It’s a technicality about the pointer type. You can cast the type away which typically doesn’t change the actual value (but I’m pretty sure that causes undefined behavior)

For your example, int x = 0xDEADBEEF; signifies the integer -559038737 (at least on x86.)

char *p = (char*)0xDEADBEEF; on the other hand may or may not point to the real memory address 0xDEADBEEF, depending on factors like if the processor is using virtual or real addressing, etc

Lots of em-dash usage

Service goes down after emitting an event but before persisting internal state—causing partial failures that are hard to roll back.
Subscribe to an existing event and start processing—no changes to publishers.
Helps track a request across multiple services—even through async events.
We once had a refund service consume OrderCancelled events—but due to a config typo, it ignored 15% of messages.
Takeaway: fire-and-forget works—until someone forgets to monitor.
Use it when the domain fits—fan-out use cases, audit logs, or workflows where latency isn’t critical.

combined with other chatgpt-isms like the heavy reliance on lists, yeah safe to say it’s mostly AI generated

Someone brough up a theory that it’s a “symbolic punishment” for a journalist:

remove the eyes so you cannot see
remove the brain so you cannot think
remove the larynx so you cannot speak (the larynx contains the vocal cords)

1. They claim to respect privacy and - to date - have done nothing to suggest that they don’t.

If you ignore all the fast and loose they play with privacy, sure, there is “nothing to suggest” they don’t respect it.

IT’S OPTIONAL (there goes the “aggressive push” bit)

It’s not an aggressive push if you ignore the part where they repeatedly use the foot in the door technique where they first promise they won’t do something, and then later do it anyways.

They claim it is optional but they just shove a pop-up in your face about AI, while misleading you about how it works. This is about 1 step away from how most companies “allow” you to “preserve your privacy” by carefully clicking “no” to a long list of popups suggesting you give them cookies and share your emails etc.

This may be easy to dismiss as “problem between keyboard and chair” but when it predictably leads to many users thinking it’s off but being surprised when they find it turned on without them realizing it it’s not much consolation

NOTHING EXCEPT FOR THE PROMPT IS SENT TO MISTRAL (there goes the “reads all emails” bit)

How do you figure that works? The server somehow corrects your spelling mistakes without reading the email containing the spelling mistake? Again, End-to-end encryption is a core advertised feature of protonmail, and this completely sidesteps it while actively misleading users into thinking it doesn’t

Sure you can look at it as just a bit of politicking (if a poorly thought out one), but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Proton hasn’t done anything that clearly crosses an unacceptable line, but they’ve made a lot of other highly questionable decisions in a relatively short timespan

oh, actually now that I looked it up closer, starting about 9 months ago they did a foot in the door manuever (a survey with leading questions followed up by misrepresenting the results) and then aggressively pushed an AI service that, you guessed it, tries to read all the emails you write and receive, totally undermining the end-to-end encryption. (the claim is it works locally, but most users have their data processed on the proton servers unencrypted)
And the way they did it is straight out of the enshittification playbook where they first promise that it’s “business only” and then later try to push it to all users, and claiming it’s off by default while it’s actually on by default

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/18/proton-mail-goes-ai-security-focused-userbase-goes-what-on-earth/

(this article only covers the early portion of the debacle)

this isn’t even all the problems with proton either, though all the other things are pretty minor by comparison (eg. quitting mastodon “because it’s too expensive to maintain” (?))

The most popular alternative seems to be tutanota, though there should be a lot of alternatives though they may be very niche

(it seems tuta has some technical limitations if you want to do automated emailing, and the UI is a bit clunky, but it’s not a privacy or security problem)

What started it I think is this twitter post praising trump and the republican party: https://xcancel.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

He later doubled down on it (if I recall correctly) and the company has generally been making some highly questionable decisions since

rebugging, if you will

64 gigs of ram costs less than $200 these days

the US constitution specifically has a carve-out that allows using prisoners as slaves

Spotify also originally got all its music by pirating it. But later it started printing money for record labels (while fucking over musicians) so all was forgiven.

the entirety of stackoverflow is not enough data to make the AI work properly. They need terabytes of text, stackoverflow has about 50-100GB of useful data at most

it seems people realized this and the old cards aren’t even properly falling in price anymore, even on the used market

There is an implicit threat of government censorship there, even if it is ultimately toothless. And since valve is clearly not the one interested in increasing moderation, your point about the 1st amendment “not applying to private forums” is irrelevant

if it’s the government that is doing the censoring, against the will of both the users and the private company, how does it not apply here then?

also the person apparently spent 2 million dollars to find the number. and the money is probably from stock compensation from nvidia

that does happen to be one of the defining characteristics of mersenne primes.

And searching for mersenne primes happens to be the easiest known way to find extremely large prime numbers (via the Special Number Field Sieve I believe)

Looks like the image I found cropped out the signature, seems to be jeremykaye.tumblr.com

Garbage collection is still allowed, and technically JIT languages are still compiled so it really isn’t that restrictive