It is surprising how often I encounter strings with NULs in the middle. Bytes have 256 different values, and sooner or later someone wants to transmit all 256 values in what was an ascii text-based conversation. HTTP is a good example. The conversation starts as a normal group of strings, until the header says "Content-Length:" and a bunch of binary data follows later.

Another issue in C is that strings are used for both immutable strings and for string buffers. Java makes it clear that string buffer is going to be something that grows, and a string is immutable. This allows optimizations like keeping the string length and maximum buffer size handy when the buffer is being appended too. C does both functions with the ever present char * type, for better and worse.

The M4 lacks a some important security instructions that are in X86 chips. So I have to use my old Intel Mac to compile certain code. The M4 can't do it.

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

Home assistant is your friend. There are multiple way of integrating control methods. Someone will write a home assistant integration for the Flipper one sooner or later.

This article was about software developers, what I consider to be a dying field.

What you seem to be describing is the much broader field of being an idiot, which no LLM can truly mask, but it might mitigate and normalize.

If using an LLM for coding is rotting your brain, then you likely were never using your brain, you were simply translating a requirement from one human language into software. That's accounting, not creating, and your brain has been rotting the entire time.

Seriously. Software 'development' is little more than acting as a human requirements compiler, and that ship has sailed. Engineers - of any discipline - applying math & developing algorithms - is an endeavor that takes far more than 'software development'. Developing 'software' is kind of dead - like farming with a stick or a horse. Complain all you want, or hop on the tractor and learn how to use automation to your advantage.

When asked the speed of sound, Albert Einstein said, “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” Are all those years thinking about Java & C++ teaching you to think about the broader problems to be solved, or have you lost sight of the forest for the trees?

How would a US social security number help a UK child bypass age verification checks?

Managers have more leverage over a visa-based employee compared to a citizen. If a citizen refuses an order the worst outcome is that they must find another job. Whereas a non-citizen may have to leave the country if they can't find another job before their visa expires. Highly paid positions are not always easy to achieve so there is no reason to believe this effect would be limited to cheap workers.

Not wrong. Naive. You can be right all day and not get the outcome you imagine being right will get you.

Actually this is not entirely correct. People who live and work locally drive less and therefore generate less smog. Whereas, commuters are relatively more responsible for generating smog but may not live in smoggy areas. This counterintuitive fact has been observed in Los Angeles and there are articles in the LA Times discussing it. For LA, the majority of smog *does* come from locals but commuters contribute more than their fair share. Other cities may be different.

And when you succeed, you will find the illegal immigrants were not the cause of society's problems.

Recent result from Penrose showed that a gravitational gradient also collapsed wave functions. So it's not just you. The universe is doing it too.

Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.

I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.

If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.

I've been using AI to write code recently. I figured I should give it a go.
Not reviewing and understanding and editing the output code is a recipe for disaster.

For example, in code for a cryptographic hash function there are padding rules to bring the data size to a multiple of the block size and add a length. So for example with SHA3, a minimum of 65 extra bits. If your data length mod the block size is 65 bits less than the block size, then add the pad bit, put the length at the end of the block and fill in between with zeroes.

If you are longer than that, then it all spills over into the next block and you add a block.

If your length exactly ends up fitting in the block size, then you add a whole extra block with just the padding bit and length and a bunch of zeroes.

The hash that claude spit out missed that last case, so creating a hard to find bug, where in one out of 512 bit sizes, the hash fails. If I had not spotted that by reviewing the code in detail, there would have been a catastrophic bug creating a security vulnerability and system failures in chips.

So read the code and fix it or be doomed.