pcwalton

53 ms·

781.
by pcwalton 5y ago
We're not talking about Donald Trump.
782.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Both technically true statements (though I think you mean Ice land), but presented in a completely misleading way. Yes, breakthrough infections exist and nothing is 100%; you should still get the vaccine, obviously. Yes, when the populatio
783.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The trolley problem analogy breaks down when you consider that Covid is an infectious disease. Getting vaccinated doesn't just protect you; it protects everyone else you might have spread the disease to.
784.
by pcwalton 5y ago
It should be noted, of course, that Vinay Prasad is a hematologist and oncologist (not a specialist in infectious disease) most well known as of late for comparing US public health restrictions to Nazi Germany [1]. Needless to say, he'
785.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Because you're packing unbounded floating point values into an 8-bit RGBA unorm texture. Yes, it can be done. Dealing with the issues is annoying, though.
786.
by pcwalton 5y ago
There are lots of things that highly-engaged young people have done that don't catch on in the long run. Given the problems that Web 3 has, I see it as a lot more likely that Web 3 will go the route of fidget spinners than the route of
787.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Vertex skinning is a pain in GLES 2 because of uniform size limits, since there are no UBOs. You can only have so many bones before you overflow those limits and then basically the only option I can see is to start packing your bone matrice
788.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> In the coming decades as the automation and ease-of-use of formal verification tools improves, I think C may well end up being the best choice for security-critical and correctness-critical systems programming. With current tools it is
789.
by pcwalton 5y ago
NFTs are something "tech dudes" created, not something artists were actually asking for. This is reflected in the amount of utility NFTs as a concept generally bring to artists: negative, because of the constant stress of having t
790.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Except, ironically, when they're used for mining cryptocurrencies (okay, not pixel shaders, but close enough).
791.
by pcwalton 5y ago
It's indirect contempt of court [1] to disobey a court order to hand over the money you owe, and you can be jailed for it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#United_State...
792.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> "as you're testing, all of your code is automatically scanned for these vulnerabilities". For browsers, that's been done for years and years, probably even a decade at this point. Tooling for memory safety has gotte
793.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Yes, something like that may work. Note that this approach also has time and memory overhead quoted in the paper. There's no free lunch.
794.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The point is that "write tests" has empirically not been a satisfactory solution to this class of vulnerability.
795.
by pcwalton 5y ago
It only works if you use link-time optimization or the qsort() definition is otherwise available for the compiler to see.
796.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Some sort of pointer tagging system, like 128-bit pointers where the upper word is a unique generation ID, might be the simplest approach to eliminate security problems from use-after-free, but it's going to have some amount of runtime
797.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Many of the highest-profile memory safety security issues are in very well-tested codebases, like browsers.
798.
by pcwalton 5y ago
I believe it's because important businesses literally have scripts that do things like "open the network control panel and click at the button at position (123px, 456px)". Backwards compatibility is hard .
799.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Among other things, yes, compilers will do that.
800.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Well, a modern optimizing compiler can get rid of the indirection if it inlines qsort() and then inlines the comparison function. Of course, it needs to be able to see the source of qsort() to do so (which might be a problem if it's dy
801.
by pcwalton 5y ago
How do you write a generic quicksort function without generics? There are two ways I know of: (1) throw type and memory safety out the window and use void pointers plus size/alignment like qsort(3) does; (2) require that users manually
802.
by pcwalton 5y ago
The _Weird_identifier_naming_convention that the STL has to use to avoid colliding with potential user-defined macros doesn't help either.
803.
by pcwalton 5y ago
You're correct: you do get virtually all of the safety benefits of Zig by using sanitizers in C++. (Not speaking to language features in general, obviously.) In fact, C++ with sanitizers gives you more safety, because ASan/TSan&
804.
by pcwalton 5y ago
> (you can still get a segmentation fault, and I did a few times - by erroneously holding on to pointers inside a container while it resized. Still, uncomparably safer) This is a severe problem, and I predict that this is going to cause
805.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Cargo doesn't enable warnings for crate dependencies, by design. In fact, it won't even emit them if those crates say #[deny(warnings)]--there's a special rustc flag called --cap-lints that it uses for this (RFC at [1]). The
806.
by pcwalton 5y ago
By "decode a string" do you mean that you must apply some sort of Unicode transformation to it? If so, the HFS+ file system, which .dmg files often are, is an example: Unicode NFD normalization must be performed on all filenames b
807.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Using AES-NI for small integer hashing in the Rust compiler was found to result in a measurable slowdown.
808.
by pcwalton 5y ago
That warning has caught bugs for me when I was copy and pasting code, or writing code on "autopilot". Usually it's pretty obvious mistakes though. Unused variable warnings are a good idea, but making them hard errors is a lan
809.
by pcwalton 5y ago
Neat, this is impressive! The first thing that comes to mind is that it's not very amenable to parallel encoding or decoding, even less so than PNG. The fact that QOI_OP_INDEX could reach arbitrarily far back basically eliminates paral
810.
by pcwalton 5y ago
IMO as long as animation isn't tied to After Effects like Lottie is, you can't go wrong. The fact that the most popular open vector animation format is tied to an expensive, proprietary piece of software that isn't even prima

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