> I'm always baffled by the insistence of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages

should be

> I'm always baffled by the insistence by opponents of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages

This has been your reminder that Slashdot's refusal to allow people to edit their own comments just generates more heat than light.

"Our side" hasn't really shot anyone. Kirk's killer appears to either be apolitical or, less likely, a member of a MAGA faction that hated Kirk's faction. There isn't anything linking Kirk's killer to left wing politics at all, if there had been it'd be mentioned pretty much every day by the Trump administration. And both the attempts to murder Trump came from people whose friends said were conservatives.

Your side, OTOH, has killed or attempted to kill a fair number of the right's opponents, be it the murder of elected politicians such as Hortman or Hoffman, or even the crazed hammer attack on Pelosi's husband.

And we're still here. You're not going to win.

So Donald Trump isn't MAGA, he sneaked in? I could have sworn he was the one who popularized the initials.

(Or are you saying a lot of his supporters believed a rather obvious lie? Just curious, but why is this lie so important and not the others?)

Are the people rewriting everything in Rust with us in the room right now?

There are some projects to rewrite some tools in Rust, sometimes unnecessarily, but nobody's proposed rewriting everything or even everything in use. Even this article is about Rust being added to the kernel, not rewritten in it. Where are you getting it from that, say, anyone is proposing rewriting the Linux kernel in Rust?

In fairness, PHP simply replaces one type of lack-of-safety with another. C does not assume null, 0, "", "0", and false or all the same thing, something PHP does because... reasons. If PHP actually implemented mandatory type safety, PHP would be no worse than Python, and the rewritten code running under the new PHP would have most of the security issues fixed.

Rust's spec... do bear in mind there's at least one project out there that's implementing an independent version of Rust. You kind of need multiple implementations for a programming language to have one. If you look at most of the programming languages we deal with every day, relatively few have a formal spec that isn't "Whatever the only implementation of this does". I'm not arguing that's good, far from it, but it's apparently not a barrier.

If I had to criticize Rust these days, I'd say the fact its standard library is bare and you're forced to rely upon third party modules ("crates") that aren't audited or in any way curated for basic functionality is pretty fucking dumb. It completely undermines the entire point of the language, that it's supposed to be safe to use. We know from the XZ backdoor that you can't trust third party code that way, and it's only a matter of time before a malicious actor attacks one of the bigger crates - perhaps via a dependency - and does the same thing.

To me, Rust having a standard library comparable to, say, Java's is more important than it having a written specification.

I'm always baffled by the insistence of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages that developers can only make a certain number of errors-per-project. That somehow if you write something in C it'll be perfect except for the buffer overflows and null pointers. That if you write it in Java or Rust or Go or whatever somehow those will go so you need to introduce logic errors instead.

Is this how you program?

As for "Developers should now be freed to make higher level, more difficult to find logic erors", are you implying that it's easier to find logic errors in C?

God forbid anyone ban bullying at a time when bullying was becoming increasingly common in tech communities.

I'm not sure how it qualifies as "toxic" to ban toxic behavior, but there we go. In the mean time at least one kernel programmer has been celebrated here for actively lying about the Rust project and demanding the Rust modules be banned from using his code because... no reasons given.

Literally the only reason for objecting to Rust's "real world politics" is if you wanted to call a fellow programmer who you had a disagreement with the N word, F word, or misgender them. None of that behavior has a place in an open source community, or indeed a work place or even a bar.

Who needs school when we have TikTok?

Now that they've gotten rid of this woke DEI nonsense, they can spend 10x as much on some more wholesome and less-indoctrinating educational materials! /s

It's not just Germany. Most of Western Europe has been trending this way since the end of the Cold War, and the roots of such thinking were there long before Hitler was even an itch in his daddy's pants. A lot of Americans seem surprised by this. But Europe isn't America, and European governments have always had a more paternalistic view of their role than American political philosophy allows for. Further, most Europeans are fine with that. Americans gasp when they see such things, but this is just the latest line of code in the old European We'll keep you all safe, comfy, and warm under the blanket of *insert European capitol here* script. European thinking sees the welfare of their people in totality. So it's not just social welfare you get from such systems... "free" healthcare, subsidized housing, schools, etc... but you also get the rest of the "protection" philosophy... that you have to protect people from themselves. Speech codes, bans on anything the government deems "extreme", they're all part of the paternalistic view that you're protecting and providing for your people. Father's job is to feed, house, and keep the kids safe. Part of that is disciplining and setting rules that they have to follow, for their own good. With a few exceptions, this is No Bueno is most of North America, but again, Europe isn't America. It has a considerably different mindset.

Did you even RTFA?

"Our analysis takes advantage of administrative data from a large, urban, public college system "

The analysts are from Columbia, a private Ivy League school. Not the students. Since they're NYC based, the students they were studying were almost certainly from the public City University of New York system. Not at all hard to get into, and no need for "nepo baby" admissions.

There was a movie called Kill the Irishman, starring the late great Ray Stevenson, that had a similar plot point: Danny Greene borrows money from the Mob to start a restaurant. The courier tasked with delivering the cash decides to take it and buy heroin with it, re-sell it at a profit, and keep the difference for himself. Except the sellers are Feds in a honeypot scheme. The money is gone, the Mob demands Greene pay them back, he refuses, so the order goes out to "kill the Irishman".

So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.

Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that this type of content isn't seen as adult-only" and TBH I think the W3C could easily define it, and legislators could then basically decide whether it's worth the hassle of going beyond the W3C's recommendations. (Remember that a world wide standard for what constitutes adult material is going to be an issue anyway, to obey Australia's law as well as those of various US states a website will have to go for the most all encompassing definition to cover both. So having the W3C define something reasonable, and having nations decide whether they want to accept that, or basically create something unworkable more likely to result in their region being blocked than anything useful, would be an improvement.)

So we have a potential solution that doesn't involve the extreme "Upload your driver's license and other forms of ID and basically reveal to the world who you are and fuck anonymity just when we need it most" garbage, we just need to implement it.

The question then becomes: would Reddit support it under threat of prosecution? My guess is they would. My guess is Facebook, Reddit, X, etc, would happily mark their websites as adult-only to comply with a social-media-adults-only law. They wouldn't be happy with it, but the alternative, which blocks adults too, is worse.

Microsoft could be making a killing on ex-VMware customers if they would just improve their management tools on Hyper-V. That keeps a lot of enterprise customers away. MS's management software for VM's is barebones compared to what VMware offers. But Broadcom seems determined to dare their customers to leave. They're pretty arrogant because they're confident most of their customers will pay the bigger bill instead of jumping to a far-less feature-rich solution.

Hard disagree: LLM, sold as you're selling it, is a con. It is not a viable replacement for human beings over the long term. LLMs train on information that's created by human beings. There's zero incentive to create that content if LLMs will just gobble it up and sit between the end users and authors.

Be very clear on this: as we shift to LLMs being put in front of everything, the incentive to post answers to StackOverflow or Reddit, the incentive to post news, the incentive to post movie reviews, the incentive to blog, the incentive to write anything at all, tends to zero.

And that in turn means that, assuming this gets worse and we don't have those incentives back in place by, say, 2030, that LLMs will be based upon 2030s information.. in 2040, in 2050, etc.

That's just not sustainable or viable. It's not going to work.

And just to add insult to injury, LLMs are already being fed their own material. LLMs trawl the web looking for content, and an increasingly large amount of content is generated by LLMs. Nothing sane can come out of LLMs ingesting their own poop.

And YOU may be too short sighted to see that, but you can bet the fraudsters selling this technology are not. They will cash out eventually leaving the rest of us holding the bag.

China? China may do the same thing as well, but that's not going to mean they "beat us", it just means we'll all sink faster.