That’s cool, Multi Theft Auto (SA mod) also used Lua. Helped me learn programming in a fun way

Why not couch the article as “a vulnerability was found and patched” instead of “something bad could have happened”?

“STORE COULD HAVE BEEN ROBBED!! A bystander noticed the door wasn’t locked, with the owner realizing he hadn’t been locking it correctly. There is no evidence anyone broke in.”

News in the porcelain village in Oz.

It’s weird, China has giant reeducation camps where they imprison over a million Uyghurs / Muslims… you know, the asocials. The huge crowds of people being held on their knees with bags on their heads should have stuck in people’s minds.

And then there’s misinformation about some national social credit score.

I bet everyone hears people bring up the latter way more than the former.

Why do you think China has a social score? If you look up information on it, you find many scores / systems for different domains. Or how national policy and local policy can be different or at odds. You see China announced it in 2014 and barely put out a draft in 2023. The “trustworthy” score is tied to fraud, cheating people, selling counterfeits, etc. One local government is apparently trying to tie blood donation to financial breaks. Like giving you a tax break. Just an example of how the national policy can be interpreted and used in practice.

The idea of our governments scoring us for every little tic is scary, but the danger of overreach is different than “in China, your social score goes down for not smiling.” What exactly are people referring to?

I need to try windows again. I remember it being more complex than Linux. I switched just so things were easier. Cygwin! Registry editing! Getting a Microsoft degree just to edit my desktop menus. I didn’t just sit there and install my programs like a good kid and actually wanted to, you know, do things with my computer. And boy did windows hate me for it.

I’m hoping modern IDEs or just having Linux on standby would make Windows simple enough to use.

That’s what I said. Free licenses are for free software, while copyleft is for “free software.” Copyleft is because corporations like Xerox will act in bad faith, etc. Free licenses are for free software. Copyleft is for Free Software, The Movement. People aren’t cucks for not deigning to make every piece of code they write part of some statement.

Permissive licenses are truer to the spirit of free software but copyleft, while kind of a copout, seems more pragmatic due to corporations. I wouldn’t avoid copyleft licensing on principle or anything but it feels incongruous to want to make something freely available to all but then nitpick over how they use it.

It’s new to me, I think it’s saying that your system is built up by you declaring what you want in a file, a single source that everything comes from.

It’s atomic because each action the system takes is carefully completed rather than bailing out and requiring you to fix something.

It’s immutable meaning you declare how you want things to be set up and then critical changes stem from those declarations and nothing else. You would obviously generate preferences, save data, etc. but the files that make the system / packages work are carefully locked.

It’s like the concept of flatpaks + structured system defining + modern common sense OS operations?

No problem. I’m no guru and I’m currently on Zig but I think learning some Rust is a really fast way to hone skills that are implied by other languages.

You use lifetimes to annotate parameters and return values in order to tell the compiler about how long things must last for your function to be valid. You can link a specific input with the output, or explicitly separate them. If you don’t give lifetimes the language uses some basic rules to do it for you. If it can’t, eg it’s ambiguous, then it’s a compile error and you need to do it manually.

It’s one of the harder concepts of rust to explain succinctly. But imagine you had a function that took strA and strB, used strB to find a subsection of strA, and then return a slice of strA. That slice is tied to strA. You would use 'a annotation for strA and the return value, and 'b for strB.

Rust compiler will detect the lifetime being shorter than expected.

Also, ownership semantics. Think c++ move semantics. Only one person is left with a good value, the previous owners just have garbage data they can’t use anymore. If you created a thing on the heap and then gave it away, you wouldn’t have it anymore to free at the end. If you want to have “multiple owners” then you need ref counting and such, which also stops this problem of premature freeing.

Edit: one more thing: reference rules. You can have many read-only references to a thing, or one mutable reference. Unless you’re doing crazy things, the compiler simply won’t let you have references to a thing, and then via one of those references free that thing, thereby invalidating the other references.

The other day I was trying to disable Ubuntu Pro stuff and the way to do it reminded me of Windows. Once I get my media backed up I’m switching to another distro, just not sure what one yet.

Burning CDs. That’s how I know most people didn’t know how to do it, or want to put in the effort. You had to go buy a stack of CDs, hope your computer supported burning, had to make sure players could support the burned disc (depending on if you made a music disc or data disc, if it was rewritable), and spend the time to burn the disc.

Contrast that to ctrl+c ctrl+v.

There’s more people who can ‘duplicate’ digital files than there were people burning CDs.

The amount of people who will duplicate their tapes and CDs would be lower than the amount of people who will duplicate their digital files.

Most of the time when a law sounds silly for banning something when alternatives exist, it’s because people themselves are silly and don’t actually go for the alternatives at the same rate as they would the banned thing. Ie gun accessory bans, ninja star bans.