Skip Navigation

User banner
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)E
entwine @ entwine @programming.dev
Posts
0
Comments
69
Joined
2 mo. ago

  • Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

    Jump

  • Here's a good article with some context around the F-droid situation, and why Signal is full of crap.

    I think it’s also important to understand that signal is also a company that, at some ooint, needs to make money from somewhere to do this awesome thing and they won’t get that limiting themselves to an obscure app store that maybe 1 in 100 users even know about.

    Signal is a non-profit and backed by a billionare. Tbh idk what their financials look like, but they don't seem to be in a difficult funding situation at all.

    I also highly doubt that Google would modify the signal binary with a backdoor...

    They definitely wouldn't do it for everyone, but if the FBI comes knocking at their door and tells them that they need to access a specific person's Signal chats, deploying a backdoored update to that individual is easily within Google's power. It's extremely likely nobody would notice, unless maybe the target is a security researcher or something. And IMO even if the info does come out, most of the blame/consequences (if any) would fall on the government, not Google.

    Considering everyone is being labeled a "terrorist" nowadays by this whackjob administration, this type of scenario seems increasingly likely to me.

  • Open 3D Engine O3DE 25.10 Brings Build Improvements, Vulkan & Linux Fixes

    Jump

  • It's a very high quality code base too, but not for the faint of heart.

  • Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

    Jump

  • No F-Droid, no trust. It doesn't matter how strong the cryptography is, if Google or the government can trivially deploy a backdoored version. It also brings into question Signal's own credibility/trustworthiness, as this is an obvious and well-known flaw that they've refused to rectify, and have made bogus arguments to justify their decision.

  • Server migration has been completed

    Jump

  • Sidebar stats say this instance gets 23 users/day, which seems absolutely tiny and within the capabilities of 4c/16gb cloud instance.

    We were maxing out every part of the server whenever any even slightly significant number of users were on the fediverse.

    Idk anything about how lemmy/fediverse works, but does that mean tiny instances like this get hit when the rest of the network is experiencing high load? Seems problematic.

    EDIT: btw, thanks for the free service and the effort you put in to keep it running!

  • Heater: A Rust command-line application that churns your CPU cores at maximum capacity so your laptop isn't cold

    Jump

  • This doesn't appear optimal. The correct way to melt a CPU is to make use of as many functional units as possible in parallel, while avoiding pipeline stalls and cache misses. I'm not a Rust guy, but skimming through the code it seems like the only work it's doing is some integer math, so it's not even touching the FPUs. Also I see while running.load(Ordering::SeqCst). Idk if Rust's memory model is similar to C++, but does that mean it's using atomic operations? That's going to create a lot of unnecessary cache coherency traffic that works against the goal of melting. Each thread should have its own counter not shared with other threads, and it should only spawn enough threads for the number of physical cores (not logical cores) on the system, and ideally pin each thread to a single core to prevent the OS from acting like a firefighter.

    The gpu parts I'm not sure about. There's might be some special consideration required when dealing with integrated graphics though.

  • Would you use a service that automatically identifies refactoring opportunities in your code?

    Jump

  • Just because a product exists already doesn't mean there isn't opportunity for a competitor! You could try competing on price, maybe offer a more generous free tier which can help you get more sign ups. Maybe make it free for self-hosting, but you make money offering it as a service as most devs probably won't bother.

    Sonarqube proved there's a market for this type of product already, which is the hardest part!

  • Software Quality Collapse

    Jump

  • the only point my comment adresses is the factually wrong statement that memory leaks are not a problem.

    Two things:

    1. I never claimed that memory leaks are not a problem. It seems you misread my original comment.
    2. Only like one or two of the links you posted are potentially related to memory leaks at all. It seems you misread the list of articles you found.

    Reading comprehension is an important skill to master, as it's useful no matter what you do in life. If no one has ever pointed out this deficiency, I hope you take it as a hint to guide your personal improvement journey (which is my intention) rather than a petty dunk from an internet rando (which is not my intention)

  • Software Quality Collapse

    Jump

  • Did you just ask ChatGPT to give you a list of articles with the word "leak" in them? I haven't gone through all of them, but I see two of them are Windows zombie process bugs, one is an Intel branch predictor attack, one is the example in the OP (which you posted...)

  • Software Quality Collapse

    Jump

  • While they do not leak memory like crazy, they hog a lot and people accept it.

    They do not leak memory at all. Using a lot of memory is not the same as leaking memory. And from a practical perspective, it doesn't really matter if a calculator app on iOS uses a gigabyte or three of RAM, as the amount of multi-tasking a user can do on a phone is severely limited, and the operating system kills background apps when it needs to reclaim memory for the foreground.

    The bigger problem are many “smol” programs are written without performance in mind at all

    Do you have specific examples of this? The iOS calculator sucks, but it does not have performance problems. People who think every piece of software needs to be hyper-optimized are either unemployed (or should be) as they don't get any work done, or they just don't practice what they preach. IME, it's usually beginners/novices who discovered what a "native" language is, like C++ or Rust, and are going through a phase. None of those people know how to actually optimize a program, haven't even heard of Compiler Explorer, think "MESI" is a soccer player, and probably know more about TUI frameworks than profiling ones.

  • Software Quality Collapse

    Jump

  • American Big Tech is the world leader because they employee and train the best engineers in the world

    OR

    American Big Tech is the world leader because they employee illegal anti-competitive business practices and bribe/lobby US officials to not stop them

    It's obvious which is correct. All of big tech has been leaking competence for a long time, and this AI frenzy is only accelerating it. The solution to these problems is to enforce the law and break them up, as smaller companies can't survive by being incompetent, and can't afford to compensate engineers with ridiculous salaries/inflated stock just to prevent them from joining/launching a competitor (or in the case of big tech, using illegal agreements to not poach from each other).

    The worst part is that even if this problem reaches its apex, and some/all of these companies start to fail, the market won't correct itself. I can already see the government bailing them out so they can keep doing the same shit.

  • Intel rethinking how it contributes to open source community

    Jump

  • Final nail in the coffin.

  • Why Nix Will Win (and What's Stopping It): A 3-Year Production Story - Ryan Rasti

    Jump

  • Nix has one great idea and one terrible idea. Until at least the configuration language is redesigned by someone with good taste (and sanity), I'm not touching it. The amount of effort it takes to get back into the nix headspace in order to maintain anything is just not worth it. Docker and Podman are trivial by comparison, and the benefits of Nix do not justify the headaches. I Nix on a personal server for a few months, but migrated back to Podman after I found myself spending way too much time trying to find documentation and make sense of crackhead JSON.

    In my work I get to use Conan which kind of implements some of the same ideas as Nix/Guix. It's designed for a different use case, but the benefits are similar and I love using it. It also has a learning curve, but Python is a real programming language at least. Guix may have the right idea too, but my experience with FSF projects is that they choose ideology over practicality every time, so I'm not eager to dive into it.

  • Free Software Foundation Turns 40, Unveils LibrePhone

    Jump

  • Qualcomm seems to be in a tough spot nowadays, so maybe they'll be open to playing nice with others for once? One can dream.

  • What's a readability

    Jump

  • Microsoft hasn't been known for good engineering for... a long time, but this seems like the type of idea an undergrad with zero real world experience might come up with (or I guess AI).

    This is why I avoid corporate languages like this. Swift and Go are also on my "hell no" list.

  • Discord customer service data breach leaks user info and scanned photo IDs

    Jump

  • If there's a silver lining here, it's that more pedophiles could get doxxed.

    If Roblox is Epstein's Island, Discord is Mar a Lago.

  • What's your "I switched to Linux because..." Story?

    Jump

  • I first discovered Linux in middle/highschool back when Ubuntu was the hot shit and they had that awesome Gnome 2 desktop. I loved the vibes, but didn't stick with it because I didn't know what to do. Then just over the years I'd occasionally install it for a few days and give it a shot, learning more and more, even installing Arch Linux once (back when it was actually a challenge).

    Switching to Linux was inevitable for me, I think. As the years rolled on, Windows got worse and worse while my understanding/confidence with Linux got better and better. I don't remember what the final thing was that convinced me to finally go 100% Linux on all my devices, but I did around ~2017 or 2018 with zero regrets.

    So I think that if there's a path for people to learn Linux at a comfortable pace, without the trauma of going all in, they'll also find it impossible to resist. The dynamic of Windows becoming worse while Linux becomes better is still holding strong.

  • stop over engineering

    Jump

  • CouchDB (a no-sql db, but whatever) automatically provides a REST API that's designed to be exposed directly to clients. It even implements its own client-facing authentication system. "queries" are configured in advance from the admin side, and clients just pull the results, allowing for very efficient caching. Basically, if you RTFM enough to get a couchdb instance running, you have 90%-100% of your backend complete. You could create an entire scalable full-stack app using only client-side code... and if you're clever with HTMX, you might even be able to do it without writing any javascript at all! (I tried once, but failed because I'm not that clever, but it's definitely probably possible)

    So TL;DR: I like couchdb, and the idea of exposing your database directly to users isn't unprecedented. I wonder if there are any SQL databases that offer a similar thing?

  • AI company Vercel loses hundreds of developers after CEO posts about meeting with Netanyahu

    Jump

  • Is it still fashionable to claim you were always an AI company, and just developed

    <unrelated product>

    to build the capital to achieve your AI goals?

    In any case, AI is (and always was) a meaningless buzz word. Worse, it's a pop-culture adjacent buzz word.

  • AI company Vercel loses hundreds of developers after CEO posts about meeting with Netanyahu

    Jump

  • “I feel liberated,” one top banker told the paper. “We can say ‘removed’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.… It’s a new dawn.”

    Source

    I don't think people realize how fucking smoothbrain incompetent the powerful and wealthy are. I think everyone understands that there is rampant nepotism in this country, but don't notice the scale of the problem. One of America's biggest weaknesses is the deference we give to people who have a lot of money, regardless of where that money came from.

    These nepobabies will elect a fascist government that eagerly wipes it's ass with the US constitution, just so they can OwN tHe LiBs on social media. It's the type of thing that can only come from people who have never faced any kind if hardship or consequences in their lives. Who cannot even imagine that the same constitutional rights they're trying to trample are protecting them, because they can't imagine an existence where they need protection.

    Fuck these clowns.