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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I explained a little about buffer overflows, but in essence programming is the act of making a fancy list of commands for your computer to run one after the other.

    One concept in programming is an “array” or list of things, sometimes in languages like C the developer is responsible for keeping track of how many items are in a list. When that program accepts info from other programs (like a chat message, video call, website to render, etx) in the form of an array sometimes the sender can send more info than the developer expected to receive.

    When that extra info is received it can actually modify the fancy list of commands in such a way that the data itself is run directly on the computer instead of what the developer originally intended.

    Bad guy sends too much data, at the end of the data are secret instructions to install a new program that watches every key you type on your keyboard and send that info to the bad guy.


  • There is a ton of literature out there, but in a few words:

    Rust is built from the ground up with the intention of being safe, and fast. There are a bunch of things you can do when programming that are technically fine but often cause errors. Rust builds on decades of understanding of best practices and forces the developer to follow them. It can be frustrating at first but being forced to use best practices is actually a huge boon to the whole community.

    C is a language that lets the developer do whatever the heck they want as long as it’s technically possible. “Dereferencing pointer 0?” No problem boss. C is fast but there are many many pitfalls and mildly incorrect code can cause significant problems, buffer overflows for example can open your system to bad actors sending information packets to the program and cause your computer to do whatever the bad actor wants. You can technically write code with that problem in both c and rust, but rust has guardrails that keep you out of trouble.




  • None of us are in your shoes so it’s really tough to say what your coworkers’ motivations are, but at the end of the day you are yourself, you are in charge of your mental and physical well-being. When someone else does something minor and it affects you strongly it’s time to stop thinking about them and start thinking about what’s happening in your own body.

    Unfortunately your emotions, like being offended, aren’t entirely in your control. There are a lot of brain connections rustling around up in your noggin that don’t pass through the filter of your consciousness.

    The best advice I can offer is to redirect yourself when you start to get offended. Pick a favorite topic, something that you like to think about often, and “switch” to it when you feel yourself getting triggered.

    As for how you should act when you aren’t greeted directly? I see no reason for you to change your behavior, just act as though nothing happened, because nothing did happen


  • No, I live here.

    I hate

    • religious zealotry
    • massive dichotomy in polotical ideologies
    • identity politics
    • warmongering
    • brainwashing (pledge of allegiance?!)
    • poor treatment of poor and homeless
    • prison complex
    • poor education system
    • incredibly expensive healthcare
    • terrible zoning laws and car centricity
    • hiroshima, native genocide, iraq, and so many more. The US has shed so much blood and terror inflicted on the world population
    • world police, vigilante, the US is basically every bad movie villian in country form
    • regressing views on women’s rights
    • the history of slavery



  • Wow what a neat project, I have spent a lot of time recently working around vulkan on m1 machines with compatibility layers and while it’s not a huge pain it does suck to miss out on some of the more powerful features of vulkan that the hardware is certainly capable of. I’m not keen on learning metal to bridge the gap and this is just what the doctor ordered.

    This will be a huge boon for me, way to go!


  • 0x01@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlVLC Player
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    4 months ago

    We don’t deserve our open source heroes, so grateful for the incredible free software ecosystem

    Gimp, 7zip, blender, vlc, open office, the kernel, thousands of others, I feel like our lives have been universally improved by these inverted charity projects. The few taking care of the undeserving many.


  • I’m a 10 year pro, and I’ve changed my workflows completely to include both chatgpt and copilot. I have found that for the mundane, simple, common patterns copilot’s accuracy is close to 9/10 correct, especially in my well maintained repos.

    It seems like the accuracy of simple answers is directly proportional to the precision of my function and variable names.

    I haven’t typed a full for loop in a year thanks to copilot, I treat it like an intent autocomplete.

    Chatgpt on the other hand is remarkably useful for super well laid out questions, again with extreme precision in the terms you lay out. It has helped me in greenfield development with unique and insightful methodologies to accomplish tasks that would normally require extensive documentation searching.

    Anyone who claims llms are a nothingburger is frankly wrong, with the right guidance my output has increased dramatically and my error rate has dropped slightly. I used to be able to put out about 1000 quality lines of change in a day (a poor metric, but a useful one) and my output has expanded to at least double that using the tools we have today.

    Are LLMs miraculous? No, but they are incredibly powerful tools in the right hands.

    Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.










  • We yearn for answers to why we’re here, there’s a reason religion has been such a huge part of there human consciousness for so long, our brains are hard wired to find reasons for everything.

    Since there is no known objective answer to this question, I’ll answer it subjectively, recognizing that my life experiences have tainted my views.

    Life has no purpose. People who do immense “evil” will not be punished. People who do immense “good” will not be rewarded.

    Your existence is a beautiful, flighty phenomenon. You are a heap of octillions of atoms that somehow gained self awareness. Your happiness is merely a chemical exchange in your skull meat, it’s fine to strive for happiness but it’s fleeting.

    I personally strive for serenity, accepting reality for what it is and making peace with it. Nothing matters, we’re all going to lose the gift of consciousness through inevitable death, and that’s okay.