I'm feeling weirdly conflicted about the prospect of the military potentially avoiding funding C and C++ work due to memory safety reasons. On one hand I'm generally against politicians making decisions about what parts of computer science are compulsory. However if the military were to eventually be banned from using C++, as a pacifist I find the idea weirdly compelling. That certainly would reduce the likelihood of any software I write being misused to murder people at scale.
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aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 08:30:10 JST aeva
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tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 08:30:04 JST tech? no! man, see...
@brennen @aeva kinda tempting to blame all the dysfunction and RIIR-brigading you hear about in the Rust community on NSA moles tho
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brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 08:30:07 JST brennen
@aeva i'd guess the relevant NSA personnel know better than most that there's no risk of software in general becoming secure, even if you could wave a magic wand tomorrow and Solve Memory Safety.
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aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 08:30:08 JST aeva
Something interesting I've noticed that I'm not really sure what to make of: with cryptography you have politicians and departments and so on all with wildly different contradictory agendas. Some want to weaken it, some want to protect it.
I haven't really seen any of that regarding memory safety. There's government analysts here and there speaking in favor of it, and it might be the subject of some spending guidelines, but like
Where's, like, the NSA going to bat for unsafe?
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tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 14:16:44 JST tech? no! man, see...
@aeva @brennen I mean, think of the language you most want to not succeed
can you really say that you're not at least a little tempted by the idea of role-playing as a completely obnoxious fan of that language on reddit in order to damage that language's reputation? it could be a fun hobby
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aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 14:16:46 JST aeva
@technomancy @brennen 🍿 go on
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