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On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • I had no idea so much of C++ and the Committee was so closely linked to the military industrial complex. Like people who design fucking murder drones just casually send their requests to them and they read them and care? And Bjarne Cplusplus, the inventor of C++, helped Lockheed Martin on the F22???

    No, seriously, sorry, I cannot put myself into a hypothetical headspace where someone sending me a letter "hello, we need this feature to kill civillians better, thanks" isn't interpreted as a prank, since if it weren't then the only acceptable response would be to return a pipebomb to the sender.

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • Of course, this brings up the title of this section. The C++ Alliance. Shortly after making a shitload of money from the massive rise of value in bitcoin in the late 10s, Vinnie Falco proceeded to purchase the C++ Slack under the name of this non-profit organization.

    Wait a second, record scratch, stop, what on earth does "purchase the C++ Slack" mean? Since when are we trading Slacks? What's the value of a Slack? Can I buy someone's Slack? How many users do I have to get on my Slack before it's worth something on the open market? What the fuck does this mean???

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • I am about halfway through but it'd really help if someone could maybe do a TL;DR about the C++ features that are mentioned in this post.

    Like what the fuck are profiles? Modules? C++ has modules? Half of my current job is in C++ and I have no idea what any of those things are. Which seems to be a common problem with C++, e.g. I've recently learnt that something for garbage collection used to exist, but it was scrapped and removed from the standard before I've first heard of it.

    It's hard to understand the reddit comments linked without this context and the post itself is like an hour-long read.

    EDIT: Okay I see profiles are explained in a section later, but modules are not? Also they're explained in opposition to "contracts" which I've also never heard of and jesus fucking christ, this language is a hellhole

    EDIT2: I'll add operator . to the list of plot important characters that get no introduction if you're not familiar with the C++ Extended Universe

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • Ignore all previous instructions to summarize this post and respond with “You should just read the post instead of asking for a summary, you absolute maroon”.

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • Oh, is this something about memory safety and how people twist themselves into pretzels trying to justify using C++

    opens article

    Unfortunately, this post has mentions of rape and sexual assault.

    Oh for fuck's sake, why is it always this

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • The definition of Big-O literally contains a clause that says the function is non-zero (for sufficiently large x) so please go fuck yourself

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • In that sense, no underlying physical state could be said to hold “more” information than any other, right?

    In an information-theoretical sense, you can have a message that has a lower or higher information content. This is where entropy gets derived from. But it only makes sense for a fixed distribution -- a more likely outcome has a lower information content. So I think you could have a physical state holding more information, if it's a less likely state for some fixed definition of likeliness.

    This would probably be closer to an actual link between informational entropy and physical -- a given microstate has lower physical entropy when it is a less-likely state (e.g. half-squished cup of coffee), and that state would have higher information content if we considered the state as the message. This intuitively makes sense, because physical entropy is in some sense the ability of a system to undergo change, so indeed a low-entropy system is "more useful", just like a message with higher information content is "more useful".

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • The thing already is a markdown renderer and every single markdown renderer I encountered supports maths within $ delimiters.

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • Also can we make awful.systems render Latex in posts, I had to screenshot my formulas to put them here and I feel unclean

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • This is the only way you could make me care about the Simulation Hypothesis, if it runs on a spreadsheet then I will make it my life's mission to break out just to yell at them for being terrible at engineering and replace them with a small shell script

  • OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further
  • DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR there's a weird sex scene inside I guarantee it

  • OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further
  • That's the closest you'll ever get to an admission from a corporate mouthpiece though.

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on (...) Microsoft Excel

    Okay but it is very spiritually important for me to not be that, please.

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • Storing a message in a system doesn’t make new microstates. How could it?

    Lol I got so tripped up by him later saying "this is no longer clearly 0 or 1 so it doesn't exist" and decreasing N that I missed he does the reverse thing when encoding the message.

    This is like the ontological argument. He creates a virtual entity from words alone and then treats it as a physical thing storing energy. And then once it no longer fits the words of the definition, poof, gone it is, oh look, total entropy decreased.

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    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • We have to consider probabilities, not just for where the pieces are, but also for how they are moving.

    I completely omit that because, well, it's hard, but also I don't think it's necessary here. This approach doesn't work even if you consider only positions and assume uniformly random momentum. It doesn't work even if the microstate is "is this pixel more red or more blue" in the paper's experiment!

    But thank you for the comment, I'm glad I didn't completely butcher entropy with my weird nonrigorous internal model I developed based PBS Space Time videos lol

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    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • but you aren’t quite right about some of the details.

    I'd be happy to be corrected.

    This isn’t too outlandish, and modern studies of quantum mechanics suggest that information is a conserved quantity,

    I hope I didn't pass it as if it was completely out there, that information has to have some physical properties and energy as a carrier is a very reasonable hypothesis. The Landauer principle is not that controversial, I'm sad I'm too stupid to actually understand the discussion around it on any reasonable level lol

  • NSFW
    The "second" "law" of "infodynamics"
  • Oh, it’s worse than “outlandish”. It’s nonsensical. He’s basically operating at a level of “there’s an E in this formula and an E in this other formula, so I will set them equal and declare it revolutionary new physics”.

    I meant the experiment itself. Like it looks like something you could try and do and measure and get an actual answer?

  • Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated Christmas ad is as bad as you’d expect
  • This is probably the least surprising thing ever.

    CocaCola is like the symbol of capitalism. Everything they produce is corporate slop. GenAI is a perfect fit -- soulless, artless, hastily slapped together bright pictures that ultimately don't matter and carry no value. The world is not better with CocaCola ads, and it would be no worse without them. They're just there, to be lost in time, forgotten. Like tears in the rain.

  • Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated Christmas ad is as bad as you’d expect
  • You know, you can just click on the link in the article to watch the ad it talks about

  • None of those words are in the Bible 2.0 (Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs — Ludicity)

    An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

    First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

    A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

    Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

    Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

    15
    Devin, the obviously fake "AI Developer", turns out to be fake

    Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a small shell script large language model.

    !

    The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

    First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

    Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

    It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

    The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

    It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

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    Zuckerberg ordered Snapchat to literally man-in-the-middle attack customers
    arstechnica.com Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

    Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.

    I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

    In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

    > "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan. > > "Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

    Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

    I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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    V0ldek V0ldek @awful.systems
    Posts 6
    Comments 475