https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1cdqd3m/lessons_learned_after_3_years_of_fulltime_rust/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learned_after_3_years_of_fulltime_rust/?sort=controversial

Article is too long to copy & paste, so here's the link https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/.

!codecels

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what's to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot's ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I've ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji's 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji's ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco's government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations': outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who's attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherlovers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You're a fellow Gray.”

The Grays' shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman's banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That's, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon's building?”

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building's exterior. But in Balaji's dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they'll march through the city together.

!clinklickers MOAR WORDS...

>A day of the life of a DEI program manager

>11:00 am - Wake up. Early birds are racist.

>11:30 am - Attend a sync up meeting. Standup is not inclusive. Everyone needs to come up with 5 words to remove from our dictionary.

>12:00 pm - Have lunch at a black-female-owned Chinese restaurant. Scold the owner for cultural appropriation.

>1:00 pm - Meet with one of my program sponsors. Discuss what protest we need to fund next.

>2:00 pm - Check internal Slack messages and mark those who used non inclusive language

>3:00 pm - Have s*x with a queer peer

>4:00 pm - Go back home. Work is racist

>10:00 pm - Attack random people online

https://fortune.com/2024/04/18/mercedes-self-driving-autonomous-cars-california-nevada-level-3-drive-pilot/

TSMC Takes on Arizona needs to be a documentary

"U.S. engineers told Rest of World that some Taiwanese male engineers had calendars with bikini models on their desks and occasionally shared sexual memes in group chats.

A female American colleague, according to an American… pic.twitter.com/Vf2yceE4sO

— Jordan Schneider (@jordanschnyc) April 23, 2024

Full story.

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

Microsoft just open-sourced DOS 4 https://t.co/iOeLUVfVok (as well a release of beta binaries, disk images, and PDFs from @rozzie's archives!) (but who did the PR?!) pic.twitter.com/g3VyOCsT40

— Scott Hanselman 🌮 (@shanselman) April 25, 2024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40126958

There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.

Won't someone think of the poor zoomer influencers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127055

Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.

Fellas is democracy gonna die because nurses can't twerk on TikTok anymore?

Pikesville principal Eric Eiswert was caught on tape going on a racist rant.

People called for his life to be destroyed.

Turns out, the entire recording was fake and generated (using AI) by Dazhon Darien, the school's former athletic director. pic.twitter.com/Qw6J1LPnxD

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 25, 2024

The Department of "Justice" has once again criminalized the developers of an app that restores financial privacy. The way to fix this it to make money private by default. Privacy must never be "exceptional," or they will make it criminal.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 24, 2024

I've been reading some Effective Altruist writings and learned that even if AI had moral goals it could be very dangerous .

Like imagine an AI whos goal was to maximize the number of mosquito nets given to Africa, sounds great right?

NO! Because the AI would be willing to do anything in order to achieve it's goals it might do something like commit one of the largest acts of fraud in history to get the money for more mosquito nets!

Hmm... what does this remind me of?

https://old.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bt7agy/exploit_balatros_source_code_is_exposed_easy_to/?sort=controversial

hello~ idk if this has been discussed in the community yet, but there's a really easy exploit to cheat in balatro --- you can right-click the .exe file, go to "Open Archive", and modify the source code directly. i made a video so you can see how it works:

i'm bringing it up because if the editor is smart, there's no way to tell if a game has been modified or not --- you can, for example, increase the droprate of powerful jokers or legendaries and cheat in a speedrun category

i've sent a message in the speedrunning groomercord that they should probably modify the rules so that runners have to verify their game files on Steam before they submit a run. and more generally, i think ppl should be aware that this exists so they can call out suspect videos and runs

i almost didn't want to publicize this because the more well-known this gets, the easier it will be for ppl to cheat in speedruns and tournaments and stuff, but at the end of the day i think it's better if more ppl know and can establish rules to stop it when it matters

In order to download the full text of private newsletters you need to provide the cookie name and value of your session. The cookie name is either substack.sid or connect.sid, based on your cookie. To get the cookie value you can use the developer tools of your browser. Once you have the cookie name and value, you can pass them to the downloader using the --cookie_name and --cookie_val flags.

Don't ever use Reddit again. pic.twitter.com/ynSlWFt844

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 23, 2024

Stomp sexy Indian dude skulls with steel toed boots.

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US.

Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions). pic.twitter.com/H8F4UVxhwS

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) April 23, 2024

I am probably not the first person to notice this but I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about it in these terms before.

As we all know, the internet sucks compared to 10 years ago. Specifically, search engines and easily accessible information sources are much less useful than they were in the past. As many have pointed out (and as I like to bring up whenever relevant) a lot of the blame lies with SEOshit, and another sizeable chunk of the blame lies with the groomercordification of communities.

In case you've missed all of my own and others' rants on the topic, what I mean by groomercordification is the currentyear+9 tendency of online communities to use groomercord instead of a forum or subreddit or wiki for everything from community organization (meh) to information archiving (very, very bad).

To use an example most of you incels should be able to relate to, take vidya gayme mods. A decade ago, developers of a mod would use either a legacy self-hosted forum, self-hosted wiki (usually in combination with a forum), or a dedicated subreddit to share general information with each other and with their users. Information such as installation instructions, community feature requests, compatibility details, current status of codecel efforts, details of codecel efforts (I believe the codecels call this "documentation"), et cetera.

In CY+9, it is increasingly common for vidya mods to have no web presence other than a splash page referring you to their groomercord. Want installation instructions? Refer to groomercord. Want to request a feature? Refer to groomercord. Want extremely basic FAQ-tier tech support? Refer to groomercord. Want to know some details about the code in order to diagnose compatibility problems with other mods? Refer to groomercord. Want to ask other users an extremely basic question about the mod? Refer to groomercord.

This phenomenon has taken over all kinds of communities, but modding is an example where I've personally observed it multiple times over. A lot of the types of information I listed above are going to be frequently requested by users. In the old times, we had these things called "installation instructions" and "FAQs" on static web pages. The best thing about these static web pages was that they could be retrieved on demand, at any time, with no action required by anybody but the requestor, by entering keywords into a search engine. Similarly, we had these things called "forums" where you could check whether somebody had already asked the question you're about to ask by searching for it before asking.

Finally, my novel (to me) point: why are we backsliding to a state where basic information is gated behind a login wall and mandatory interaction with other people?

One more sidestep: chatbots.

Chatbots are an innovative way for companies to outsource their tech support to a computer/not have to pay for call centers. They're pretty good for 90% of tech support problems, since 90% of tech support problems can be solved by walking the tech-illiterate customer through the process of turning their device off and back on again. Having a robot do this instead of a person saves a looooot of money. More recently chatbots have taken on a new meaning as the most common frontend for AIs, probably because they're easy to interface with even if you're tech illiterate. Can you see where I'm going with this?

The groomercordification of everything, and especially of things that should not be groomercordified (anything that would traditionally be on a wiki), is just another result of the normie takeover of the internet. A loooooot of people (apparently the vast majority) strongly prefer to consume technical information in a conversation style versus reading a document, so the state of things has drifted towards enforced conversation-style information consumption. This has had horrible consequences for the general availability of information that should logically be retrievable on demand from a static source.

Yes, this is rather galaxybrained and obvious in hindsight.

^ Yeah this thing

Truely unsurprising.

{Its basically just a VNC connection to an android VM with Playwright automation scripts for the 5 services it does. Oh and that VM connection is also how you put in your logins to those services, probably scraping your password}