I'm pretty sure that Amazon is one of those institutions that's all-in on AI so they can join in the attempts to take over every business in the country.

Maybe they should just say "We're upping our prices because of our own greed and lust for power, just not in the usual way."

C++ has developed at lot over the last 20 years, and my understanding from C++ programmers is that there are now safe alternatives to virtually everything that had to be done using unsafe code in the past. So as long as you restrict yourself to those modern features, you can produce entirely safe C++, C++ that's as safe as Rust.

The problem with C++ is more that you have no idea what you're getting when someone drops a C++ source code bomb on you. It might be written using safe idioms, it might be using unsafe features but in a safe way. I wouldn't start a new project in C++, but I understand why someone like the GP might propose it as a way to start a project to increase security of an existing C program.

He's not looking at it the wrong way.

You're essentially saying "But a technology that does this would be very valuable!"

Yeah, no shit. So would a technology that turns lead into gold. Or that can tell whether some unwatermarked text is LLM generated or not.

Like both of those cases, it's just not possible. C needs to be translated to Rust by someone who knows the intent of the programmer, as the GP pointed out. Most of the time that's not possible to automate. There are far too many edge cases.

In C a string is an array of chars. And chars are often used as a byte type because before the second ANSI standard, char *was* the byte type. So every time you see char a[256] you MAY be looking at something intended to hold a string, but you also MAY be looking at something intended to hold series of bytes. You may think that because someone wrote something that maybe even included a string initializer that you're dealing with a string, but the developer may well be treating it as something else.

Your very example is why this kind of thing isn't automatable without a huge level of hand holding.

The best anyone can do to make "safe C" is to emulate capabilities and make it do that. Which is chronically slow. And the reality is that even capabilities aren't a panacea, because C really is just that bad. You'd get rid of some classes of error, but UB means you'd almost certainly introduce a whole set of bugs from programmers unaware how big an issue UB is, and who assume ultimately memory is just a big byte array, and some of those errors may well be security holes.

> What you're not considering is that the manufacturers are building fab capacity like crazy right now.

Which they'll shutter or repurpose if the demand plummets. You think they're going keep those factories churning out memory chips if prices drop significantly?

At the end of the day they have to make a profit. Making a bunch of memory chips with a profit of $-1 per chip is not making a profit.

It just means Gemini will start being rude and will refuse to try to help anyone with a question.

No. The hardware being built for AI is basically using hardware that more closely resembles graphic cards minus the DisplayPort output than anything you can pick apart to insert in your PC. Even the memory modules are completely un-DIMM like.

At best, supply will return to pre-AI levels, but that'll just mean that memory reduces in cost to somewhere between today's absurd prices and Trump's post-tariff prices. The chances of it being reduced to Biden levels is pretty low.

Memory is going to be expensive for the foreseeable future. And all because of what's essentially a con job, an attempt to take over every substantial business in America by making their own employees unable to understand what it is they do, that nobody's prepared to do anything about.

If it's an AI data center (which is generally what people are concerned about the massive growth of) responsible for 911, then you're going to have a bad day whether powered or not.

The obvious solution here is to run the data centers in reverse. Basically feed them long winded manipulative slop, and have them convert it into the original art. This will mean the centers will then start generating power instead of using it up.

It's so obvious I can't believe nobody's thought of it before. We could probably solve global warming if we did this.

https://www.404media.co/we-tra...

Ask the average system administrator who maintains any small website whether the AI companies are still scraping the web, and you might find yourself surprised. Pretty much anything with high quality content that isn't a major well funded site like Reddit or Wikipedia is getting hammered to the point that websites are either constantly going down, or resorting to reCAPTCHA and other similar "Legit or AI?" technologies to limit their use. Every BBS/etc I've been using lately has that anime nurse with a magnifying glass interstitial (see openwrt.org for example) to try to limit the amount of hammering they're getting from OpenGPT, Anthropic, Google, etc.

This is also impacting the ability of those same websites to be found via search engines. It's literally a disaster for the open web.

Anthropic adding watermarking isn't going to do much except add even more self-serving justifications to the AI bros to hammer websites constantly, as now they can distinguish between their own crap and stuff that might possibly be human written.

If all that's changed is one word, there's not nearly enough word choices by Claude to allow them to put in the watermark. The watermark is based upon word choices.

So that specific incidence wouldn't actually get watermarked, not unless Claude decides to do more than correct one typo.

OTOH, it's entirely possible the response "one typo, you wrote CIa instead of CIA, fixed" would be worded in such a way that it would include the watermark. Which would make sense and fit with what Anthropic are claiming. It would also explain why the text explaining that you didn't write CIA correctly consists of four paragraphs plus a bulleted list and starts with an entirely unnecessary complement on your writing skills. Well, that, and the necessity for LLM companies to post manipulative language to try to make you feel good about using their products.

> Certainly no indication they were more popular than Twitter

Twitter died a long time ago. Elon Musk bought it and replaced it with X which is a far right website that "inherited" the user base Twitter had. The reason Threads is increasing is because nobody wants to be bombarded with messages about how they, or their friends, or just people who have done nothing wrong, are subhuman vermin who need to be exterminated.

X's user numbers are inflated. Bluesky is a fraud and BS's users are catching on to that. Threads is, for better or worse, the devil you know without having fascism pushed into your feed. In 2021, there's no way it would have beat out Twitter, but with X being what it is, it's both larger than it would have been then (I suspect, actually, it'd have closed by now), and X is, in reality whatever Musk claims, much much smaller than Twitter is.

And those of us who actually don't want corporate media have our alternative and are enjoying it very much. Once upon a time I would have mentioned it and been furious at all the supposed tech experts here who freak out about "having to choose a server", but, you know what? I don't want those guys in my socials anyway. Maybe one day you'll all "get it", but I doubt it.

> Having to produce physical media is a barrier to competition

No it isn't. The only barrier to competition is the whole digital signing thing which is true of both physical media and online delivery.

Physical media is dirt cheap and always has been. You can print off 1,000 BDs for $1,000 or less. Virtually every software developer capable of buying the equipment needed to produce a game is capable of spending that. What they can't do is actually get hold of the proprietary Sony keys and digital distribution stuff, and that's not going to change.

You're seriously going to vibe code a replacement for Oracle's DBMS and then trust it with your data?

One thing that's infuriating me is that apparently it's now impossible to implement in modern GNU/Linux distros as Wayland does not allow applications (such as file managers) to position windows.

Yeah, really.

And by "not allow" I don't mean "they haven't gotten around to it", they've actually said they're opposed on principle in the mailing lists.

We are running so fast in the wrong direction with UI design it's not funny. GNOME wanted to try something new, and I respect that, but it's like they took everything we've learned about what makes a good UI in the last 40 years, and did the exact opposite. It's one thing to change where the scrollbars are, or decide whether to put menus at the top of the screen or not, or what buttons should look like, etc, but they don't even value concepts like consistency any more.

It's horrific.