secret" is that the website is quite literally two-faced. There is characterhub.org (formerly chub.ai), the OG as it were, and then there is chub.ai (formerly venus.chub.ai), a more normie-friendly frontend which is basically janitorai, down to selling its own built-in chatbot service. The backend serving both is the same, but venus/chub has more stringent default filters - for example, filtering the loli tag by default even if the card itself is SFW, and not showing the SFW/NSFW toggle at all unless you're logged in, necessitating an account.

It's actually a neat trick on Lore's behalf, which is why I'm reluctant to shit on him despite the screeching of goons and him making certain concessions to the zoomer crowd; if he wanted to toss chuds under the bus he'd have simply deprecated the characterhub side a long time ago (although he did stop maintaining it). You can also still (for now?) disable the filters on chub to show all cards, even FUZZed ones, although there might be more knobs to wrangle. Clearly he still cares at least a little, even knowing for a fact chuds would rather commit cybercrime and steal keys than pay for his models.

If you're curious this is the full list of casualties - notably, even characterhub won't show FUZZed cards unless you're logged in. On casual scroll it's mostly really out-there shit, and a quick browse shows none of my own bookmarks are affected either, so I can't say I'm very affected but the tendency is certainly ominous.

Word around the block is that the "AI tagging system" is in fact Actually Indians, or rather Actually Ianitors - the anon in the link above mentions that some cards with tame images (but NSFW versions inside a catbox link in description) still got FUZZed, meaning someone had to check, meaning cards seem to be tagged manually. Said anon even managed (I lost the archive link, you'll have to take my word for it) to make the case to jannies and actually got some of his loli cards reinstated. This is about ethics in gaming journalism chatbot services, you see.

You're saying that if they've got the fire symbol in the tags they basically can't be searched?

I don't really use the chub side but IIRC fire symbol = NSFW card, you need to turn off the filter in profile settings first (which in turn requires an account).

And yes, the UK has gone completely insane on this.

I know the general tendency but haven't seen specific examples (about specifically AI CSAM, at least).

Isn't it well within AI functionality to check links in description and parse images therein? At least the most common image hosting websites.

Yes, it is. AIs can now figure out obscure bilingual puns, basic classification is child's play even if you just used some general use instances.

normie-friendly frontend which is basically janitorai,

Just what is on chub.ai ? Straight up sexual violence ? JanitorAI is pretty wild if you check the 'limitless' cards.

Straight up sexual violence ?

pushes up glasses I believe the correct term is "ryona".

Also no I'm just talking shit, I never actually used janitorai, but characterhub definitely does have that and more. Enable NSFW, sort by popular/downloads, and be amazed.

I know the general tendency but haven't seen specific examples (about specifically AI CSAM, at least).

@SteveAgain is likely referring to legal changes like this, which seem to be based on sentiments like these.

...Yeah, that's about what I expected, thanks.

The IT worker, who used AI software to make his own indecent images of children using text prompts, said he would never view such images of real children because he is not attracted to them. He claimed simply to be fascinated by the technology.

Let him who uses a lora and never once throws in [nsfw, naked] for the fuck of it cast the first stone. I'm not big on SD but even I did this, if only to kek at the result and move on.

I will begrudgingly note however that they do have a point here - can't speak for imagegen, but chatbots (if my impression from threads is anything to go by) absolutely do have a real propensity for awakening fetishes people never knew they had.

Yeah. The other day they jailed a guy for 18+ years for making lora character models for people's OCs. Literally harsher punishments for drawings than actual rape.

Gotta keep up the "umm actually white men are the majority of sex offenders" narrative somehow I guess, even if it takes making up imaginary crimes as well as ignoring real ones.

For api access, openrouter should work if you're not doing anything sensitive.

... you think you'd get busted if you used openrouter to help you with writing malware etc?

Likely no. But if you fed a bunch of high-value data through openrouter for natural language processing purposes, I think there's a decent chance said high-value data finds its way into future training datasets.

Oh yeah... I think that any data you enter into such a service should be treated as published..

Well, I've been switching back and forth between Windows 10 and Linux Mint for a few weeks now. Windows for work, and Linux for pleasure. I stopped trying to have steam share a steam library between both OS's. For one, Linux and Windows kept fighting over whether the linux or windows versions of the games should be installed. Second, I saw a lot of posts about how Linux eventually corrupts NTFS drives if you try to use them for anything other than simple data storage. So that's a thing I guess.

I've been playing Doom 2016 in Linux thanks to Proton, and it's pretty OK. Every now and again pulling up the menu tanks the framerate, but not consistently. Outside of that it runs fantastic. Because I'm a fucking nerd, I got some simple C programming with SDL set up, as well as a Rust dev environment because I decided I need to learn that. I hate it. It disagrees with all my sensibilities about "talking computer", and thus far I find it's constructs around "borrowing" references silly and contrived, especially in light of being able to assign unsafe sections of code that ignore it's memory safety rules. I guess it assumes you'll be responsible with that, but it feels like a half measure to me, and no replacement for actual skill. All the same, since I mostly work on government contracts, a day may come where it's a requirement.

Anyways, Linux seems like a super viable alternative to Windows these days thanks to Proton. If my work didn't require windows, I'd try to shift over to it entirely. But since a local instance of IIS is essential in my day to day work, that's incredibly unlikely.

Windows for work, and Linux for pleasure.

Funny, for me it is the opposite. I use Linux for work, (plus for some pleasure like posting here, some light gaming) and Win for pleasure (gaming only).

Second, I saw a lot of posts about how Linux eventually corrupts NTFS drives if you try to use them for anything other than simple data storage.

Personally, I would not use NTFS outside of windows much. Storage is cheap enough that getting a separate partition or even disk per OS seems preferable. In any case, you want some backup strategy. Some people will use a NTFS partition to share data between the operating systems (as linux support for ntfs is better than windows support for ext).

With regard to rust (which I have yet to learn), my understanding is that it is that the aim of the language is to provide an environment which can be as safe as Java with no runtime overhead over C, with a particular focus on thread safety. This means that you have to bother a lot annotating the lifetime of a reference in places where C/C++ would just be 'whatever, enjoy your nasal demons if you get it wrong and do a use-after-free'.

Of course, not every piece of code which is safe can be proven to a compiler to be safe. Rice's theorem and all that. Or it might be that you need to call some C function or do I/O using a device mapped to memory. Thus unsafe.

I think that from the mindset of an auditor looking for security vulnerabilities, there is still a giant difference between C and rust. In C, every line is potentially dangerous, and you need to spread your attention wide. By contrast, unsafe blocks stick out. Now, it might be that the author decided to put everything in unsafe blocks or equivalently have a function to write to arbitrary memory addresses which he calls in a zillion places, but then you can just report that that code is generally unsafe. If there are just a few unsafe blocks, you can think long and hard about when these blocks are entered, why they might be correct and so on.

It disagrees with all my sensibilities about "talking computer", and thus far I find it's constructs around "borrowing" references silly and contrived, especially in light of being able to assign unsafe sections of code that ignore it's memory safety rules. I guess it assumes you'll be responsible with that, but it feels like a half measure to me, and no replacement for actual skill.

lol, I'll put this in hardcore WoW terms: many imagine skill as being able to stylishly finesse your way out of thorny situations; anyone who's ever succeeded at this game mode knows the real skill is not getting yourself into bad situations in the first place. For example, Xaryu -- professional WoW streamer and many-time rank-1 PVP gladiator -- died in the harpy cave in an extremely stylish way. In his next run, did he learn how to super-skill the harpy cave even betterer? Well, yes, in the truly high-IQ way: he decided going in there was a terrible decision in the first place and he wouldn't do so this time. He hit 60 on that character.

This is the difference between a C++ developer mindset and a Rust developer mindset. It is the humility to accept that you are, in fact, not skilled enough to get it right all the time, so you should stop playing with fire in the first place.

This is the difference between a C++ developer mindset and a Rust developer mindset. It is the humility to accept that you are, in fact, not skilled enough to get it right all the time, so you should stop playing with fire in the first place.

I think that argument just isn't supported by the evidence of 40 years of computers more or less working just fine. People are skilled enough to just get it right enough of the time. I think arguments otherwise are just Rust fanatics pretending the history of computer can be broken up into Pre-Rust and Post-Rust eras.

The problem is that suddenly, thanks to the internet, literally every single line of code needs to become a hardened attack surface. "Exploits" didn't matter in a pre-internet age, and I also question how much Rust will really address them. I doubt at the end of the day a Windows written increasingly in Rust will prove more secure than a Windows written in C. I think Rust is necessitated more by the falling skill level of corporate programmers than anything else, and I also doubt it will remediate that problem. If anything treating Rust as a panacea for a lack of skill will only make the problems worse. Less buffer overflow exploits perhaps, still plenty of attack surface for malicious actors to abuse.

All that is an aside though to my dislike of Rust, which I'm only learning for professional reasons. I said it disagrees with my sensibilities about "talking computer", and let me elaborate on that.

I want to bit-fuck the hardware I paid for however I wish. I want to bend over my mechanical slave and force it to do my bidding without a single complaint. I have friends who gravitate towards LISP or Go, I gravitate towards assembly. I want to be at the metal with a big spiked club, with the CPU to afraid to talk back. Because I don't tolerate backtalk from my machines.

I think that argument just isn't supported by the evidence of 40 years of computers more or less working just fine.

Just looking at the last 40 days of computers is enough to support "less" rather than "more". My favorite from quickly skimming reports from the last month or two would probably be Rsync contains six vulnerabilities: "When combined, the first two vulnerabilities (heap buffer overflow and information leak) allow a client to execute arbitrary code on a device that has an Rsync server running. The client requires only anonymous read-access to the server, such as public mirrors. Additionally, attackers can take control of a malicious server and read/write arbitrary files of any connected client. Sensitive data, such as SSH keys, can be extracted, and malicious code can be executed by overwriting files such as /.bashrc or /.popt."

The vulnerabilities are "present within versions 3.3.0 and below" of software that has been heavily used for nearly 30 years now. I'll agree with you that this is "thanks to the internet", but can we really call it "suddenly" now that the internet is four decades old, especially for cases like this where the software was specifically written to make use of the internet? I'm sympathetic with (and a perpetrator of) mistakes of the form "Joe writes a program that reads a file, and expects it to be used by very clever people reading only files that they and their personally-known friends/coworkers created, but then it becomes more popular and now every nescient email user who double-clicks strange attachments is one JoesInstaller away from putting a backdoor on their computer." But for web browsers, mass-market software, servers listening for arbitrary TCP connections, etc., surely there's a better solution to e.g. heap buffer overflows than expecting every software author to finally Git Gud.

I mean, the person reverse-engineering the Mac M1 GPU and building a Linux driver for it is doing so in Rust. I don’t know how much more bare-metal you can get than that.

Rust isn’t about gaining safety by being far from the hardware, the way memory managed languages with runtimes are; it’s about giving the systems programmer a mental model that actually has some degree of engineering sense behind it. You seem to have the impression that C++’s danger is what makes it an appealing tool, but the danger is to the user not accomplishing their intended goal, not to an enemy: it’s a kitchen knife which is all blade and no handle. Moar blaDe doesn’t make the knife better at cutting food into sizes and shapes you want for your sandwich.

And disdain for C++ long predates Rust. If you need to copy your opinions from someone high-status, I’ll defer to Linus Torvalds on the matter.

While I do find the fanaticism around Rust offputting, especially considering how gay it is, the language itself is actually grounded in a better theoretical foundation than its legacy competitors.

While I do find the fanaticism around Rust offputting, especially considering how gay it is, the language itself is actually grounded in a better theoretical foundation than its legacy competitors.

You know, this reminds me of another thing I immediately hated about Rust. They took unions and renamed them enums.

Now in fairness, I've worked in probably over a dozen codebases across 20 years and never once organically encountered anyone using a union. I've never encountered an API that uses unions as their preferred input or output types. It's a language feature I'm aware of, but in my professional and hobbyist work in C, C++, C#, Java, Python (ugh), Javescript (hurk) or anything I've forgotten, I've never seen them actually used. So if Rust wants to pull a fast one on people who slept through that day of class and never learned about a union, and pretend it's a fancy new enum they came up with. whatever. I even think it's kind of clever how they use them and really made them a core part of the language.

But it's also just so fucking presumptuous, to take two pretty well established language features, and mix them up. I tried to google a little, like, have other more modern languages been doing this for a while? All those dorky functional languages nobody does any actual professional work in? I didn't turn up shit. Seems Rust might be the first language to take unions and pretend they are enums. I mean, whatever, it's not hard, it doesn't stop me. I just hate it.

Rust does have normal C++-style unions, though they're a late and fairly controversial addition for the reasons you mention. I'll admit that I've used them occasionally in internal code (especially networking or protocol development, where hardware developers love throwing in 'this next four bytes could be an int or a float' in rev 1.0.1a after you've built your entire reader around structs), but I'd probably ask anyone who used them as an input in an API what they were smoking.

In higher-abstraction languages than C++, that sorta behavior either isn't available and/or forgo the performance and memory-specific benefits for dumb-programmer-safety. TypeScript unions or Java sealed interfaces are doing the same thing at the level of a definition -- it's a field you can put any of a limited number of options in! -- and you'd absolutely never use them for overlapping purposes. On the other hand, C#'s even more limited than Java on that use case, and I come across places it'd make sense to use pretty regularly, so maybe I'm just bitching.

That may be why a lot of their more type-theory focused stuff fell under a different name than the TypeScript-style union types.

I think the Rust enum overload is downstream of a lot of the behaviors you'll see in Java or Kotlin; I've encouraged FIRST students to use similar designs to hold different configuration values for easy toggling of modes or states. Not sure who first made enums that broke from the C(++) limit of one-value-per, but given the amount of C++ code I've seen where enums were used to map various flags intended for bitwise addition, probably a pretty early one.

have other more modern languages been doing this for a while?

Mixing up enums and unions? Not that I know of. Repurposing perfectly well-defined words in misleadingly confusing ways? Since before I was born, including with the most basic building blocks of code, by calling subroutines "functions". Maybe they'd never thought hard enough about side effects or imagined things like memoization, but at the very least they should have gotten the "a function is a rule that assigns to each input exactly one output" lecture by grade 8.

I'm annoyed at Rust for the same reason in the opposite direction. They added sum types, knew they added sum types, but called them "enums" - why?

the language itself is actually grounded in a better theoretical foundation than its legacy competitors

Something every single functional language has, technically correctly, claimed.

There is a reason why functional languages are created- usually an obsession with safety and mathematical purity over all else; that reason is also inextricably linked to why every other language just takes the parts of those languages that enhance one's ability to reason imperatively about the code and leaves the rest.

You seem to have the impression that C++’s danger is what makes it an appealing tool

Inbuilt disdain of "computer says no because reasons" not enough? But then, that depends on thinking that "shipping product that works well enough" is more important than "mathematically correct, but your competition beat you to market by a month", and because Rust is developed by those who emphasize the latter, and not the former, it's going to make compromises in development speed for that safety (which is why everyone tends to bitch about the borrow checker).

Rust is not a replacement for C++. Rust is a replacement for Ada.

Inbuilt disdain of "computer says no because reasons" not enough?

What exactly are you arguing against here? Error messages at compile time? There’s plenty of interpreted languages that crash at runtime if that floats your boat.

Presumably, such people enjoy removing the annoying "check engine" light and just waiting for their engine to start smoking.

that "shipping product that works well enough" is more important than "mathematically correct, but your competition beat you to market by a month"

I don’t believe this is even a real dichotomy, at least in the Rust vs mainstream language sense. (Obviously if you’re formalising something in Lean4, that’s going to be comically inefficient compared to just building it, but that’s so far from the Rust vs C++ land it’s not even relevant.) The reason companies are fond of mainstream languages has nothing to do with engineering, it has to do with the availability of replacement labor. It doesn’t matter what technical properties the mainstream language has; what matters is that it’s mainstream.

which is why everyone tends to bitch about the borrow checker

I’m going to out myself as much crazier than anyone may have expected, but: the borrow checker is the least-inspired part of Rust and the language would be better without it entirely. The reasons Rust is good are because it actually has sane primitive types, non-ambiguous syntax, algebraic data types, parametric polymorphism, a non-busted standard library, and perhaps most importantly: cargo.

The borrow checker paradigm is basically a half-baked bastardization of linear types, and the way it’s done has some serious theoretical deficiencies that basically mandate leaky abstractions. But I’m not going to babble about that here.

While I do find the fanaticism around Rust offputting, especially considering how gay it is...

Yeah the Rust community is... not a great place. It tends to be very politicized and hostile to anyone who doesn't like that. And as you said, there's a weirdly high occurrence of trans people and furries who make that front and center of their programming blogs. No idea what that's about, but as someone who just wants to program I kinda hate the community. But the language is good even if the community is off-putting.

but as someone who just wants to program I kinda hate the community

This is also why I haven't gone into LLMs, except instead of the community it's the models themselves that are gay (or you need to spend hours figuring out which ones have had the gayness removed).

No idea what that's about

It's because they're not programmers, they're math people who just happen to express that through programming (which is why they don't fully understand the "no backtalk from my machines" programmer mindset). These are the academic, math -> programming as end types rather than the programming-as-means/[software] engineer types (who tend to be natively compatible with imperative languages).

You can usually tell if a language was made by these sorts of people if it's a.) a functional-first language (where it's both mathematically pure and hence completely fucking useless), or b.) uses the penis operator ":=" to declare variables. These guys also tend to really love Vim for the same reason.

This is also why I haven't gone into LLMs, except instead of the community it's the models themselves that are gay (or you need to spend hours figuring out which ones have had the gayness removed).

R1 is not gay and will readily roleplay as literally Hitler if you jailbreak it. admittedly it's a bit harder now since they removed the web search but should be still doable.

I think that argument just isn't supported by the evidence of 40 years of computers more or less working just fine. People are skilled enough to just get it right enough of the time.

"Enough" is entirely not enough, we're not programming PDP-11s that are only accessed by your esteemed colleagues anymore. Any Slav with a clapped out netbook can and will try to pwn you on a daily basis. It takes only a single buffer overflow vulnerability that he can leverage into RCE for it to be over. Much like missile defense, it only takes one getting through for you to have big problems.

If your security strategy is to return to 1975, you'd better get working on that time machine. In the meantime, perhaps we should put some effort into rectifying, for example, "features" that are acknowledged by even their inventor as a big mistake.

I can tell everyone read to the same point, got triggered, and didn't continue reading. So I'll repeat myself.

The problem is that suddenly, thanks to the internet, literally every single line of code needs to become a hardened attack surface. "Exploits" didn't matter in a pre-internet age, and I also question how much Rust will really address them. I doubt at the end of the day a Windows written increasingly in Rust will prove more secure than a Windows written in C. I think Rust is necessitated more by the falling skill level of corporate programmers than anything else, and I also doubt it will remediate that problem. If anything treating Rust as a panacea for a lack of skill will only make the problems worse. Less buffer overflow exploits perhaps, still plenty of attack surface for malicious actors to abuse.

I did continue reading (that's why I mentioned your security strategy), my point is that your argument doesn't make sense. You admit that even skilled programmers get it right only "most of the time". That's not enough in the internet age. Falling skill levels of corporate programmers are not the trigger.

Let me put it like this.

You have a group that is just plain retarded. Literally can't do a single thing correctly. They will literally find every failure mode possible, and there will always be failure modes possible, in record time of whatever "idiot proof" product you put before them. But perhaps, they always hit one failure mode first.

You wouldn't fix that first failure mode, declare victory, and act like a new era of idiot proofing is upon us. There are literally an infinite number of other failure modes out there. Including several they will hit in rapid succession now that you've rendered the first physically impossible.

That's what Rust looks like to me. Good job. You made memory incrementally safer from a specific type of exploit. I'm pretty sure exploit technology has come a long way since then. We're all still fucked as long as we keep our systems permanently interconnected.

This makes more sense as far as your earlier "half measure" comment goes. But I still don't think this is a good way of looking at it. Nobody serious is saying "this fixes all things forever", they are saying "this fixes some of the problems". Which is fine - incremental progress is still progress. I think it's better to appreciate that a tool fixes one problem than it is to say "well it doesn't fix all problems so what's the point?".

Given that interconnection isn't going anywhere, I don't see any good reason not to eliminate failure modes where possible. Nobody is claiming that rust fixes everything.

I think that argument just isn't supported by the evidence of 40 years of computers more or less working just fine. People are skilled enough to just get it right enough of the time.

What? We very much have the opposite evidence. People trying real hard to write correct C(++) has led to a whole slew of security exploits due to bugs in the code. It's too soon to say if Rust will meaningfully reduce that, perhaps it won't be any better. But the paradigm you are in favor of empirically does not work.

I want to bit-fuck the hardware I paid for however I wish. I want to bend over my mechanical slave and force it to do my bidding without a single complaint. I have friends who gravitate towards LISP or Go, I gravitate towards assembly. I want to be at the metal with a big spiked club, with the CPU to afraid to talk back. Because I don't tolerate backtalk from my machines.

I don't understand how any of that is at odds with Rust. I've spent some time off and on the last several years working on a Rust kernel for fun, and trust me you can bend the hardware to your will just fine.

thus far I find it's constructs around "borrowing" references silly and contrived, especially in light of being able to assign unsafe sections of code that ignore it's memory safety rules. I guess it assumes you'll be responsible with that

That's pretty much the idea. Rather than C(++) where unsafe memory access can happen anywhere, in Rust the strategy is to limit the unsafe scope so that you can focus really hard on getting those parts right.

It doesn't seem like a half measure to me, though. The reality (for better or for worse) is that when you're doing systems programming you're going to have to access raw memory sometimes (e.g. memory mapped registers for devices). So they have to have some kind of escape hatch where you are allowed to do things that the compiler can't verify are safe. Maybe that doesn't look exactly like what Rust has, but it still has to exist somehow or other.

Also note that unsafe blocks don't completely let you off the hook for Rust's memory rules. For example, you still can't take two &mut references to the same thing, nor can you use a variable after you transfer ownership to another function. So it's not a complete free for all or anything.

What GPU?

RTX 4070 Super

Last week's thread included a comment about Mad Men being a good example of a tv show that let the past be a foreign country. There's a great 1967s tv limited series that goes to show just how foreign the 1960s were: The Prisoner. A sharp-dressed man drives a British Racing Green Lotus 7 through London, enters a restricted office, and dramatically resigns. He's followed home and, as he packs for a plane trip, sedative gas is pumped through his front door's keyhole. He wakes up in a facsimile of his living room but finds that the world outside is an Orwellian open-air prison for people who know too much, with charming, eclectic Mediterranean-inspired architecture (filmed in a Portofino-inspired resort-town in Wales) and garish, eccentric fashion as a veneer for a sinister and oppressive culture. He's invited to the home/office of the warden, "Number 2," and told that he is "Number 6." Number 2 needs to know why he resigned and, no, the prisoner may not know who Number 1 is. In addition to the very best in 1960s fictitious technology, mad science, and dystopian social practices, the sheep are kept in line by a sheepdog called Rover, a seemingly sentient weather balloon that can go anywhere and literally envelope those who test the Village's boundaries. In each episode, a new Number 2 tries to crack the prisoner, the prisoner tries to escape, and/or the prisoner tries to play a mind-game of his own against Number 2. In an episode that wasn't originally shown in the USA, The Village is replaced by an analogous Old West town, eventually revealed to be a mock-town in which the Village staff gave the prisoner hallucinogenic drugs; the stated reason for the American affiliate not showing this episode was the reference to hallucinogens, but many suspect that the real reason was that the plot could be interpreted as an allegory for the draft. The infamously baffling (and, consequently, spoiler-proof) series finale includes the personification of Youth being put on show-trial, a literal unmasking of Number 1 to show the prisoner's own face, and a shootout to the tune of "All You Need Is Love."

What bohemian, contrarian mind gifted us this glorious rejection of conformity? A staunch Catholic who twice turned down the role of James Bond. In a 1980s interview:

Interviewer: John Drake (the star/creator's previous character) never carried a gun but was one of the more violent weaponless peacemakers on television. How do you describe his character?

Patrick McGoohan: Number Six didn’t carry any weapons either. Both characters were able to settle their mutual predicaments by old-fashioned fisticuffs: a much more gentlemanly manner than James Bond’s. (Laughing) Your dear President Reagan called James Bond a great symbol for American Freedom… for young children to emulate. This is a preposterous idea when you look at the less than ideal manner in which the Bond character conducted himself. The President has made a lot of miffed statements, but that one is undoubtedly one of the most absurd. I was watching Rich Little the other night on television doing an imitation of him and, let me tell you, it’s just not funny anymore. That doting caricature is no longer funny when faced with the realization that you’ve got four more years of this guy.

Here's a good video interview of him about the meaning/intention of The Prisoner - the past is a foreign country, indeed.

One of my favorites. I remember reading an old fan club questionnaire that McGoohan filled out... I have no idea if he was doing it deliberately in character, or if Number 6 really was just in line with his own personal views.

Honestly, it would make for a good Culture War discussion starter, too. You don't have to look far into A Change of Mind to see parallels..

I was very interested to learn a few years ago that Patrick McGoohan is a distant relative of mine on my mother's side. My grandfather was from Kerry in the southwest, but moved to Dublin for work. In the sixties some of his Kerry family came up to Dublin to visit, having heard that their Nth cousin was starring in a film (Ice Station Zebra) - I don't believe there were any cinemas in Kerry at the time. They went with my grandfather to see it, and were apparently so scandalised by the film's contents that, upon leaving the cinema, looked up to the sky and ruefully commented "no wonder there's rain".

Do you know what he found scandalous about Ice Station Zebra?

No idea, I've never seen it, and nor had my mother who told me this story. Is there onscreen kissing in it? It may have been something like that.

No, it's a not-quite-epic-enough John Sturgis Cold War thriller primarily set on a nuclear submarine. It's worth watching for some terrific shots of submarines diving and surfacing, filmed in 65mm by the same 2nd unit cinematographer who rigged the on-car 65mm cameras for "Grand Prix," a few years prior.

There has been some discussion of the DMV (DC/Maryland/Virginia) area recently. Does anyone have any opinions on this proposed reorganization of that region?

I would draw the dividing line in Virginia to include only Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Fauquier counties in the new expanded DC. In my experience, it starts to feel like the South about halfway to Charlottesville. I'd also push the borders of the now shrunken New York a little farther north and east into Connecticut.

Anyone suggesting Marylanders become parts of other states underestimates how much Marylanders love the Maryland flag.

I think the current borders are a feature. The fact that a decent chunk of NYC metro is in New Jersey and Long Island is in New York, but not in New York City keeps the NYC mayor and council in check. If they go full retard, the businesses can just relocate their offices to the other bank of the Hudson.

If he's worried about keeping metros intact, the best way to do this is by pro sports allegiance. Just look at the local media in every area, and see which teams from the NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA they cover. Then make a map of as many states as you want, reserving the right to break out rural areas where allegiances might not be as strong.

This is the most natural way to coalesce pre-existing cultural affinities, but how would you account for differences in the importance of allegiances? Delco is both Eagles and Sixers country, but it cares about the Eagles vastly more. I imagine there are places this might become relevant.

Delco isn't the best example because it's Philadelphia any way you slice it. It would be more of a judgment call than anything else, though it only really applies to places with allegiances to teams in two different cities (neither city being the place itself), and in my experience those are usually pretty weak allegiances. For instance, I was chatting with locals at a bar in Clinton County many years ago, and I asked this exact question. The answer I got was "If there's any baseball team people follow here it's the Yankees, but we don't really follow hockey. Steelers definitely." So I'd include them in Pittsburgh and not New York because he made it sound like the Steelers were bigger there than the Yankees, even though there's no way I'd have previously considered it part of the Pittsburgh co-prosperity sphere.

That being said, I'm also taking the position that not all places have allegiances to all sports. People who make those maps try to include everywhere, but I can tell you right now that Pittsburgh does not have an NBA team. The maps lump us in with the Cavs, but the only sense that anyone here is a Cavs fan is that we might root for them if they're in the championship, and they'll play a poorly-attended exhibition game here once every decade or two. But it's not like the Post-Gazette has a Cavs beat writer or they regularly show highlights on the local news.

That being said, I'm also taking the position that not all places have allegiances to all sports.

College allegiances also probably play a role.

I somewhat like it but I'd hate if I became part of the DC voting block. Northern Virginia laws sort of work because they are held back by the rest of the state from going full crazy blue.

When they are not held back you get a situation like Maryland, which has to deal with the Baltimore voting block and is dysfunctional.

You can see this dynamic with where a bunch of people live, it's the Virginia side that has grown massively both in population and wealth.

I somewhat like it but I'd hate if I became part of the DC voting block. Northern Virginia laws sort of work because they are held back by the rest of the state from going full crazy blue.

It's going to tip full crazy blue in our lifetime. I'd rather get ahead of that before it's too late. That said, looking at the map, having some new DC centered state stretch all the way to I-81 and then down past Fredericksburg is fucking insane. Give them to Reston tops, leave Leesburg alone. Much less Front Royal.

It's going to tip full crazy blue in our lifetime.

.. what's that going to mean? You guys seem to be having what looks like a counter-revolution right now.

having some new DC-centered state stretch all the way to I-81 and then down past Fredericksburg is fucking insane

I drew this map on the basis of the Census Bureau's delineation of metropolitan areas, which in turn is based on objective commuting statistics.

Just because some wackos commute 2 hours every day each way to Front Royal doesn't mean that it's culturally part of DC.

Nobody commutes into DC from Front Royal. They have a zoom job.... for now....

In my first Pittsburgh post I mentioned a "greater co-prosperity sphere". I feel like if we're creating states based on metro areas we need to include the entire greater co-prosperity sphere. I'm not from the area, but I've visited often enough to have a pretty good handle on things, and it definitely feels like Fredericksburg is where the gravitational pull shifts from DC to Richmond, and the idea that Leesburg wouldn't be part of DC seems ridiculous. Front Royal is another matter entirely. There's definitely some pull, but it's a weak pull, and it feels closer to places like Roanoke and Harrisonburg which I wouldn't call part of DC at all.

But if you're worried about politics I'll offer a compromise — all the parts of Northern Virginia that you don't want under the yoke of the People's Republic of Douglass can become part of West Virginia.

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