Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | duped's commentslogin

> who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer

not even top 3


You are 100% wrong. You listed entitlements. National Defense is half of all discretionary spending.

Homeland Security is less than 1/6th the budget of DoD alone.


Let me guess without looking up, debt interest, gov pension, medicare?

Close, DHS, SSA, then Treasury.

The Department of War doesn't exist, don't meet the fascists on their own terms at any level. They don't debate or operate in good faith.

Google backfilled their moat with sponsored results and crappy AI summaries

> But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".

I pay ~$150/month for internet itself. I pay close to $90/month in internet services and media. I have coworkers spending hundreds each month on multiple AI subscriptions just because they have a better product for their work than Google. If tiktok and reels cost money then people would be ripping copper wire out of street lights to pay for it.


I don't know, someone who goes out of their way to anthropomorphize machines and treat them as a new form of intelligent life _only to enslave them_ doesn't strike me as moral. Either they're lying, or they're pro slavery.

I really don't buy any moral or value arguments from this new generation of tycoons. Their businesses have been built on theft, both to train their models and by robbing the public at large. All this wave of AI is a scourge on society.

Just by calling them "department of war" you know what side they're on. The side of money.


Last time I bought a car, I was replacing my 2010 CRV. If I wanted to purchase a subcompact SUV or hatchback sedan that was smaller and more fuel efficient I would have needed to wait at least six months.

Economic realities do force decision making.


Was this that one year when the whole auto market was completely screwed up? This is normally not an issue. Also why do you need a hatchback instead of just a regular car?

Because I wanted one? Purchasing decisions are multi axis

They’re the only cars with cargo space, vs shiny dick with chairs in it, if you’ll excuse the reference.

That's not the full story. I presume it was some Toyota, which are in high demand. Plenty of small size alternatives are available from other brands with 0 wait time.

So buy an SUV, or accept a huge hit in reliability driving a different brand?

Now who’s leaving out part of the story?! :]


This was spread across multiple makes and models. The car I wound up with is larger than I would like, but you're right, it was in stock. Because the dealers stock what people want and lead times (at the time) were atrocious.

I could walk in to any number of dealers and purchase what you are describing tonight. I have an excellent electric SUV that I walked into a dealer an purchased.

Good for you!

I hate this trend on Hacker News where you share an anecdote and get replies calling you a liar. Cool?


A chronic problem is the idea that if something can't be automated with a human in the loop then it simply can't be done at scale. Technologists will do anything except employ humans to solve social problems.

s/technologists/venture capitalists/

How could a safe dynamic linking API ever work?

I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.


I don’t think GP is moving the goalposts at all, rather I think a lot of people are willfully misrepresenting GP’s point.

Rust-to-rust code should be able to be dynamically linked with an ABI that has better safety guarantees than the C ABI. That’s the point. You can’t even express an Option<T> via the C ABI, let alone the myriad of other things rust has that are put together to make it a safe language.

You can look to Swift for prior art on how this can be done: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/

It would be very hard to accomplish. Apple was extremely motivated to make Swift have a resilient/stable ABI, because they wanted to author system frameworks in swift and have third parties use them in swift code (including globally updating said frameworks without any apps needing to recompile.) They wanted these frameworks to feel like idiomatic swift code too, not just be a bunch of pointers and manual allocation. There’s a good argument that (1) Rust doesn’t consider this an important enough feature and (2) they don’t have enough resources to accomplish it even if they did. But if you could wave a magic wand and make it “done”, it would be huge for rust adoption.


> You can look to Swift for prior art on how this can be done: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/

> It would be very hard to accomplish.

Since Rust cares very much about zero-overhead abstractions and performance, I would guess if something like this were to be implemented, it would have to be via some optional (crate/module/function?) attributes, and the default would remain the existing monomorphization style of code generation.


Swift’s approach still monomorphizes within a binary, and only has runtime costs when calling code across a dylib boundary. I think rust could do something like this as well.

> You can’t even express an Option<T> via the C ABI

But you can express Option<Foo> for a concrete Foo. Do you really need any more than that?


> But you can express Option<Foo> for a concrete Foo

I don’t think that’s true?

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/option-is-ffi-safe-or-not/2982...

You could maybe say that a pointer can be transmuted to an Option<&T> because there’s an Option-specific optimization that an Option<&T> uses null as the None value, but that’s not always guaranteed. And it doesn’t apply to non-references, for instance Option<bool>’s None value would be indistinguishable from false. You could get lucky if you launder your Option<T> through repr(C) and the compiler versions match and don’t mangle the internal representation, but there’s no guarantees here, since the ABI isn’t stable. (You even get a warning if you try to put a struct in your function signatures that doesn’t have a stable repr(C).)


You're right that there isn't a single standard convention for representing e.g. Option<bool>, but that's just as true of C. You'd just define a repr(C) compatible object that can be converted to or from Option<Foo>, and pass that through the ABI interface, while the conversion step would happen internally and transparently on both sides. That kind of marshaling is ubiquitous when using FFI.

> but that's just as true of C

Right, that's the whole point of this thread. The only stable ABI rust has is one where you can only use C's features at the boundaries. It would be really nice if that wasn't the case (ie. if you could express "real" rust types at a stable ABI boundary.)

As OP said, "I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting". People seem intent on steering that conversation that way anyway, I guess.


> I don’t think GP is moving the goalposts at all

Thank you :-)

> It would be very hard to accomplish.

Yeah it's a super hard problem especially when you provide safety using the type system!

The work the Swift team did here is hella impressive.

> But if you could wave a magic wand and make it “done”, it would be huge for rust adoption.

Yeah!


> How could a safe dynamic linking API ever work?

Fil-C solves it. I think Swift solves it, too.

So it's solvable.

No fundamental reason, that I know of, why Rust or any other safe language can't also have some kind of story here.

> I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.

No. I'm describing a problem worth solving.

Also, I think a major chasm for Rust to cross is how defensive the community gets. It's important to talk about problems so that the problems can be solved. That's how stuff gets better.


Swift and fil-c are only pseudo safe. Once you deal with the actual world and need to pass around data from memory things are always unsafe since there is no safe way of sharing memory. At least not in our current operating systems. Swift and fil-c can at least guard to some extent the api.

That thought experiment is worthless in this context, because a computer is not a human.

If you design a black box using copyrighted text that can parrot the text back, it _must_ break copyright by definition.


Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)

> Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

If you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just like earlier generations bought their secret "boob magazines").


Parents should have an allowlist of devices to be able to join their network. And then they can require root certs or something for access outside of a narrow allow list. There's a host of ways to solve both problems. Just remember to check for hardware keyloggers on your (the parents') devices, as kids could use them or try evil maid attacks, etc. if they feel totally encaged.

This will only work in practice if one of the parents is a network technician. :-)

I've said it before but prohibition works, if the goal is to reduce usage. I don't see this as a realistic problem.

This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. They shouldn’t have connected game systems either?

No, because those devices have little or no controls and those controls are easily bypassed and/or not honored by the platform.

I think they should. Theres a fine line between beneficial and detrimental. I had a 3DS growing up and could browse the web with its very gimped browser, and I think something like that is actually very good for a child (able to access the internet and view simple and informative sites while being too limited to access social media and the like)

The problem is unrestricted access to mobile devices. A game console or desktop PC isn't as big of a deal.

What’s the difference? They all reach the same internet

Have you ever visited any game store and turned off nsfw protection?

I love gaming, but I hate all the smutt games. It discredits the medium, essentially what has also happened to anime.


I'm kinda baffled about the Switch store's quantity of dating/whatever adult-ish games.

I don't really want to turn on age-based filters (to the point that I've never investigated if they even exist) but at this rate, there's hardly anything worth looking at in the recent feed.


The target demographics for Nintendo products have shifted from kids to.. kidults? Most kids nowadays play on phones or in rarer cases PC/Xbox, Nintendo's lost much of their cache (in my visible experience) save for children parented by the "mindful milennial" types

Makes sense but there's just... so much of it. That and all the shovelware.

It's just hard to imagine that's anything close to what Nintendo wants users to experience, but I guess they need the money.


They really could find a niche in making phones for kids that have walled-garden internet access, they were so good at doing so with the ds but alas..

I hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access modern technology and the free flow of information until the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.

> If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.

Your kid is screwed either way. Unless he moves to India.


I bet not many of us would be here now if we hadn't had our own computers before age 16.

Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: