Yeah, I’m old enough to remember this song and dance with Java. Also this isn’t like deciding all your javascript should be coffescript. Rust has some pretty big differences. It would be hilarious if the AI just threw a huge unsafe around giant blocks of code.

I worked at a computer store when blaster happened. Shit was wild, for weeks. People blamed us too, of course. We started giving away patch disks for free.

Watching videos has been broken for a few weeks. On the 24th of Sep they mentioned that they’d identified a potential cause, but since then there haven’t been any updates. They typically aren’t super communicative and tend to lock down posts because of the huge surge of duplicate bug reports and unhelpful comments they get whenever this happens. So the silence is not that unusual, but it has been slightly longer than usual for an update.

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.

“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”

Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

I’ve been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I’ve tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that’s what I’ve gathered from all the threads about it. It’s bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.

(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)

I had a tricky time getting hardware encoding to work and it ultimately ended up being I needed to expose the GPU to the Docker container. The yaml config needed:

    devices:
      - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
      - /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0

Note this was on a low-end Synology NAS with some sort of crappy intel GPU, but it actually works now, I was surprised. I only mention because before this I spent lots of time messing around with the Jellyfin settings and only the logs tipped me off. Jellyfin loves to fallback silently to CPU transcoding it seems, which I guess is good, but make troubleshooting unintuitive. Searching for log errors online gave me this solution.

If people want to fart around with ffmpeg filters this site is great: https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.

I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn’t have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tycoons, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.

I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don’t have a culture of safety. That’s not to say software errors can’t cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That’s an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.

Most of us aren’t working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software’s risks you have to speak to “harms” rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.

So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who’ve seen the inside are quietly horrified and that’s the end of it.

I don’t know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.

I found the original blog post more educational.

Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least “namespace obfuscation”, imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it’s easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it’s important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I’m just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can’t say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

This reminds me of the Blaster Worm back in the early 2000s. Infected users had to patch their PC without the internet, because connecting is what would cause you to reboot (so many PCs were infected it was basically instant). I worked at a computer store and we burned a bunch of patch CDs and were giving them out like hotcakes. My boss decided to slap a price tag on them for a day or two but we convinced him the good will was worth the cost and he eventually made it free again. People were fucking pissed off and handing out the free CD made them very grateful.

That sounds like a “premultiplied alpha” issue. Although I’m not familiar with this specific workflow, I always suspect premultiplied alpha issues when there’s a halo like that. If there’s an option try toggling it.

Bugs? My favs are buggy to the point some of these bugs became their own mechanics

This is pretty much half of competitive Brood War.

Coming from Python I feel like it’s my partner and best friend. In fact the whole damn tool chain is amazing.

Ubiquitous in the games industry unfortunately, for at least the art side but often code as well.

That’s one kind, and Rust’s “ownership” concept does mean there’s built-in compile time checks to prevent dangling pointers or unreachable memory. But there’s also just never de-allocating stuff you allocated even though it’s still reachable. Like you could just make a loop that allocates memory and never stops and that’s a memory leak, or more generally a “resource leak”, if you prefer.

Rust is really good at keeping you from having a reference to something that you think is valid but it turns out it got mutated way down in some class hierarchy and now it’s dead, so you have a null pointer or you double free, or whatever. But it can’t stop the case where your code is technically valid but the resource leak is caused by bad “logic” in your design, if that makes sense.