Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson @ simontherockjohnson @lemmy.ml

they/them

---

Read more

Posts

1

Comments

46

Joined

3 mo. ago

Everyone's libing out hard over this. I've seen this my entire fucking life.

Watch any municipal or state town hall where it's an issue with real stakes where the cops have shot someone, where there's an unequal land deal with developer money behind it, or literally just like be black in America.

The only difference here is that your status as Mr. Senator no longer protects you. These types of arrests and laws have existed in America and have always been used this way. This is why disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and and vagrancy laws are often only criminally enforced on those who cannot afford good lawyers or plead out. These cases get dropped upon challenge because most applications of these laws won't pass a smell test, and the jurisdictions don't want to lose them.

Likewise most courts won't per se strike down these laws because this kind of stuff is really where the rubber meets the road with liberal legalism.

These laws are basically what makes that cop saying "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" possible.

The image shows the last state of a terminal emulator of person without command line or git knowledge. The person attempted to run git commit and is now blaming the result of a specific configuration on their system that launches a vi derivative on the vi derivative itself. This image is expected to convince the viewer that the vi derrivative is to blame.

This is quite literally the plot to A Clockwork Orange.

Now I’m super curious about Gentoo and Portage. You don’t hear so much about compiling your own stuff anymore (probably because there’s less architectures around).

"Nobody" runs Gentoo anymore because most distros have taken the 80% optimizations you can do and just mainlined them. This was back in 2000's where some distros weren't even by default compiling with -O2. Gentoo usage just proved out that the underlying code was effectively -O3 safe in the 80% case and nobody was sneakily relying on C/C++ vagaries.

I have much less time to tinker, but my favorite new bag is Fedora Atomic (currently using Bazzite on my main desktop). I'm incredibly interested in figuring out Nix though, but I haven't had the time. Immutable distros are honestly something incredibly useful for both power users and normies. The main issues I've had with Fedora Atomic have really been around vagueness in the "standard" but they're still figuring things out as far as I can tell.

The flag -O3 exists. Or just -funroll-loops. You shouldn’t even need -funroll-all-loops in this case, since hashes have a fixed size.

I sound way more competent with the flags than I am here, haha. Does Gentoo use an alternate compiler by default?

This is in reference to an ancient linux meme cw: slur

Ironically 'a'++ works in C/C++ because 'a' is char where in JS 'a' is string.

Yeah you're actually right, it's an int in C since K&R C didn't have bool, however it's a bool in C++. I forget my standards sometimes, because like I said this doesn't really matter. It's just nerd trivia.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/types/type_info/operator_cmp.html

There are plenty of sha1 implementations that are more readable and sensible and less readable and sensible. This portion is simply an manually unrolled loop (lmao these gcc nerds haven't even heard of Gentoo) of the hash chunk computation rounds. Hash functions aren't "impenetrable" they're just math. You can write math programmatically in a way that explains the math.

The point of this post is actually things like x[(I-3)&0x0f]. It's entirely the same concept as coercion to manipulate index values this way. What's funny is that void pointer math, function pointer math, void pointers and function pointers in general are typically seen as "beyond the pale" for whatever reason.

Beyond that if you know C you know why this is written this way with the parens. It's because C has fucked up order of operations. For example a + b == 7 is literally "does adding a + b equal 7", but if you write a & b == 7 you would think it means "does a AND b equal 7", but you'd be wrong. It actually means does b equal 7 AND a.

Furthermore a & (b ==7) makes no sense because b == 7 is a boolean value. Bitwise ANDing a boolean value should not work because the width of the boolean is 1 bit and the width of the int is 8 bits. ANDing should fail because there's 7 void bits between the two types. However the standard coerces booleans in these cases to fit the full width, coercing the void bits to 0's to make bitwise ANDing make sense.

Beyond that asking what the memory size of a variable in C is a fools errand because the real answer is "it depends" and "it also depends if someone decided to ignore what it typically depends on (compiler and platform) with some preprocessor fun". Remember how I said "void pointers" are beyond the pale? Yeah the typical "why" of that is because they don't have a known size, but remember the size of something for C is "it depends". 🤷

Almost every language has idiosyncratic stuff like this, but some let you make up your own shit on top of that. These kinda low hanging fruit jokes are just people virtue signaling their nerddom (JS bad am rite guis, use a real language like C), when in reality this stuff is everywhere in imperative languages and typically doesn't matter too much in practice. This isn't even getting into idiosyncracies based on how computers understand numbers which is what subtracting from 0x5F3759DF (fast inverse square root) references.

I thank god every day people who make these comics are too stupid to open gcc's sha1.c because they'd see shit like:

 c

    
#define M(I) ( tm =   x[I&0x0f] ^ x[(I-14)&0x0f] \
            ^ x[(I-8)&0x0f] ^ x[(I-3)&0x0f] \
           , (x[I&0x0f] = rol(tm, 1)) )

#define R(A,B,C,D,E,F,K,M)  do { E += rol( A, 5 )     \
                      + F( B, C, D )  \
                      + K	      \
                      + M;	      \
                 B = rol( B, 30 );    \
                   } while(0)

      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[ 0] );
      R( e, a, b, c, d, F1, K1, x[ 1] );
      R( d, e, a, b, c, F1, K1, x[ 2] );
      R( c, d, e, a, b, F1, K1, x[ 3] );
      R( b, c, d, e, a, F1, K1, x[ 4] );
      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[ 5] );
      R( e, a, b, c, d, F1, K1, x[ 6] );
      R( d, e, a, b, c, F1, K1, x[ 7] );
      R( c, d, e, a, b, F1, K1, x[ 8] );
      R( b, c, d, e, a, F1, K1, x[ 9] );
      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[10] );
      R( e, a, b, c, d, F1, K1, x[11] );
      R( d, e, a, b, c, F1, K1, x[12] );
      R( c, d, e, a, b, F1, K1, x[13] );
      R( b, c, d, e, a, F1, K1, x[14] );
      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[15] );
      R( dee, dee, dee, baa, dee, F1, K1, x[16] );
      R( bee, do, do, dee, baa, F1, K1, x[17] );
      R( dee, bee, do, dee, dee, F1, K1, x[18] );
      R( dee, dee, dee, ba, dee, F1, K1, x[19] );
      R( d, a, y, d, o, F1, K1, x[20] );

  

And think, yeah this is real programming. Remember the difference between being smart and incredibly stupid is what language you write it in. Using seemingly nonsensical coercion and operator overloaded is cringe, making your own nonsensical coercion and operator overloads is based.

That's why you should never subtract things from 0x5F3759DF in any language other than C.

From my perspective making software, it's improved. Prior to 2016, I had to be the one pushing WCAG standards. After 2016 it's been explicit customer facing criteria managed by product managers.

Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.

I honestly don't believe this at all.

Snapshat was popularized by a generation that grew up only using apps, and it was designed to be obtuse, mysterious and difficult to learn in comparison to other apps as a feature. It grew regardless.

To be honest though, I’m a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I’m talking fox news comment section level.

Yeah so is reddit. The best moderation and engagement in fediverse typically exists in the highly moderated communities that people constantly complain about not respecting their freeze peach and antisocial tendencies.

Maximizing the MAU and pLTV of a niche internet forum for the love of the game.

Most people are mad at hexbear because their moderation policies are consequentialist not deontological and thus more stringent against stupid online shit. As a poster you don't have a "right" to post on hexbear, however the community has a right to be protected. As such it's one of the better places if you don't want to read reams upon reams of lib coded bigotry.

I love how quickly lemmy.world speed ran the aesthetically lib to fash redditor pipeline problem without even a profit motive behind them.

This already happens in enterprise code bases with dummies running the show and juniors coding. Every primitive is actually a god object that can work at any level of the software stack.

OH YEAH BUT CAN YOU HAVE AN PUBLIC, CACHED ON MULTIPLE PUBLIC SERVERS, EXTREMELY ANTI-SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL OVER REACTION AGAINST A POLITICIAN ON CHINESE INTERNET???????

I have freely made history today by posting slurs into the public record. The SEE SEE PEE will never give its citizens the ability to do this.

mfs will post this calling it "freedom" or "political participation" or "democracy".

You are playing very loose with context. There are reasons to distrust all the Governments, which is why an uncensored internet is of value.

Yeah so your argument boils down to it's okay to dismiss the Chinese context because they're categorically evil, but the Western governments have "good reasons" because they're categorically good.

Surprise surprise it's just chauvinism.

It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.

Yeah it's equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren't uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.

If you read actual comparisons of "censorship regimes" there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to "drink tea" you're ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.

You know why it's "soooo hard" for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It's because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an "investigation") doesn't work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren't easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn't is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren't told explicitly to the "freedom loving people" of America? Meanwhile the agents of "evil Chinese government" don't need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.

People in other countries get "dissapeared", but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are "political prisoners" but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can "honestly label" it's political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.

People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it's processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn't want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.

The reality here is that you're not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that's how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like "authoritarian" to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of "Are we the baddies?" the reply is a thought terminating cliche of "No we're all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World". China doesn't need to Nuremburg because it's goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.

Why do you think this shit matters?

They read one Tweet or at best an article from an OSINT guy about how influence operations have started to heavily rely on necro accounts to prevent moderation policies of age from affecting their reach. So much like a child learning about ghosts, he sees ghosts everywhere.

The self censorship that exists on the Chinese internet is a matter of moderation scale and techniques. It doesn't exist in the West because Western companies have the incentive to keep you interacting with their products.

In China moderation is meant to:

1. Protect the rest of the users from bad behavior
2. Signal to the bad user that they are engaging in bad behavior.

Western moderation is meant to:

1. Protect the rest of users from a bad behavior
2. Keep bad users engaged in order to drive ad revenues.

1 and 2 are inherently at tensions with one another. Thus you have the problem where 1 is diluted by 2 leading to a much more limited set of what is considered bad, and an ever changing and political understanding of it based on the whims of the ownership and their relation to the party in power. Facebook changes its moderation policies based on presidential administration.

2 also leads to non-deterministic systems of gating users into fake interaction or limiting their reach to other similarly bad users.

Another reason is cultural / social. Praise is often used ironicly in China, they have a very fine line between legitimate praise and what in the West would be considered saccharine or gassing someone up. In China when you overly praise someone it's read as a criticism of the person for what you're praising them for. So typically censorship structures do not take into account sentiment unlike in the West esp. because Chinese is more of a figurative language than English. There is a lot of context lost in communicating text only and audio only Chinese due to how the language is constructed. In essence they prefer to police topic not types of speech (e.g. hate speech, criticism, etc).

The last reason this happens is a lot of the Chinese Internet's moderation policies are based on the fact that their level of public social acceptability is much more constricted think PG not even PG-13. In that sense the codified language works to create a space where you're able to have conversations on things that would "rock the boat" without getting everyone hot and bothered. Unlike the Western Internet where social media companies want these clashes to happen because they drive more engagement and thus more revenue.

For example instead of posting about censorship and getting into an internet pile on where nothing happens and nobody learns anything because they're talking past each-other why not just post a picture of a river crab wearing 3 watches. Anyone who cares knows what that means and they know that arguing about it online isn't actually the way to change anything in China. Everyone having a take while barely understanding the thing they have a take on is only beneficial to Western capitalists running internet companies that act as treats. Higher education is affordable in China, you can actually go learn about censorship at an accredited program. Surprisingly because Chinese citizens on average are protected by their government from being wrung dry for all their profit potential by their capitalist class they have time/energy to do these things.