Notices by rain 🌦️ :verified_trans: (rain@hachyderm.io)

Can't believe how many of the worst people on the internet were actually paid Russian assets lmao

I'm sorry but CrowdStrike's "technical details" post is well below the expected standard in our field. What kind of logic error was it? More importantly, what was your QA process like? Why did CI not catch it? Why was there not a staged rollout? These are the absolute basics that should be expected.

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/falcon-update-for-windows-hosts-technical-details/

More and more websites have anti-adblock measures these days, some going so far as to tell you to uninstall your ad blocker altogether. I understand the impulse, but you are basically telling your users to meaningfully reduce their security for your benefit.

Got unreasonably excited about this new, incredibly straightforward count-distinct algorithm. The CVM algorithm is a direct replacement for HyperLogLog, it nerd-sniped Donald Knuth for weeks, *and* it can easily be taught in an entry-level CS course.

h/t @munin
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-invent-an-efficient-new-way-to-count-20240516/

The entire anti-trans movement is a fraudulent right-wing creation, and the entire UK mainstream media apparatus is fraudulent and right-wing. The Guardian and BBC are right-wing, and most of the tabloids are indistinguishable from the Daily Stormer

The BBC is just a right-wing rag these days. Platforming some of the most despicable people on the earth like it's no big deal

I think automatically configuring features based on what's supported locally is just a really bad idea.

One of my first major contributions to Mozilla back in 2008-2009 was ripping out all the code that automatically configured the set of features enabled in Firefox, turning it into errors instead. This meant that everyone knew exactly the set of configure features enabled for a build of Firefox.

https://mas.to/@scvalex/112185125504853603

Unsurprisingly, JKR is doing Holocaust denial now. An internally consistent anti-trans politics requires Holocaust denial at some point

I refuse to believe this was written by actual practitioners in the field

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/ONCD-2023-0002-0020

What kind of brain-dead response is "Vulnerabilities are found with any programming language, but it takes time to discover them"? This was actually written by the ISO C++ committee? What???

To be honest, Rust is a pretty clear example of why formal specifications are worth less than they first seem to be! I'm glad people are working on one, but Rust has been successful at its goals without them. The fundamental soundness of its mechanics is pretty clear to anyone who has written production code in it, even though there are edge cases that need nailing down.

What is this talking about??? Python has the with keyword, Java has had AutoCloseable since 2011, and even PHP has refcounting so resources are released if you don't duplicate a reference (and everything's cleaned up at the end of the request in any case). Saying that most newer languages don't have "facilities for handling resource release automatically" is a bald-faced lie! The people who wrote this should have to face professional consequences.

New blog post: ECC RAM on AM5 Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs. Lots of juicy details! https://sunshowers.io/posts/am5-ryzen-7000-ecc-ram/

@bcantrill @lanodan as a specific example, you can install a signal handler for SIGCONT and SIGTSTP (though not SIGSTOP). whatever the debugger does would ideally not cause those signal handlers to be triggered

Still thinking about the time I was debugging a process stopped by mdb with @bcantrill, and he mentioned continuing the process with some command (I think ::cont in mdb). I was like "oh, that's like kill -CONT" and he reacted with "we absolutely DO NOT use signals to do debugging on illumos"

My hot take for the weekend, as someone raised in a socially conservative household, is that social conservatism is bad and raising kids in such a household is inherently abusive

My social politics are informed by actual lived experience (and of course the data doesn't lie either)

Many people are relativist or otherwise equivocal about the environments in which parents raise their kids. I'm both lived experience and data-driven

For example, corporal punishment:

https://aifs.gov.au/resources/short-articles/what-does-evidence-tell-us-about-physical-punishment-children

The data is astoundingly clear that it traumatizes and harms kids. There's no curvilinear effect either where a little bit is ok but too much is bad. It's just bad. And yet socially conservative households persist with it