I think DHH's comments are pretty mild given the subject. However, I think it is how he frames his comments that cause offensive - lumping a (potentially) problematic (arguably) ethnic group of people in with animal control...
I think DHH's opinion is a very common sentiment in Europe. "Gypsies" are a very European thing. I wonder if there's anything similar in the US? For context for US readers; they generally exist outside of the usual social norms, and have a pretty bad reputation because of it.
This is not a defence of DHH, just providing context to his comments.
There isn't really a direct point of comparison in the US, because by and large the US is much more loosely attached to the concept of having a specific "Our culture" that others are expected to assimilate to. Rather, US culture is more of an admixture of whoever happens to be in an area. That isn't to say that it's all peaches and roses, but our racism tends towards "this group is intrinsically worse than mine" rather than "this group is trying to conquer our homeland".
This plays out with things like US culture being pretty well tolerant of ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns, Little Italies, Solvang, etc) compared to what I've seen in my travels abroad, while preferring to bulldoze those enclaves when a new freeway needs to be built, and foods emblematic of certain areas being Flanderized versions of various foreign cuisines (Take a look at California's burritos, or a Chicago style pizza, or a New York style pizza).
There are in a lot of EU countries sets of laws to integrate gypsies, but it's a hard problem, e.g. schooling kids who move town every three months.
I think the gypsies he's referring to might be a particular set of organised beggar gangs exploiting gypsies from Romania, Bulgaria and generally central Europe in European cities since the early 2000s, and not the usual seasonal workers from these and other gypsy communities. But I haven't been to Copenhagen in a while.
I don't understand your comment - the social norms I refer to are paying tax, sending your children to school, integrating with the local community, living in areas/accommodation that is legal/not transitory. It can be argued how many of those are valid criticisms, but that is what generally refer to.
His opinion that their behavior is undesirable and should be dealt with is common.
His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.
I cannot speak for all of Europe, since I have no idea what rules are elsewhere. But in Sweden in the municipality I live in, they have banned begging in public areas. And the ones who are begging in public areas in Sweden are predominantly gypsies. There are a few municipalities in Sweden that have banned begging in public areas, while most still allow it. E.g. in the capital Stockholm it's allowed, and you may see gypsies sitting at shopping streets, at the central station and outside stores.
Just wanted to share that there are areas where people have gotten tired of gypsies, and have gotten rid of most of them in this way, as some extra context.
I thought it was very obvious throughout the video what was happening...
Rust has compile time checks to enforce some safety. In comparison Fil-C is a lot more memory safe, it's more comparable to being a software implementation of CHERI.
Unfortunately it comes with downsides: runtime performance, runtime enforcement, granular safety (the safety is around allocations).
It also comes with huge upsides: you can run C/C++ with little to no code changes. Imagine compiling nginx and the associated system libraries with Fil-C, the performance hit is probably acceptable and now the web server is memory safe.
Rust probably provides enough memory safety (even if it is not complete safety) in most circumstances though.
I'm not a native English speaker, I know "memory safe" has a precise technical meaning, but the word "safe" still feels a bit strange to me given that a memory-safety bug can make the program crash at run-time.
Sure, Fil-C prevents the bug from possibly being exploited, which is a huge improvement. But crashing can be a DoS attack, and if running a mission-critical system, it might not be an acceptable outcome.
I just feel the already very good presentation could have been made much better if it had put more weight on explaining these trade-offs.
I think you are concentrating on 'free' too much here.
It's not about giving away resources, it's about serving the user.
1. No, a kiosk shouldn't be hooked up to some crime database, it should function exactly as expected in situ.
2. A self-service checkout machine shouldn't 'give away' free stuff, it should however let you pay and leave.
3. An ATM should give the user money from their account - without added charge for the convienance.
I think 2 and 3 are bad examples because they actually already exist in the way that Andrew is saying things should exist. If they didn't (for example, they played a 30 second advert before you could checkout) then people would never have started using them.
Software/SaaS/startups are much more inclined to use dark patterns and attempt to bleed the users dry (either their cash or their attention) - established conveniences like self checkout and ATMs on the whole just do their job - the general public would NOT accept it any other way. It's a shame the general public don't share the same sentiment when it comes to more glamorous technology.
I think it was trying to find a moral standard that wasn't being set by established places. I think it was showing a level of self-reflection (going through a process of finding your set of principals after leaving an established faith translates very well into questioning the morality of how established software operates).
I did find a few things adventuring into the off topic in the video. Considering all the drama lately and certain opinions that always come out with threads on this person, I was thinking "oh no, people aren't going to like this" while watching, despite broadly agreeing with the substance of the message.
There are no 'unsafe' blocks in Fil-C. I think you trying to conflate 'unsafe blocks' with the fact that there might be compiler errors which might break 'safety'? Which is equally true in any system including Rust.
Pobody's Nerfect is not the mindset that led to Rust's innovations, nor Fil-C's.
"Blocks" are relevant as they are how you express programs, algorithms, etc., that you need in order to get something done. Lots of data structures in Rust have a little unsafe somewhere. Users will typically depend on some "specialist" crate author to write them, but it exists, and is a necessary part of practical Rust programming. The pool of unsafety is open and by necessity growing.
In Fil-C, no such specialists are needed, and the pool of unsafety is closed and fixed, no matter what programs, algorithms, data structures you use.
This is not a trivial distinction I think. I think it's easy to acknowledge, especially given its (current) performance cost.
My god, you are insufferable, that's not my opinion at all. Just because I used quotation marks in one place, a practice that can convey multiple meanings, not all of which involve disdain. It's unfortunate that Rust, a good language that has more practical use than Fil-C, a language that I use more than Fil-C, has proselytizers such as you.
I think you should watch the linked presentation, it will show how it is "safer" than rust. Unfortunately there are performance implications, but fil-c seems fast enough to go into production for many workloads and surprisingly needs very little code changes to existing C/C++ projects which is a huge benefit.
I think Fil-C might make a lot of sense for running legacy C or C++ codebases. But for new code, it seems like it’s trying to compete with other GC languages. Take away C’s performance advantages and I don’t know why anyone would use it.
Fil-C: Combining the ergonomics of C with the performance of Python!
I like using C. It is simple, elegant, has very fast compilation times, requires no FFI needed for many libraries, is extremely stable and extremely portable, a large ecosystem, and, most importantly, I do not think the ergonomics of C are bad.
It is inconvenient to start using it as it comes with basically nothing out of the box, but this is irrelevant after a short time using it.
I can't believe these comments - passkeys are pretty easy to understand and most platforms allow you to add multiple. Not enough for truly one-passkey-per-device, but if you use a password manager that syncs passkeys, or hardware passkeys it's fine - it's easy, quick, and more secure than any password can ever be (mitm resistant).
I think the confusion with passkeys comes from that fact that everyone wants to own you so you have to be mindful if this passkey is being stored on the OS, the browser, sync'd between devices through google or apple, etc.
I have zero passkeys to my name. It's just not covering any serious attack surface in my life or anyone that I can think of.
If technically-motivated individuals can't be assed to switch away from passwords, then imagine how normies feel. I fully understand why most people choose passwords instead.
Wow, 97% that there will be elections. That's high, but if you handed me a gun with a 3% chance of being loaded and offered me a billion dollars to point it at my head and pull the trigger, I would not. My foot on the other hand...
It's worth noting that Polymarket (and all other prediction markets using money) has some fundamental problems that cause inaccuracy. Most notably here, the elections are still several months out, so you're asking people to put up 97 cents to get a dollar back in three months. But for that time frame I could also put 97 cents in treasuries and get 98 cents back, so the market won't be accurate within 1% of reality, and treasuries are considered a good deal safer than Polymarket.
In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on.
So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer.
(Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)
Plus the percent chance that Polymarket doesn't accurately resolve the market. It'll never hit 100% odds because there's value in buying the the 1,000,000 to 1 odds and maybe turning $1 into $1,000,000 from an administrative issue on the market.
You can sell your bet at any time, though. So if you put $100 on NO while it's at 3¢ and then sell them next week at 4¢, you're getting $133 back. You're not necessarily betting on the outcome, but on the sentiment over time.
That's true, but then the people you're selling to have to want to buy the shares. And if you're buying YES at 97%, you're not going to be able to sell the YES shares to anyone at much higher - because eventually someone has to hold it to the end.
It's true that this isn't as true for NO, because a small change can give a huge return, but that's asymmetrical. So there's incentive for traders to buy NO, hoping that it moves down, but not an incentive for traders to buy YES, since it doesn't have any room to go up.
I don't think it's high at all. Elections are required for almost any legitimate government these days. Russia has elections. China has elections. North Korea has elections. The question is not whether there will be elections, but whether they will be free and fair.
There's no mechanism that could possibly cancel the mid-terms. What we should worry about is the election being interfered with, and swayed by intimidation and disinformation, NOT being cancelled.
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