On one hand, I’m pleased that C++ is answering the call for what I’ll call “safety as default”, since as The Register and everyone else since pointed out, if safety constructs are “bolted on” like an afterthought, then of course it’s not going to have very high adoption. Contrast this to Rust and its “unsafe” keyword that marks all the places where the minimum safety of the language might not hold.

On the other hand, while this Safe C++ proposal adopts a similar notion of an “unsafe” context, it also adds a “safe” keyword, to specify that a function will conform to compile-time safety checks. But as the proposal readily admits:

Rust’s functions are safe by default. C++’s are unsafe by default.

While the proposal will surely continue to evolve before being implemented, I forsee a similar situation as in C where code that lacked initial const-correctness will struggle to work with newer code and libraries. In this case, it would be the “unsafe” keyword that proliferates everywhere just to call older, unsafe code from newer, safe callers.

Rust has the advantage that there isn’t much/any legacy Rust to upkeep, and that means the volume of unsafe code in Rust proframs is minimal, making them safer overall today. But for Safe C++ code, there’s going to be a lot of unsafe legacy C++ code and that reduces the safety benefit for programs overall, for the time being

Even as this proposal progresses, the question of whether to start rewriting some code anew in Rust remains relevant. But this is still exciting as a new option to raise the bar in memory safety in C++.

A few months ago, my library gained a copy of Cybersecurity For Small Networks by Seth Enoka, published by No Starch Press in 2022. So I figured I’d have a look and see if it it included modern best-practices for networks.

It was alright, in that it’s a decent how-to guide for a novice to set up sensible, minimum network fortifications. But it only includes an overview of how those fortifications work, without going into the additional depth needed to fine-tune or optimize them for specific environments. So if the reader has zero experience with network security, it’s a worthwhile read. But if you’ve already been operating a network with defenses for a while, there’s not much to gain from this particular text.

Also, the author suggests that IPv6 should be disabled, which is a terrible idea. Modern best-practice is not to pretend IPv6 doesn’t exist, but to assure that firewalls and other defenses are configured to handle this traffic. There’s a vast difference between “administratively reject IPv6 traffic in/out of the WAN” and “disable IPv6 on all devices and pray no one ever connects an IPv6-enabled device”.

You might have a look at other books available from No Starch Press, though.

I lost it when coming across this commit: https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/commit/67c68e6dc24f36b266427034d016fb86ef4d486c

I know this is c/programmerhumor but I’ll take a stab at the question. If I may broaden the question to include collectively the set of software engineers, programmers, and (from a mainframe era) operators – but will still use “programmers” for brevity – then we can find examples of all sorts of other roles being taken over by computers or subsumed as part of a different worker’s job description. So it shouldn’t really be surprising that the job of programmer would also be partially offloaded.

The classic example of computer-induced obsolescence is the job of typist, where a large organization would employ staff to operate typewriters to convert hand-written memos into typed documents. Helped by the availability of word processors – no, not the software but a standalone appliance – and then the personal computer, the expectation moved to where knowledge workers have to type their own documents.

If we look to some of the earliest analog computers, built to compute differential equations such as for weather and flow analysis, a small team of people would be needed to operate and interpret the results for the research staff. But nowadays, researchers are expected to crunch their own numbers, possibly aided by a statistics or data analyst expert, but they’re still working in R or Python, as opposed to a dedicated person or team that sets up the analysis program.

In that sense, the job of setting up tasks to run on a computer – that is, the old definition of “programming” the machine – has moved to the users. But alleviating the burden on programmers isn’t always going to be viewed as obsolescence. Otherwise, we’d say that tab-complete is making human-typing obsolete lol

It’s also worth noting that switching from ANSI to ISO 216 paper would not be a substantial physical undertaking, as the short-side of even-numbered ISO 216 paper (eg A2, A4, A6, etc) is narrower than for ANSI equivalents. And for the odd-numbered sizes, I’ve seen Tabloid-size printers in America which generously accommodate A3.

For comparison, the standard “Letter” paper size (aka ANSI A) is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. (note: I’m sticking with American units because I hope Americans read this). Whereas the similar A4 paper size is 8.3 inches by 11.7 inches. Unless you have the rare, oddball printer which takes paper long-edge first, this means all domestic and small-business printers could start printing A4 today.

In fact, for businesses with an excess stock of company-labeled #10 envelopes – a common size of envelope, measuring 4.125 inches by 9.5 inches – a sheet of A4 folded into thirds will still (just barely) fit. Although this would require precision folding, that’s no problem for automated letter mailing systems. Note that the common #9 envelope (3.875 inches by 8.875 inches) used for return envelopes will not fit an A4 sheet folded in thirds. It would be advisable to switch entirely to A series paper and C series envelopes at the same time.

Confusingly, North America has an A-series of envelopes, which bear no relation to the ISO 216 paper series. Fortunately, the overlap is only for the less-common A2, A6, and A7.

TL;DR: bring reams of A4 to the USA and we can use it. And Tabloid-size printers often accept A3.

That book sounds very insightful. I hope my public library accepts my purchase suggestion.

I will admit that my familiarity with private law outside the USA is almost non-existent, except for what I skimmed from the Wikipedia article for the Inquisitorial system. So I had assumed that private law in European jurisdictions would follow the same judge-intensive approach. Rereading the article more closely, I do see that it really only talks about criminal proceedings.

But I did some more web searching, and found this – honestly, extremely convenient – article comparing civil litigation procedure in Germany and California (the jurisdiction I’m most familiar with; IANAL). The three most substantial differences I could identify were the judge’s involvement in: serving papers, discovery, and depositions.

Serving legal notice is the least consequential difference between California and Germany, but it seems that the former allows any qualified adult to chase down the respondent (ie person being sued) and deliver the notice of a lawsuit – hence the trope of yelling “you have been served” and then throwing a stack of papers at someone’s porch – on behalf of the complainant (person who filed the lawsuit). Whereas German courts take up the role themselves for notifying the complainant. Small difference, but notable.

In Germany, the court, and not the plaintiff, is required to serve the complaint on the defendant without undue delay, which is usually immediately after it has been filed with the court.

Next, discovery and pleadings in Germany appear to be different from the California custom. It seems that German courts require parties to thoroughly plead their positions first, and only afterwards will discovery begin, with the court deciding what topics can be investigated. Whereas California allows parties to make broad assertions that can later be proven or disproven during discovery. This is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and a big reason this is done is because any argument that isn’t raised during trial cannot be reargued during a later appeal.

I believe that discovery in California and other US States can get rather invasive, as each party’s lawyers are on a fact-finding mission where the truth will out. The general limitation on the pleadings in California is that they still must be germane to the complaint and at least be colorable. This obviously leads to a lot of pre-trial motions, as the targeted party will naturally want to resist a fishing expedition during discovery.

Lastly, depositions in Germany involve the judge(s) a lot more than they would in California. Here, depositions are off-site from the court and conducted by the deposing party, usually video-taped and with all attorneys present, plus a privately hired stenographer, with the deposing attorney asking questions. Basically, after a deposition order is granted by the judge, the judge isn’t involved unless during the deposition, the process is interrupted in a way that would violate the judge’s order. But the solution to that is to simply phone the judge and ask for clarification or a new order to force the deposition to continue.

Whereas that article describes the German deposition process as always occuring in court, during trial, and with questions asked by the judge(s). The parties may suggest certain questions by way of constructing arguments which require the judge(s) to probe in a particular direction. But it’s not clear that the lawyers get to dictate the exact questions asked.

In contrast, depositions in Germany are conducted by the judge or the panel of judges and only during trial.

I grant you that this is just an examination of the German court proceedings for private law. And perhaps Germany may be an outlier, with other European counterparts adopting civil law but with a more adversarial flavor for private law. But I would say that for Germany, these differences indicate that their private law is more inquisitorial overall, in stark contrast to the California or USA adversarial procedure for private litigation.

You are absolutely correct: this fragile experiment called democracy will not survive if the citizenry becomes ambivalent about its institutions, allowing corrupt officials and other enablers of authoritarianism to take root.

If you are an American and that prospect disturbs you, then you need to help strengthen and guard the institutions that protect the core American values. Nobody owes you a democracy.

For some ideas of what to do, this post by Teri Kanefield has a list of concrete actions that you can take: https://terikanefield.com/things-to-do/

I am usually not wont to defend the dysfunction presently found in the USA federal (and state-level) judiciary, but I think this comparison to the German courts requires a bit more context. Generally speaking, the USA federal courts and US States adopt the adversarial system, originally following the English practice in both common law and equity. This means the judge takes on a referee role, and a plaintiff and a defendant will make their best, most convincing arguments.

I should clarify that “common law” in this context refers to the criminal matters (akin to public law), and “equity” refers to person-versus-person disputes (akin to private law), such as contracts.

For the adversarial system to work, the plaintiff and defendant need to be sufficiently motivated (and nowadays, well-monied) to put on good arguments, or else they’re just wasting the court’s time. Hence, there is a requirement (known as “standing”) where – grossly oversimplifying – the plaintiff must be the person with the most to gain, and the defendant must be the person with the most to lose. They are interested parties who will argue vigorously.

Of course, that’s legal fiction, because oftentimes, a defendant might be unable to able to afford excellent legal counsel. Or plaintiffs will half-ass or drag out a lawsuit, so that it’s more an annoyance to the opposite party.

In an adversarial system, it is each party’s responsibility to obtain subject-matter experts and their opinions to present to the court. The judge is just there to listen and evaluate the evidence – exception: criminal trials leave the evaluation of evidence to the jury.

Why is the USA like this? For the USA federal courts, it’s because it’s part of our constitution, in the Case or Controversy Clause. One of the key driving forces for drafters of the USA Constitution was to restrict the powers of government officials and bureaucrats, after seeing the abuses committed during the Colonial Era. The Clause above is meant to constrain the unelected judiciary – which otherwise has awe-inducing powers such as jailing people, undoing legislation, and assigning wardship or custody of children – from doing anything unless some controversy actually needed addressing.

With all that history in mind, if the judiciary kept their own in-house subject-matter experts, then that could be viewed as more unelected officials trying to tip the scale in matters of science, medicine, computer science, or any other field. Suddenly, landing a position as the judiciary’s go-to expert could have broad reaching impacts, despite no one in the federal judiciary being elected.

In a sense, because of the fear of officials potentially running amok, the USA essentially “privatizes” subject matter experts, to be paid by the plaintiff or defendant, rather than employed by the judiciary. The adversarial system is thus an intentional value judgement, rather than “whoopsie” type of thing that we walked into.

Small note: the federal executive (the US President and all the agencies) do keep subject matter experts, for the limited purpose of implementing regulations (aka secondary legislation). But at least they all report indirectly to the US President, who is term-limited and only stays 4 years at a time.

This system isn’t perfect, but it’s also not totally insane.

Can you please kindly link to that article, if it’s publicly available?

This is an interesting application of so-called AI, where the result is actually desirable and isn’t some sort of frivolity or grift. The memory-safety guarantees offered by native Rust code would be a very welcome improvement over C code that guarantees very little. So a translation of legacy code into Rust would either attain memory safety, or wouldn’t compile. If AI somehow (very unlikely) manages to produce valid Rust that ends up being memory-unsafe, then it’s still an advancement as the compiler folks would have a new scenario to solve for.

Lots of current uses of AI have focused on what the output could enable, but here, I think it’s worth appreciating that in this application, we don’t need the AI to always complete every translation. After all, some C code will be so hardware-specific that it becomes unwieldy to rewrite in Rust, without also doing a larger refactor. DARPA readily admits that their goal is simply to improve the translation accuracy, rather than achieve perfection. Ideally, this means the result of their research is an AI which knows its own limits and just declines to proceed.

Assuming that the resulting Rust is: 1) native code, and 2) idiomatic, so humans can still understand and maintain it, this is a project worth pursuing. Meanwhile, I have no doubt grifters will also try to hitch their trailer on DARPA’s wagon, with insane suggestions that proprietary AI can somehow replace whole teams of Rust engineers, or some such nonsense.

Edit: is my disdain for current commercial applications of AI too obvious? Is my desire for less commercialization and more research-based LLM development too subtle? :)

A commenter already provided a fairly comprehensive description of low-level computer security positions. But I also want to note that a firm foundation in low-level implementations is also useful for designing embedded software and firmware.

As in, writing or deploying against custom BIOS/UEFI images, or for real-time devices where timing is of the essence. Most anyone dealing with an RTOS or kernel drivers or protocol buses will necessarily require an understanding of both the hardware architecture plus the programming language available to them. And if that appeals to you, you might consider looking into embedded software development.

The field spans anything from writing the control loop for washing machines, to managing data exchange between multiple video co-processors onboard a flying drone to identify and avoid collisions, to negotiating the protocol to set up a 400 Gbps optical transceiver to shoot a laser down 40 km of fibre.

If something “thinks” but doesn’t have a monitor and keyboard, it’s likely to have one or more processors running embedded software. Look around the room you’re in and see what this field has enabled.

I have to ask: does your server switch to storing PDT during daylight savings? Either way, I’m so sorry you have to deal with that.

2. The return value of time.time() is actually a floating-point number … It’s also not guaranteed to be monotonically increasing, which is a whole other thing that can trip people up, but that will have to be a separate blog post.

Oh god, I didn’t realize that about Python and the POSIX spec. Cautiously, I’m going to guess that GPS seconds are one of the few reliable ways to uniformly convey a monotonically-increasing time reference.

Python has long since deprecated the datetime.datetime.utcnow() function, because it produces a naive object that is ostensibly in UTC.

Ok, this is just a plainly bad decision then and now by the datetime library people. What possible reason could have existed to produce a TZ-naive object from a library call that only returns a reference to UTC?

If not code or documentation contributions, then well-written bug reports. Seriously, the quality of bug reports sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. And I don’t necessarily mean a full back-trace attached – and please, if you ever send a back-trace, copy-and-paste the text, never a screenshot – but just details like: system details, OS, version, step-by-step instructions to reproduce that a non-coder could also understand, plus what you expected to happen versus what actually happened.

This stuff (usually) comes naturally to programmers and engineers, but users don’t necessarily see things this way. I sometimes think bug reports need to adopt a “so tell me what happened?” approach, where reporters are encouraged to describe free-form what they think of the software, then providing the specific details that developers need. That at least would collect all the relevant details, plus extra details that no developers thought to ask.

Even just having folks that help gather and distill details from user reporters on a forum is easing a burden off of developers, and that effort should be welcomed by any competently-organized project. Many projects already have a template for reports, although it often gets mistaken for boilerplate. Helping reports recognize that they need to fill in all the details is a useful activity that isn’t code or docs.

If there were changes in 2020 to 2024 inclusive, then yes, I’d write it as 2020-2024. But if not inclusive, then I’d write 2021-2023.

I’m not any type of lawyer, especially not a copyright lawyer, though I’ve been informed that the point of having the copyright date is to mark when the work (book, website, photo, etc) was produced and when last edited. Both aspects are important, since the original date is when the copyright clock starts counting, and having it further in the past is useful to prove infringement that occurs later.

Likewise, each update to the work imbues a new copyright on just the updated parts, which starts its own clock, and is again useful to prosecute infringement.

As a result, updating the copyright date is not an exercise of writing today’s year. But rather, it’s adding years to a list, compressing as needed, but never removing any years. For example, if a work was created in 2012 and updated in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2022, the copyright date could look like:

© 2012, 2013, 2015-2017, 2022

To be clear, I’m not terribly concerned with whether large, institutional copyright holders are able to effectively litigate their IP holdings. Rather, this is advice for small producers of works, like freelancers or folks hosting their own blog. In the age of AI, copyright abuse against small players is now rampant, and a copyright date that is always the current year is ammunition for an AI company’s lawyer to argue that they didn’t plagiarize your work, because your work has a date that came after when they trained their models.

Not that the copyright date is wholly dispositive, but it makes clear from the get-go when a work came unto copyright protection.

FYI, the Intel code used to be here (https://github.com/intel/thunderbolt-utils) but apparently was archived a week ago. So instead, the video creator posted the fork here: https://github.com/rxrbln/thunderbolt-utils

This reminds me of a post I once saw, describing a person who (ab)used the C preprocessor to make an Old English version of C. It was clever, but obviously unmaintainable in a collaborative setting.

If this DreamBerd language is statically compiled, then it might still rank slightly above Tcl, a language I’ve had to use in production and despised every moment of it.