Fun fact, Rust has a special error message for this:

Unicode character ‘;’ (Greek Question Mark) looks like a semicolon, but it is not.

It also detects other potentially confusing Unicode characters, like the division slash which looks like /.

Tell me you don’t know what a programming language is without telling me you don’t know what a programming language is

I have this great idea for an app, we can go 70/30 on it! 70 for me because the idea is the hardest part after all. So basically it’s Twitter plus Facebook plus Tinder with a built in MMO. You can get that done in a couple weeks, should be pretty easy right?

Texan here. I don’t have a generator. Blackouts basically haven’t been a thing in my area since like 15 years ago, so it really depends on location. Also my electric bill works the same way as it would in any other state; the problem is when people buy electricity at what you might call “market price”: most of the time it’s cheaper, but you get fucked over sooner or later. It’s kind of like that story about people’s AC being controlled by the power company. They signed up for a program that explicitly set your AC higher during high-demand periods and then surprise Pikachu faced when the company did what they said they would do.

That said, our grid is still definitely trash (as are many other things here) and I’m desperately trying to move. Basically the only thing we’ve got going for us is the food is amazing.

In simple terms, they just don’t allow you to write code that would be unsafe in those ways. There are different ways of doing that, but it’s difficult to explain to a layperson. For one example, though, we can talk about “out of bounds access”.

Suppose you have a list of 10 numbers. In a memory unsafe language, you’d be able to tell the computer “set the 1 millionth number to be ‘50’”. Simply put, this means you could modify data you’re not supposed to be able to. In a safe language, the language might automatically check to make sure you’re not trying to access something beyond the end of the list.

No, the industry consensus is actually that open source tends to be more secure. The reason C++ is a problem is that it’s possible, and very easy, to write code that has exploitable bugs. The largest and most relevant type of bug it enables is what’s known as a memory safety bug. Elsewhere in this thread I linked this:

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safety/

Which says 70% of exploits in chrome were due to memory safety issues. That page also links to this article, if you want to learn more about what “memory safety” means from a layperson’s perspective:

https://alexgaynor.net/2019/aug/12/introduction-to-memory-unsafety-for-vps-of-engineering/

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280

Of course! Thanks for the discourse. Makes the world go 'round.

And as I said, if they manage to entirely switch, I won’t have reservations.

As far as security in extant browsers and C++, see here: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safety/

The Chromium project finds that around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems.

It’s a serious issue.

Depends on a lot of factors. Due to uncontrollable factors like small untrackable debris, more satellites is always more dangerous, but that’s still an extremely small problem. If all the Starlink-style companies cooperate properly and adopt high tech solutions for collision avoidance, it’ll probably be fine - space is really, really big. Additionally, the extremely low orbits are a great mitigating factor for potential parts failures; even if a satellite outright dies, losing its telemetry and maneuvering capability, it’ll be gone pretty quick.

Honestly, more than anything, I’d be concerned about the recent science showing that satellites burning up on reentry could be very significantly more damaging to our atmosphere and the ozone layer than previously thought.

Yeah, it was ok when the project started. The issue begins once it transitions from a toy to a potential competitor with Firefox.

Yeah, I know the history. And if they fully switch to Swift and manage decent performance, that would be acceptable, just strange. And it would also be fine to use whatever language if it were only a hobby project. I just reject the notion that C++ is an acceptable choice for new projects in security-critical positions.

To be pedantic, AFAIK there’s no evidence Pythagoras himself had anything to do with the censure of the discovery of irrational numbers. The common story has to do with his later followers, and could well be more fiction than fact in any case.

Talking about creepy numbers, the ones that always fucked with me are uncomputable numbers. That shit’s wack, yo

The choice of C++ + Swift feels strange and off-putting to me. Swift, at least, is pretty safe as languages go, but does leave me scratching my head a bit. C++, though, frankly should have no place in a new browser project. For a piece of software whose whole purpose is to essentially download and run untrusted code, C++ is unacceptable.

It’s realistically not gonna happen, but what I’d really like to see is Servo developed into a full browser.

Maybe try the stop parsing symbol?

A favorite of mine is Ghidra. Before they realeased+open souced it a few years back, the only option for real software reverse engineering (as in, for large and non-trivial programs, where you need more than just fancy disassembly) was IDA Pro, which is absurdly expensive if you’re not sponsored or willing to pirate. Now, some of us kinda take for granted the fact that there’s an open source world-class RE tool. And honestly, I even prefer it to IDA Pro - that’s how good it is.