Notices by Kornel (kornel@mastodon.social), page 2

Firefox will reconsider supporting JPEG XL if they get a Rust implementation:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064

This is a very good news for web standards:

https://mastodon.social/@kornel/113078862354601952

and will fix a blocker that is hurting adoption of JPEG XL.

The reference implementation has unfortunately been written in C++ just as browser vendors started looking into migrating away from C++ for security reasons, and saw the C++ codec primarily as a big new attack surface.

Who could have guessed that a plastic recycling method promoted by Exxon requires 9 times more new fossil fuels than the amount of plastic it manages to successfully recycle?
And the US allows creative accounting that ends up calling that 100% recycled plastic, by counting byproducts like diesel as "recycled" "plastic".

https://www.propublica.org/article/delusion-advanced-chemical-plastic-recycling-pyrolysis

@lanodan For example, it can't tell you "hey, you need a mutex here".
Rust can, during normal compilation, not even as a separate analyzer. And not only in function-local obvious patterns, but across many levels of indirection, even callbacks spanning 3rd party libraries. And it's not approximating it, but guarantees it won't miss a case.

@lanodan Well yeah, these are the reasons why you have checkers with false positives and mostly only basic local reasoning.

From what I see, flawfinder is pattern matching well-known footguns by function name, rather than understanding these kinds of bugs semantically.
It can of course still be super useful given how common these footguns are, but it's not analyzing C deeply.

Clang analyzer does a lot of sophisticated analysis, but it is limited by the flexibility/vagueness of C's semantics.

@lanodan C needs new type system extensions or annotations to improve static analysis further.
Current tools hit dead-ends due to problems like pointer aliasing, mutable `const`, and lack of information about thread safety.

It's surreal how slowly time moves in the world of C compilers.

Today there are still active projects that are hesitant to move past C89, and C99 is still the "new" standard.

The C99 standard has been released before the first public Mac OS X and Windows XP. It's older Itanium and the x86-64 instruction set. It predates iPod, Game Cube, first ever Xbox, and Nokia 3310.

Entire platforms lived and died in the meantime, while C programmers still can't be sure if they can rely on the new C99.

@janl has homebrew for intel and runs x86 zsh?

Seriously, in retrospect, #autotools itself is a massive supply-chain security risk.

It has normalized shipping and running tens of thousands of lines of arbitrary executable code without any safeguards.

Code that is so mind-numbingly awful that nobody will review it, and written in a language that is full of gotchas that are sneaky eval gadgets.

People are afraid of running unaudited `curl | sh`, but nobody bats an eye on 24707 lines of obfuscated garbage in `./configure`.

#xz

about:config
browser.compactmode.show = true

I still can't believe that @FirefoxNightly is trying to kill the best UI option they have.

iOS is showing me Uber Eats ads on my home screen. I don’t have their app.
If this is some kind of a beacon trick, I hope Flipper Zero can broadcast goatse shortcuts.

Moldova has summoned Germany #Eurovision

@leonidas CC-0, because AFAIK it handles more of the international copyright law edge cases.

@thomasfuchs That's the emerging tech hype cycle & you seem to be ignoring that some of these things survive into the productivity phase.

3D printing has revolutionized product development.

Some people use voice assistants daily. Dictation has improved a lot.

LLMs are the piece of smarts that voice assistants lacked.

ADAS is now almost mandatory in cars. Not FSD, but saves lots of lives.

VR is slowly getting there, pushing very high-dpi screens, lighter electronics.

@thomasfuchs AFAIK that didn't happen, except a news cycle and one MKBHD video.

@thomasfuchs Just like Deep Learning went from being "OMG OMG A.I." hype, through many seemingly useless toys like style transfer, to people naturally expecting to have a working search function in their photo gallery, and not even noticing that "HDR" stopped looking weird at some point.

@thomasfuchs The Sydney with existential crisis will definitely be buried like Tay bot.

However, I expect the tech behind LLMs will be used so widely, it won't even count as anything special any more, and be "just" a text processor.

@thomasfuchs That's quite pessimistic, and a bit unwarranted to bundle outright malicious scam with emerging technologies, just because all of them had some "hype" around them. And NFT didn't even have a hype, it had aggressive astroturfing.

@davatron5000 I've had Gowalla even before signing up for Twitter.

However, the 2.0 immediately raised red flags when it was *MANDATORY* to upload your entire address book during signup. I'm highly suspicious that it's just data harvesting operation under a cheaply acquired name.

"Electronic mail" has been abbreviated all the way to "e-mail", missing the excellent intermediate step:

electro mail

:pensive_party_blob: