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Comment Re:Completely wrong and misleading headline (Score 2) 47

Exactly, we would have had cataclysmic earthquakes if the summary were correct.

The poles have shifted dramatically in recent decades and the field has weakened substantially leading to bright auroras in Florida and Hawaii at low KP numbers.

Models have the North Pole arriving at the Bay of Bengal sooner than anybody would expect. Christmas will be awkward until we change our vocabulary..

Comment Re:Maybe now we can finally get rid of COBOL? (Score 1) 28

It's certainly possible to translate COBOL source into another computer language of your choice, although I'm not sure LLMs are the best tool for that job. An LLM might be able to give you more readable post-translation source code, but traditional machine translation would give you post-translation source code that works correctly, which is probably more important.

Comment Re:Tech industry is right wing? (Score 2) 68

They think center-left is ultra right-wing.

Some mostly sensible people consider themselves center-left and feel hurt that the he Valley types are calling them fascists.

It's all complicated by the 1D spectrum model of the French Parliament being applied to politics broadly.

The Left Authoritarians really hate the Right Authoritarians while the Left Libertarians and the Right Libertarians mostly get along.

It sort of makes sense becauae violence is inherent in the former while cooperation is inherent in the latter.

But the angry aren't usually educated im polisci at all and just operate on the Friend/Eny distinction of their tribe's momentary collective preferences, which can turn on a dime.

The Valley oligarchs will also switch allegiances instantaneously if they perceive advantage in profit or control with shifting winds.

Comment Re:All data should be fuzzed by the browser (Score 1) 110

They keep adding timing noise to these API's as attacks show up but this really speaks to the need to have the noise in the core I/O libraries, not inside each new API.

If it's writing to disk in any way it should go through a code path with timing noise.

It would be easier on the feature developers too.

Probably in the network API's too. Have a turbo mode in preferences at one end of a privacy slider, maybe. Default should be safe but the browser benchmark people incentivize the wrong thing. "You get what you measure" and stuff.

Comment Re:I don't currently use Rust (Score 1) 161

This is why C code is bad, because C programmers never ask themselves, "How do I not leak memory?"

Another way to phrase that would be, "This is why C code is bad, because C programmers are expected to understand the rules about how to not leak memory, but there is no mechanism to enforce that requirement".

... and to their credit, eventually some of them do figure it out, and after that they (mostly) write good C code that doesn't leak. However, that doesn't change the fact that at any given moment there are millions of unseasoned C programmers out there who haven't reached that point yet, and who are nevertheless writing leaky code which gets put into production and causes trouble; and new C programmers appear every day. It's the Eternal September problem, applied to memory management.

So either (a) we ban C programmers from pushing to production until they've had at least 5 years of experience, or (b) we find some means to flag their errors at build-time, or (c) we live with the status quo messiness indefinitely. Linux is going with Rust as their mechanism for implementing plan (b).

Comment Re:What's the benefit of Rust here though? (Score 1) 161

If you have access to a God-tier LLM that you can rely on to find every bug, I think that could work.

However, I don't think anyone in the Linux community is ready to trust LLMs to that extent just yet. Not only are they quite fallible, they are also non-deterministic -- so if you ask your favorite LLM to find the bugs in the code, and it doesn't find any, and then you feed it the exact same prompt again, it might find some on its second attempt. So how do you know when to stop re-asking?

LLMs are currently constituted are very useful for finding bugs, but not so useful for guaranteeing that no bugs remain.

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