mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

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673

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm definitely open to the idea that C and C++ have problems, but the things listed in this article aren't them. He lists some very weird behavior by the clang compiler, and then blames it on C despite the fact that in my mind they're clearly misfeatures of clang. He talks about uncertainty of arithmetic overflow... unless I've missed something, every chip architecture that 99% of programmers will ever encounter uses two's complement, so the undefined behavior he talks about is in practice defined.

He says:

But not all systems where C and C++ run have hardware memory protection. For example, I wrote my first C and C++ programs using Turbo C on an MS-DOS system. Reading or writing a null pointer did not cause any kind of fault: the program just touched the memory at location zero and kept running. The correctness of my code improved dramatically when I moved to a Unix system that made those programs crash at the moment of the mistake. Because the behavior is non-portable, though, dereferencing a null pointer is undefined behavior.

This is the same thing. He's taking something that's been a non-issue in practice for decades and deciding it's an issue again. Yes, programming in C has some huge and unnecessary difficulties on non-memory-protected systems. The next time I'm working on that MS-DOS project, I'll be sure to do it in Python to avoid those difficulties. OH WAIT

Etc etc. C++ actually has enough big flaws to fill an essay ten times this long about things that cause active pain to working programmers every day... but no, we're unhappy that arithmetic overflow depends on the machine's reliably-predictable behavior, instead of being written into the C standard regardless overriding the machine architecture. It just seems like a very weird and esoteric list of things to complain about.

Edit: Actually, I thought about it, and I don't think clang's behavior is wrong in the examples he cites. Basically, you're using an uninitialized variable, and choosing to use compiler settings which make that legal, and the compiler is saying "Okay, you didn't give me a value for this variable, so I'm just going to pick one that's convenient for me and do my optimizations according to the value I picked." Is that the best thing for it to do? Maybe not; it certainly violates the principle of least surprise. But, it's hard for me to say it's the compiler's fault that you constructed a program that does something surprising when uninitialized variables you're using happen to have certain values.

John Oliver has a great examination

Ya... I'm honestly not sure why I thought that was a productive thing for me to say. 😕

Yep, and I just wanted to share with you how you might be able to successfully share this with others, instead of just getting downvotes and resistance. But you're clearly not interested right now. Good luck.

So:

• You don't want to invest the time to communicate your point effectively, even when people specifically ask you to tell them what you're saying
• You don't want to hear other what other people have to say to broaden your own point of view, if they "think they know better."

Sounds like a recipe for a lot of frustrating interactions to me.

I don't know anything about you as a person and it's hard to judge anything from text. But the way you've approached this comment thread comes across as mad rude, yes. And I think that's why you're getting such a negative reaction (more so than anything to do with Firefox).

If you were at a party or in some group chatting, and you had a point to make but said people weren't allowed to talk to you on the topic until they'd completely watched a 15-minute video, and people mostly said they didn't want to do that, but some person did go off and watch around 10 minutes of the video and came back and started trying to explain to everyone some of what was in it, and you just turned to him and said, "You miss some important points," and then turned away without saying anything else --- taken as a whole that'd be pretty rude, right? Or do you not think so?

I read the NYT article he's talking about.

FAIR says:

But what, exactly, did the Times dig up on Singham and his funded groups? Despite its length, the piece provides no evidence that either the philanthropist himself or the groups he funds are doing anything improper.

The NYT article says:

Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

Code Pink once criticized China’s rights record but now defends its internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity.

Several times a year, activists and politicians from across Africa fly to South Africa for boot camps at the Nkrumah School, set in a popular safari area. At a recent session, reading packets said that the United States was waging a “hybrid war” against China by distorting information about Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Xinjiang region where Uyghurs were held in camps. The packets praised Chinese loans, calling them “an opportunity for African states to construct genuine, and sovereign, development projects.” No mention was made of China’s role in a recent debt crisis in Zambia. “They’re being rounded up to be fed Chinese propaganda,” said Cebelihle Mbuyisa, a former employee who helped prepare materials for the workshop. “Whole social movements on the African continent are being hijacked by what looks like a foreign policy instrument of the Chinese Communist Party.” Those who objected were shouted down or not invited back, four past attendees said.

I would describe those things as improper. The response Singham keeps offering, in response to the question "Are you spending tons of your money spreading propaganda to benefit the CCP?" is (a) nothing we're doing is illegal, and (b) no one from the CCP is telling us what to do. Those things may be true but that wasn't the question. FAIR joins in by vigorously claiming that there's nothing to see here... all I can say is, I read the NYT piece and it was pretty interesting to me.

I did also go to Code Pink to verify the NYT's claim that they're weird about China, and they are:

CODEPINK defends the right of the Uyghurs in China to live free and fruitful lives. The Chinese government’s violation of their human rights is of concern to us and we join the call for justice for the Uyghurs. At the same time, we call out the US government, which is using the human rights of the Uyghurs as a tool to drive war with China, instead of a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as such.

This is weird because I'm not aware of the US government doing much of anything about the human rights of the Uyghurs. 😢

In 1979, the US and China normalized their diplomatic relations and issued the joint Shanghai Communique, recognizing that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of China. This “One China” policy has since ensured peaceful US-China relations for more than 50 years.

Read about the history of the progressive and long-standing movement in Taiwan for peaceful reunification with mainland China.

The most recent election in Taiwan showed that voters were more concerned about local issues, while relations with China were lower priorities.

...

Have you tried in person? I honestly have never tried playing online, but I've heard that the energy / enjoyability of in person is far better.

Right, I'll check it out (firefish also looks sort of promising...)

This is the internet, everyone is given shit. You are giving me shit, I am giving you shit. The shit is eternal and infinite. You will give and be given shit for the rest of your time on the internet, and so will everyone else. There is no shitless internet as long as you participate.

You’ll come to conclusions that support your biases, I’ll come to the opposite conclusions that support mine, and we’ll both give each other shit from the comfort of our custom tailored echo machines.

This isn't accurate. If this is the nature of your internet communities, I would encourage you to find different communities. It does seem to me that lemmy.world is becoming this type of community, yes, and I have a somewhat-solidifying plan to leave because of it. There are definitely Lemmy instances where an announcement like this wouldn't be met with hundreds of downvotes and people threatening to leave or predicting the downfall of Lemmy as a result (not this instance, but Lemmy as a whole, I think probably because they're not real clear on the difference.)

My reaction to the comments on this announcement is not intended to "give anyone shit." I don't plan to add anything negative to the discussion unless I feel like I have to in order to be honest about my view.

I can pretty much promise you that I'm trying to be open to what you say and evaluate it honestly and engage with you in good faith, although I'll definitely disagree with you on some things. IDK if you believe that, but it's true. If you have no plans to do the same, we don't need to talk. If you're coming at this with the idea that we're supposed to be "giving each other shit" in some big bad-faith waste of time... IDK, man, I think it'd be better for you if you approached it differently, whether or not you think the other person's going to do the same.

Dude... I stepped in to what you should have done, i.e. just summarize the content of the video, because that's the way to make a reasonable post on a platform where you're not the boss and can't just order people to watch whether they want to or not. Are you this rude to people in real life?

A lot of video platforms judge the quality of a video and promote it or not according to how long people watch, so if people obey things like "Watch until the end," it has the effect of rigging the metrics so that it'll get spread more widely (as compared with a video that people click away from whenever they personally feel they've seen enough.) That's why that type of statement is clickbait-y; I'm not saying that was your intent in saying it, just that that's the impact it has and why some people react negatively to it.

What are these important things he said at the end? Why are you resisting just laying out the high-level theses of the video in a manner that people can digest in a minute or two? This whole approach of coming out of the gate ordering people to devote 15 minutes of their time watching a video, whether they decide based on watching a little bit that they want to finish it or not, is just being commanding to people and incredibly disrespectful of their time. I think that's probably the main reason you're getting a negative reaction.

I'll put it this way: I generally agreed with a wildly popular (edit: unpopular) "anti-Mozilla" post if you want to call it that, I devoted enough time to watch the majority of this video before I decided I'd had enough, I devoted enough time to neutrally summarize some of its points to people and I agree with the validity of some of them. Personally I prefer Chrome over Librewolf. As not at all a "Firefox fan," there were also definitely elements of this video that moderately pissed me off. Mainly I'm trying to relate to you why I think this post is getting a negative reaction. I can't make you want to hear that if you've already decided to yourself what's what, but that was my feeling if you're open to hearing it.

The title of the article is clickbait. The actual text says something which I think is accurate, i.e. these bots create answers according to a pretty inscrutable process, and it's very difficult to get them to behave any particular way (whether that be to be "unbiased" politically, or accurate, or refuse to do illegal things, or what have you).

I think people may just be hyper-sensitive because of that article about Mozilla foundation's finances that came out a few weeks ago (which the maker of the video clearly cribbed from at one point).

FWIW, I think the article raised some pretty valid points, and I didn't agree with all the hate that it got, so I've got no issue with including the points in the video. If I were to provide some constructive criticism for the video, I would say it should dive into more of the factual basis behind a lot of these things, providing some analysis, as opposed to just touching on twenty different subjects throwing a little drop of shade at Firefox for each one and then moving on to the next one right away.

Edit: Also, trying to set rules for other people's behavior, that they're not permitted by you to comment or downvote until they've watched the whole video, is a little clickbait-y and mostly likely to just irritate people, no matter how valid or invalid is the "requirement" that you're trying to get them to follow.

Partial summary:

• Firefox has tiny market share ergo Mozilla has failed
• Firefox claims to protect user's privacy, but also has deals with Google that form the bulk of its income, to route users to Google's privacy-invading search
• Firefox doesn't work as well as Chrome
• Mozilla foundation gives money to activist organizations maybe unrelated to software development
• Mozilla has attempted several failed projects of dubious worthwhileness

It's not an uninformative video, but it's also very high-level and with a heavy opinion to fact ratio, I think. I started taking mental notes partway through about some things I had issue with factually, but I'll admit I sort of stopped caring most of the way through.

3D printers are one of the few remote-controlled devices in a house that can get hot enough to start a fire

They can also kill you with carbon monoxide if they're not vented properly.

Google declined to comment. However, there’s little that Moscow can do to collect the fine.

Lol

Especially with the low dollar figure, this doesn't sound like anything anyone expects to correspond to reality -- more just a lower-court judge who doesn't want to get in trouble and so is being publicly obedient to how we all agree it is (враньё).

I think the allies actually made a specific decision not to kill Hitler, because he was so incompetent at prosecuting the war. They felt that it he was killed and a less insane Nazi took over the war effort it would make a lot more problems for them.

"It's highly unfortunate that this statement wound up being leaked and published," said Scott Horton, an attorney representing the whistleblower. "We're in the preliminary stages of a confidential process. I'm unable to make any other comment."

"I'm glad you did this good thing. Also, fuck you if you don't want it public yet, we're publishing it."

😕

I think that's a lot of it. The internet being made of free services for so long has created this sort of "I sit on my ass and the internet is supposed to all come to me and if I don't like something I'm going to demand to speak to the manager" mentality. That's fine for some things, but on a community-run server where people have no clue the level of work and the generosity being put in by the people they're talking to, it genuinely pisses me off.

I actually don't really care about Lemmy people being nice; I was a big fan as of two months ago because it was full of weirdos and tankies and creative people being genuine about their weird cantankerous ways. Now it seems like the people whose heads are just filled with wet newspaper are here in force, and it makes me sad.