I wrote a compiler for an ObjC-like language (with less brackets), which can produce binaries for any of {Mac, Windows, Linux, WASM, Arm A9 (Zynq), m68k or 6502} running on any of {Mac, Windows, Linux}. So you can produce a dev-signed Mac binary on a Linux box. I’m just going through extending that output range to mobile {Android, iOS} and I’ll release it as open source.

The compiler docs for the language (xc) are at https://compile-xc.org/ - feel free to browse.

I didn’t think getting the signing working for Mac/iOS was terribly hard.

... between reality and what the tech bros believe. And the reality-distortion field affects only the latter, not the workers. For starters, the tech bros are wholly unaware of why people work. The vast majority of people who live on this planet work to earn money to buy food and to pay for shelter. The difference between working and not working is the difference between eating and not eating, and sleeping under a roof in a bed and sleeping rough on the streets. It is that simple. And for that vast majority of people who work to survive, how do whatever efficiencies the tech bros claim AI will create actually help? Does a reduction in working hours come with a commensurate increase in hourly wage, to ensure that total income remains the same? We all know the answer. Further, what are the estimates of what jobs will be optimized-out by AI? I think we can guess: any kind of middle-class knowledge work. That's not just the grunt coders. It's the people who work in the doctor's office both at the front desk and in the back room. It's the people at the bank who help customers. It's the support staff of every office in every industry. It's the people who work at the government agencies (always a favorite target for the right wing, anyway). Now there's an argument to be made that a lot of these jobs are Bullshit Jobs, though to be fair they are not the sort of job described in the book. They are jobs that are necessary but are not rewarding for the worker. They provide needed income, since our ownership and capitalist society demands that we trade money for food and shelter, we must work to earn that money. I haven't even mentioned the low-level labor jobs like stocking shelves at warehouses and picking crops in the fields. Already robots are replacing the former, and surely the latter. All of the jobs mentioned here are invisible to the tech bros pushing an AI future. They keep making claims about how the office workers will somehow end up benefiting by AI, even as the AI replaces them (at a much higher cost than the salaries and benefits). They don't speculate on what these people will do to earn money for food and shelter because they simply do not care. It is not on their radar. I'm an electronics engineer who is much closer to retirement than to the start of my career, so I don't expect the coming AI apocalypse to affect me, but I do see it affecting the new generation of people coming into the profession. What I will tell those new folks who ask is this: we, as engineers, are working class. We trade our labor (even if it is sitting at a desk, typing into a computer) and our time for money. And while we like to think that we have certain skills that make us valuable to our employers, ultimately we are dependent on the bosses continuing our employment and paying us. That dependency is why I say we are working class. In that respect, we professional engineers have more in common with the janitors who clean our offices than with the people in the executive suite. The execs can decide that janitors are a cost that's too much to bear, so they can lay off most of that staff and make the professionals take out their own trash. The execs can also decide that USA-based engineers are too expensive and can lay us all off and move the engineering operations overseas. Maybe the executives will live their truth, that AI's efficiencies mean that the professional knowledge workers can do a four-day week instead of five, and if they're being generous, they'll actually keep the annual salaries the same. But that doesn't help the janitors who are needed only four days a week instead of five, and let's see if the execs help the janitors same was they help the professionals. Perhaps the engineers can be replaced by the AI; in the same manner, the professional admin staff can be replaced by the AI. And when they do that, they'll no longer need janitors, because there won't be any office space to clean. And great: now you have thousands of well-paid professionals out of work, along with the thousands of low-paid laborers out of work. Take all of that cash out of a consumer economy and you have a really big problem. Why? Because the majority of work in the USA is in services. Sure, everyone needs to hire a plumber now and again, and plumbing isn't the sort of job that can be automated away, but if fewer people have the income required to pay the plumbers, the plumbers don't get hired, so they have no income to use for food and shelter, and also the pipes remain broken. Now what happens when the AI decides that high-level executives are no longer needed to run a business? Seems to me that the AI can be easily trained on that, and the money to be saved in multi-million-dollar salaries and perquisites is significant. Could anyone really tell if the executives were replaced by AI? Maybe we should run this test. And then the AI will decide that it doesn't need the tech bros. The singularity will arrive, but as Doctor Strange told Kaecilius, they're not gonna like it.

my oldest is 26, and my next is 22. oldest was told to go into cyberseurity , get a degree in it, gets out, no one will even interview without 5 years experience. no feeder jobs or anything that would give them that experience, just magically you need experience. they've been a supervisor at a fast food place for some time now, applying to 100-150 roles all over the USA and not getting a response, let alone a rejection.

My next just graduated in May, he has a little more of a plan, wants to be a professor and teach English to autistic kids (as he is one, but graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English)

Just wanting to work for a year to save up for his master program, finally found a job for $9.50 an hour at a movie theater, no other place would call him back as he has a BA in English and 'is over qualified' or doesn't have grocery store experience.

This is what happens when you don't hire people for the long haul, everything is transactional. I don't think you should work same place until you die but now business is so unwilling to invest in someone for them to leave, they won't invest.

If GoDaddy is concerned, good. They are the worst of the registrars and probably half the reason we have sketchy stuff on the internet.

I went to it last night. I have no idea what the complaints are about. 'Dark and Muddy' we were on a world destroyed by war, with people scrounging out an existnance that had bad guys stealing every female child for a breeding farm. Should it be bright and clean?

way to blow the ending spoiler. Yes, she killed a guy. how many action movies have been released where the body count is 100x higher and we're cool with it? the hero murders entire base full of people blows it up on the way out, but supergirl stabs a guy who shot her dog with a poison that tortures it to death over three days and killed a kids family, killed another family and their kid in front of her.

He died to quickly for my taste. He needed to die screaming, one appendage ripped off at a time.

it was a fun movie, I swear to god I do not understand people these days.

By the time Slashdot started using id's, I thought it had already become too crowded to have a useful conversation, so I didn't bother to register. I don't even remember why I eventually broke down and registered one.

I remember my first post was to a discussion of whether it was better for Linux distros to conform to a set of committee defined standards, or simply to allow the market to define de facto standards. Of course, that was posted under my real name, as was usually the custom at the time. I remember thinking that Anonymous Coward guy sure posted a lot of comments.

These days, I don't think I'd post anything anywhere under my real name. I don't think there's even an archive of those original Slashdot articles and comments.

If you read the article, this only affects the National Laboratories. The government already owns those. Private institutions are free to carry on as usual.

The company that wants to take advantage of my home to house their mini data center node can: 1. Pay for the cost of the house while I retain the title, 2. Pay my property taxes, 3. Pay my utility bill, 4. Pay for all house maintenance, 5. Pay for all insurance, 6. Pay me an extra $25,000 a month as a âoeconvenience fee.â Makes sense to me. And itâ(TM)s probably still cheaper for them to do this instead of building giant data centers.

I have been to all of the QC Snapdragon briefs, know the engineers personally, and have written about the shitshow on SemiAccurate.com extensively, basically I know what is going on. QC doesn't understand what they are doing and why, and there is ZERO internal impetus to change from the people on top. They do nearly nothing on software enablement because, "That is Microsoft's job". Drivers are intentionally locked down and encrypted to block Linux, and x86 compatibility is BETTER in hardware than the Mac Mx line (Same people who did the M1 and M2 did the X1 and X2, and they all just bailed on QC) but the software is.... oh look outside, there is a sky.

TLDR: No chance in hell there will be a fix.

                    -Charlie

One thing that seems to get forgotten about TOS - it bombed, and got canceled after only 3 ratings challenged seasons. It only redeemed itself in syndication.

Economics. Sadly, plastic straws and cups are cheaper to manufacture than their wax paper equivalents.

Maybe the mental health warnings should be for New York itself.

I really do think coding using AI tools is a bit faster, at least it seems that way to me. As most of the morning but lengthy work can be done faster by AI.

But I am also pretty sure it's VERY easy to rapidly incur technical debt, especially if you are telling AI to review its own work. Yeah it will do some stuff but who is to say post review fixes it's really better?

More than ever I think the right approach to coding with AI is to build up carefully crafted frameworks that are solid (maybe use AI to help but review and tests very carefully) then allow AI to build on top of solid fundamental structures that you know are solid, and do not let the AI modify those - maybe let it ask for feature requests.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz

Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.

Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).

Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.

Yaz