Markass
4d ago
Vivek is the only Republican I would vote against. The vision for the party he has is a cancer and it’s worth giving Dems a little more power to destroy him.
It’s stupid to let Vivek run in Ohio because I highly doubt I’m the only one in the base who vote against him.
Thankfully, Casey Putsch (a car YouTuber) is running as Republican specifically against Vivek. The party probably won't be fucked in Ohio.
Markass
12d ago
Prime example of too much policy being a bad thing. If there weren't specific protections for Indigenous groups, this wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Markass
14d ago
I don't think it's unfair to say that 90% of Rust programmers just want to code and be left alone, while the 10% are either vocal or they make themselves very visible when you trawl through the 9,001 dependencies of any Rust crate. But it's hard to quantify when the rot seems to be everywhere. Python forced out Tim Peters, after all. I like Null's take about the best response to people who hate you being to say fuck you and use their software anyway.
Markass
14d ago
I'm with you there. I didn't mention any of those issues in my post for the sake of time, but the behaviour of activists in the Rust community (granted, like all activists they are a vocal minority) is very off-putting.
Markass
14d ago
In the beginning, the C programming language was created, and there was much rejoicing. C is perhaps the single most influential language in the history of computing. It was "close to the hardware"*, it was fast*, it could do literally everything*. *Yes, I am simplifying a lot here.
But there were a few flaws. The programmer had to manage all the memory by himself, and that led to numerous security vulnerabilities in applications everywhere. Sometimes hackers exploited these vulnerabilities to the tune of several million dollars. This was bad.
But it's not like managing memory is particularly hard. It's just that with complex codebases, it's easy to miss a pointer dereference, or forget that you freed something, somewhere in potentially a million lines of code. So the greybeards said "lol git gud, just don't make mistakes."
The enlightened ones did not take this for an answer. They knew that the programmer shouldn't be burdened with micromanaging the details of memory, especially when security is at stake. Why is he allowed to call malloc without calling free?* The compiler should force him to do so. Better yet, the compiler can check the entire program for memory errors and refuse to compile, before a single unsafe line of code is ever run. *Actually memory leaks aren't usually security issues but I'm glossing over this because this post is already long.
They had discovered something profound: Absent external forces, the programmer will be lazy and choose the path of least resistance. And they created a language based on this principle. In C, you may get away with not checking the return value of a function that could error. In Rust, that is completely unacceptable and will make the compiler cry. The path of least resistance in C is to do nothing, while the path of least resistance in Rust is to handle the error.
That's what makes Rust a better programming language. And I have to agree with the zealots, they are right on this.
...So I have to be disappointed when they're not.
Rust seems to keep popping up in the news in the past couple of months. In November, a bug in Rust code deployed by Cloudflare took down their infrastructure, and half the Internet with it. (Why Cloudflare even has a monopoly on half the Internet is a controversial topic for another time.) The cause? A programmer didn't handle the error from a function.
Well that's technically not true, they did. It's just that calling .unwrap(), a function which will immediately abort the application on error, counts as "handling" the error. In other words, the path of least resistance is not to actually handle the error, but to crash. I argue that this isn't a better outcome than what would have happened in C, which would also be to crash. Sure, the crash won't be a segfault in Rust, but that doesn't matter if half the Internet dies.
This month, a CVE was filed in the Rust part of the Linux kernel, and it turned out to be a memory corruption vulnerability, ironically enough. "But how could this happen?" Rust has these things called unsafe blocks that let you do unsafe memory operations, closer to what you would be allowed to do in C (though granted, I have heard convincing arguments that unsafe Rust is still generally safer than C). So the path of least resistance is not to do things the safest way, but to just surround everything in unsafe if you get tired of fighting the borrow checker.
I hear the same pitch all the time from Rust advocates. "C is unsafe, programmers are too fallible, we must use a language that forces good code." They consistently blame the language, and don't blame the programmer. So how did they react to the above incidents? Did they blame the programmer, or the language?
unwrap like that." "Duh, don't use unsafe, it's obviously unsafe."
If I was one of them, I would throw my hands up and admit that the language didn't have guardrails to prevent this, so if I would blame C in a universe where the incidents happened in equivalent C code, then I should blame Rust here. But then, I wouldn't be a Rust zealot. I'd just be a Rust kinda-supporter. I'd have to carefully consider the nuances of the language and take into account various factors before forming an opinion. Oh no, the horror! And if I went the other way and blamed the programmer, it wouldn't be long before I'd have this nagging feeling that I'm just like a C-nile greybeard, telling the programmers to git gud, and at that point, there seems to be less of a point to using Rust if we just assume that programmers are infallible.
It's a Catch-22, in other words.
To be clear, I'm not saying that these incidents alone mean Rust is a bad choice for anything, ever. I'm not saying Cloudflare or Linux shouldn't use Rust. I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't use. I'm just pointing out the double standards. Rust people can attack C all day using one set of (IMO, entirely justified) standards, but when they are confronted with these incidents, they suddenly switch to another set of standards. Or to put it more clearly, they have a motte and bailey. Motte: "Rust can't prevent shitty programmers from writing shitty code." Bailey: "C is unsafe, because of all the memory unsafe code people have written, and we should rewrite everything in Rust to fix all of it!"
Markass
1mo ago
These are facts that aren't specific to the farms and apply to pretty much every site on the Internet that allows discussion of lolcows (like Reddit). Putting harassment and Kiwi Farms in the same sentence is just darkly hinting at an unspecified implication between the two without explicitly stating a fact that could be disproven.
Markass
1mo ago
Farmers would point out that calling for harassment is banned on site, but on the other hand it's likely a don't ask don't tell sort of situation where many farmers are actually harassing lolcows they just don't say so.
Is there any evidence that harassment is occurring? Not only is it banned on site, farmers actively find, document and condemn anybody who organizes trolling plans against lolcows. Notably, the Reddit "snark" subs which seem to operate with impunity and, for example, have faced little consequences for mailing human skulls to H3H3. But I won't hold my breath to see if Wikipedia will ever mention that.
It is true that three lolcows have an heroed but it's impossible to prove whether or not any farmers were involved. It's extremely likely that farmers were involved, they just didn't admit to anything on the site.
On what basis do you make this claim? The three you refer to killed themselves because:
- Chloe Sagal: Had recently been evicted and had no money due to being too unbearable for the local gay and trans community.
- Julie Terryberry: Was in a physically abusive relationship and committed suicide when it looked like the relationship was ending.
- Byuu / David Ginder: Was socially isolated in a foreign country notorious for shunning outsiders, wasn't even in contact with his husband back home. Had several mental illnesses (such as "rejection-sensitive dysphoria") that he admitted he couldn't really help. He was so isolated, nobody even knew for sure if he was dead or just logged off until FOIA documents dropped years later.
You can read more about them in this OP (note that Byuu's entry is outdated and was written before the FOIA was released).
It's hard for me to see the Kiwi Farms as having contributed to their deaths in any way besides documenting and discussing them. However, discussion is not harassment.
Markass
2mo ago
Reminds me of when Monsanto's anti-competitive, environment-harming practices directly led to one farmer murdering another. The person put on trial was the murderer, while nothing happened to Monsanto, even though they were so controversial that the jury instructions explicitly prohibited mentioning Monsanto.
It also took me too long to realize that Monsanto being enabled shows how useful all those heckler's veto environmentalist regulations were: Not very.
Markass
2mo ago
This is half of why Americans are obese.
Obesity is a complicated subject. To claim that this is even half the reason is a high level of hubris.
Markass
2mo ago
The blacks don't help, but this isn't fully true. People prefer living in suburbs and driving cars because it's just better for them. Even if all black people were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be suburbs and cars. At most it would add a marginal amount to the populations of dense cities.
Markass
2mo ago
I think it's too early to tell. It's more acceptable now to criticise porn and masturbation, sure. But there are still many communities on the Internet where porn consumption is not shamed. Maybe you wouldn't talk about porn in polite society, but that's not a problem if you only socialize in these bubbles, and nobody can force you to talk to other people. Will the broader culture shift to be anti-porn enough for a porn ban to be successful? Hard to say.
Markass
2mo ago
The law is trying to change culture, when culture must change before the law does. I think porn is too normalized in today's culture, owing to sexual liberation and the toaster fucker problem. Trying to ban it won't work when people still want porn. The problem is that it's acceptable to talk about jerking off to porn as if it's something that should be encouraged rather than getting it on with a real person.
Markass
3mo ago
That post reads to me like it's talking about people who feed off attention. If you don't care about maximizing attention then you mitigate the risk of Flanderizing yourself. My online persona is not so different from my real-life persona which is not so different from who I've always been. I don't have a Twitter account so that helps.
Markass
3mo ago
Looking at https://jobs.now/, these companies deliberately post job listings in low-circulation newspapers to be able to claim that there are no American workers. I think you're right on the money.
Markass
3mo ago
Maybe I'm heavily biased, but as the user of a website that has faced numerous deplatforming attempts for several years over completely legal speech, I find it hard to genuinely care if people get censored for saying the wrong thing about Charlie Kirk. In reaction to his death, some may say "and the world kept turning", and in reaction to people who are targeted for saying things like that, I say "first time?"
Is this hypocritical? Maybe. But my position is that going after people for completely legal speech has been a thing for a LONG time now. I'm not saying it's a good thing that people are having their lives ruined for making comments about CK, but I am saying that people have been raising the alarm bells over free speech for YEARS and yet basically nothing has been done about it. So I'm not surprised to see this happen and the only thing I have to say is: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to ensure that America is a place where anybody can speak their mind freely? Because this is very, very far from being the first time something like this has happened.
Markass
4mo ago
Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?
See downthread. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, it's hard to change, and anybody going against it will be seen as overly paranoid.
If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.
They should also ban pedophiles when they are reported and proactively look for them too.
Markass
4mo ago
What is the alternative to an opt in system?
Banning pedophiles from the platform as soon as they are reported, and proactively looking for them too.
How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.
Easier said than done. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, and I have a feeling that any parent who goes against this norm and, for example, stringently monitors their access or even prohibits them from using the Internet entirely (because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all) is going to get looks from other people, or at least their kid will say "Billy gets to use the Internet, why can't I?" Unless everybody in a community agrees that the Internet is too dangerous for kids to be used unsupervised, reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
Markass
4mo ago
So then would you agree that Roblox has said or implied "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators?
Markass
4mo ago
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it?
It's not just currency. They can want the approval of adults, the satisfaction of curiosity, or simply somebody to talk to. Many groomed kids have a tumultuous home life and are extremely lonely, for example. My point being that it shouldn't be thought of in pure economic terms, so predators doing this to children is (or should be) unacceptable and predator catchers finding predators this way is (or should be) acceptable.
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
Again, it's oversimplified to think this way. Being impressionable goes both ways. Sure, some will listen to authority figures and not do this. But some will not, for many reasons such as a preconceived distrust of authorities, being curious thinking "what could go wrong", or simply not knowing of the dangers.
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly?
It's not. But Roblox is uniquely refusing to ban predators when people report them.
The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
Yes, but you can just ban predators who are reported to do this. You can at the very least also not ban people who find predators and get them arrested in real life.
While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem
It's not just "ban people more frequently", it's not banning people who find predators too. I feel like the latter is the biggest cause of their recent PR problem. Their tendency to not ban predators has been reported and documented before but it hasn't caused a huge media circus. Going after people who find predators is just a huge WTF moment.
I do agree that it's impossible to rid platforms of pedophiles before they strike but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if Roblox suddenly reversed course, unbanned Schlep and started banning reported pedophiles, that their PR problem would virtually disappear overnight.
Markass
4mo ago
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
they foul up any actual investigation
This doesn't make sense to say when Schlep (the banned "vigilante") has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested in real life.
intentionally antagonize existing users
I'm not aware of any instances of this happening.
"Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes"
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency. I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example but then you spend a lot of words elaborating on exchanging nudes for Vbucks. In any case, it is extremely oversimplified to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so.
your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met)
That "unless other conditions are met" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. In most cases it's not as simple as blocking the predator precisely because of conditions like: the fact that minors are easily impressionable and manipulated into doing what predators want them to, the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want. The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
Sometimes it gets overloaded and the only thing you can do is wait for the storm to pass. Far as I know it's ran by one guy in Eastern Europe off a shoestring budget.
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