I should have included organized crime syndicates in that list, though thanks to Google's TLS-all-the-things push traffic sniffing is less useful for stealing money, and criminals generally have less interest in spying on people by doing traffic analysis.

Because Russia and the US are incapable of compromising or suborning providers from elsewhere?

Those are all ways to avoid installing questionable software on your primary machine, which is good, but they don't address the fact that you're still routing all of your traffic through someone else's server -- a server that tends to concentrate lots of potentially interesting traffic in one place, making it a much higher priority target than your typical ISP.

If the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world don't own or at least have significant hooks into all of the major VPN service providers, someone should be fired for not doing their job.

Really? I've never, ever heard that pitch for AI.

Also, the amount of energy required to reverse it... it's hard to see where that could possibly have come from.

The name of the product is "Bomb", and "Bomb" is the default Bluetooth name.

I don't know whether that makes you advice invalid, or all the more salient.

ROTFL

Social engineering redux... except now you only have to convince a sycophantic and overly helpful AI.

>"Still, the XPS comes with compromises of its own"

Yeah, it runs MS-Windows 11.

Many people incorrectly think of proxies and VPNs (especially VPNs) as a security and privacy enhancement, but unless you're operating the proxy/VPN server yourself they're just as likely to be a massive security and privacy risk. The problem is that they concentrate all of the traffic you'd most like to keep secret in one server, and depending on exactly how the system works, may require installing software on your local machine with ~root permissions. If the operator is malicious, this is a really dangerous combination.

These are useful tools for location shifting and -- in fairly rare cases, and with VPNs only -- from hiding traffic from malicious. But third-party proxy/VPN services should always be viewed with suspicion. Obviously this is even more true when the provider is Russian... though it's pretty likely that wasn't made clear to the people who used the service.

A person can be sane and immoral, sane and moral, insane and immoral or insane and moral. "Orthogonal" is perhaps a little too strong, since it implies the absence of any relationship, but certainly all the combinations are possible.

Well yes, I would be a trekkie. I don't know what starwars fans are, maybe jedists? But what got my interest in this story is the fact that Disney lost to not one but TWO indie films, despite how much they spent on the movie. Shit, they probably exceeded the budgets of both films combined on just marketing and promoting their movie.

Having said that, I don't believe "loud, annoying and stupid" is a valid reason to report somebody. If it was, I'd have done it already.

And the South Park guys had their own take on JarJar:

https://youtu.be/z-y4stp65HM?t...

Oooh...I think I heard of that before. At least, the concept is familiar, but I didn't know the name for it -- haven't needed to use one, though I don't typically deal in caching, aside from in-memory caching for high performance applications, but every time I've needed that, it needed to be lossless and highly concurrent and parallel, so this wouldn't work. For that, I've always relied on flurry.

Ah, thus enabling stack allocation. Have you looked at this?

https://lib.rs/crates/small-co...

Has both a hash and a btree variant, both heapless, of lru. Might be worth building a struct that has the map contained in a refcell, then define your helper functions around the refcell to make your code more ergonomic. Let those helper functions handle the unwraps (or if you want to micro-optimize, then unwrap_unchecked, though usually this isn't necessary -- I've only found one case of a tight loop where the compiler couldn't optimize out the checks, which was for a custom lz77 implementation for unpacking/repacking data from a PS2 game.) As for passing your state around, there's a great, ergonomic way to do that already:

https://crates.io/crates/state

Depends on how you build your program. I think if you use that heapless version of Box, all you'd be moving is the pointer and nothing else. At least, that's the way Box works on the heap -- just an owned pointer, and when moved, the heap memory doesn't move anywhere, just the pointer on the stack does. And that is cheap.

Also if you're not doing it, I highly recommend using 'cargo clippy'. Despite the name, it's actually far more useful than it is annoying.

They probably should have done with starwars what they did with battlestar galactica. I never saw the original, though from what I understand, the fans of the original were annoyed by some PC shit like making Starbuck a female, which I get because it's annoying when they really change a character you liked. But the new one was great regardless -- I liked Starbuck's character a lot, it, it would be weird to go back and watch the original with her as a man -- but it was a big success regardless of what the fans of the original thought of it. Sometimes, it's best to ignore what the fans think, because if it manages to be good and original, like what the BSG remake was, the fans will probably still like it anyway.

That movie made barely any sense to me. All I really remember about it is the death star blew up a bunch of planets while the rebels smuggled out its secret vulnerability, and a CG Carrie Fisher at the end. I felt like I was watching Mortal Kombat 2 -- just a bunch of action scenes with very little story telling.

George Lucas said he was supposed to be the comic relief character. Outside of that, the character is pointless. The problem is he wasn't funny, he was just an annoying CG version of drinkypoo.

Though I was never into starwars, so I don't know what appeals to starwars fans. The only thing that was interesting about the whole series was that it started Harrison Ford's career, and he's made a lot of very good movies since then. From what I understand, he cares as much about it as I do.

Sanity and morality are orthogonal.