Not on the outside, at least.

I haven’t done too much work with WASM myself, but when I did, the only languages I saw recommended were Rust, C++, or TinyGo. From what I’ve heard, Rust and C++ are smoother than TinyGo. Garbage collected languages usually aren’t great choices for compiling to wasm because wasm doesn’t have any native garbage collection support. That limits your selection down a lot.

But another option you may want to consider is Nim. As I understand, it compiles to C, so any C->Wasm compiler should theoretically work for you as well. I did a quick search and wasn’t able to find any great resources on how to do this, but you might get a bit more lucky. Good luck!

You’re probably right. I think COBOL development is one of the cases where the crazier stories are the ones that bubble to the top. The regular scene is probably more mundane.

I do think there are a few advantages to learning COBOL over C++. COBOL seems to be much stickier - companies that use it seem much more hesitant to replace it than a lot of the companies that use C++, and as a result, they will probably get more desperate. And while there’s definitely a lot more C++ out there than COBOL, I have to imagine that the number of people under 50 that use COBOL is probably tiny, while C++ still has a very large userbase. On the other hand, consulting depends a lot on your portfolio, references, and past accomplishments, and nobody’s going to pay 1k EUR/USD/etc. per hour (exaggerating, obviously) if you don’t have any credentials. It takes time to build that up.

Ultimately, I do think you’re pretty spot on, but we’ll have to see. This is more just a fantasy I tell myself to make it seem like retirement is closer than it probably is…

I fantasize about being one of those extremely well-paid Cobol consultants when I reach the later stages of my career. Hoping that I can earn a full year’s salary in 3-4 months and take the rest of the time off as a semi-retirement. It would be easier said than done, but it’s a dream that helps me get through the days when I get sick of the daily grind.

it always got marginally better at best, and then it got worse again

But why? I think it’s because Russians just don’t exhibit a lot of civic engagement. When you see the kinds of things Putin did to get into power, do you think any of those actions would slide in any other well-functioning liberal democracies? Just look at how Ukraine responded during Euromaidan. You just don’t see that kind of engagement happening in Russian society.

So why does it keep getting worse again? Unfortunately, it’s because they let it.

This is very interesting! Things like this make me wish programmers would give functional^W declarative programming more of a chance. I’ve long fantasized about being able to write programs as declarative code that the computer can optimize automatically without human intervention. When you implement your program in more restrictive (ie. stateless) paradigms, you can more easily reason about the code, and thereby make it easier to optimize or run in different environments.

SQL is a great example of this - when you look at some of the optimizations that servers like PostgreSQL can do under the hood, this is because the language inherently limits what you can do so the actual system executing your instructions can do different things with it for better performance and reliability. Things like this are what make query optimizers possible, and it’s really fascinating if you actually read carefully what query analyzers report (beyond just checking whether your indices are being used or not).

Beautiful chart. Thanks for sharing!

“Ukraine’s decision fundamentally threatens the security of supply in Hungary,” the country’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Monday

Oh my God!!! I can’t possibly imagine them being concerned about anything more serious than that right now!!!

I’m not sure what you mean when suggesting Linux is a singular implementation around which features are exclusively designed. There’s all kinds of software that runs on all kinds of different OSes. Userspace applications, for example, can take advantage of POSIX compatibility to ensure that they run on all platforms (Linux, BSDs, even Windows).

Does systemd have any similar sort of compatibility guarantee? Can I run systemd-whateverd on BSD? Can I run systemd itself on BSD? I’m pretty sure most other init systems support at least one other OS if not more. Would the maintainers even support merging patches that do this? What about musl?

I am also a Void user, but will agree that the installation process can be very difficult, especially if you want to set up encryption in ways the standard installer does not support. You have to install it into a chroot (which I believe is how Debian was installed 20+ years ago).

That said, it is a great learning process and really helps you appreciate how awesome xbps is as a package manager!

I believe you’re thinking of Gentoo. But it seems that you can get precompiled kernels in Gentoo these days.

+1. systemd is something the Linux ecosystem really needs, but its execution is abysmal. We should be designing around standards so the best product can win. We should not be designing around singular implementations that could make it easy for Red Hat to execute a EEE strategy to consolidate Linux on the workstation.

I can’t wait till a crowdstrike-like flaw is exposed in systemd so we can all see how terrible^W wonderful monocultures can be.

The full write-up can be found here and should be fairly readable for users of this forum.

Some quotes that I thought were interesting:

With a heap corruption as a primitive, two FILE structures malloc()ated in the heap, and 21 fixed bits in the glibc’s addresses, we believe that this signal handler race condition is exploitable on amd64 (probably not in ~6-8 hours, but hopefully in less than a week). Only time will tell.

So 64-bit systems seem to be a bit more resistant to this it seems? But I can’t be completely sure given how much I’ve read about this yet.

This vulnerability is exploitable remotely on glibc-based Linux systems, where syslog() itself calls async-signal-unsafe functions (for example, malloc() and free()): an unauthenticated remote code execution as root, because it affects sshd’s privileged code, which is not sandboxed and runs with full privileges. We have not investigated any other libc or operating system; but OpenBSD is notably not vulnerable, because its SIGALRM handler calls syslog_r(), an async-signal-safer version of syslog() that was invented by OpenBSD in 2001.

It seems that non glibc-based systems also could be vulnerable, but they have not yet tried to demonstrate it yet (or have tried and not been successful).

And OpenBSD wins again it seems.

Just in case this comment didn’t make it explicitly clear, you can just invoke the python binary inside your venv directly and it will automatically locate all the libraries that are installed in your virtual environment.

To show how this works, you can look at the sys.path variable to see which paths python will search for modules when you run import statements. Try running python3 -c 'import sys; print(sys.path)' using your system python, and you will only see system python library paths. Then, try running it again after replacing python3 with the full path to the python3 binary in your venv, and you will see an additional entry in the output with the lib directory in your venv, which shows that python will also look there for modules when an import statement is executed.

From my reading, it sounded like there was some controversy around whether it was ready to be merged it not. It sounded like some people felt that it wasn’t ready, but Linus decided to overrule them and merge it, saying it was ready enough and that merging it would help them improve it more rapidly.

Also, another issue with what you’re suggesting is that people have to memorize several conversion factors as well. Inherently, you only have to be able to convert inches -> cm and pounds -> kg, but unless you want to do even more math in your head, you also have to remember feet -> cm, yards -> cm, miles -> cm, square feet -> square meters, cubic feet -> cubic meters (phew, that’s just all the length conversions), pounds -> kg, ounces -> grams, pounds -> grams, cups -> grams (for every fluid you might want to measure), litres -> gallons, litres -> pints, etc.

Or you could just go through the one-time effort of actually using the metric system so you don’t have to carry this mental burden with you everywhere you go…

The problems with that are:

1. hardly anyone knows the conversion factor

2. other people aren’t going to do the math in their head

That’s on them

them == everybody in this case. Practically, nobody is going to do what you suggest - instead, non-metric users will ask metric users to do the conversion for them. And why should we be responsible for doing the work when they are the ones who refuse to use the system that 96% of the world has adopted?

How is this supposed to be considered using the metric system? If you tell someone that you weigh 80kg and he doesn’t have a clue what you mean, then you’re not really using the metric system, are you?

One is clearly more applicable for day-to-day life.

And yet, 96% of the world uses the “wrong” system…

This is quite cool. I always find it interesting to see how optimization algorithms play games and to see how their habits can change how we would approach the game.

I notice that the AI does some unnatural moves. Humans would usually try to find the safest area on the screen and leave generous amounts of space in their dodges, whereas the AI here seems happy to make minimal motions and cut dodges as closely as possible.

I also wonder if the AI has any concept of time or ability to predict the future. If not, I imagine it could get cornered easily if it dodges into an area where all of its escape routes are about to get closed off.

This is quite cool and a very interesting read. I’m not sure if it’s something I would want to use in a real project, because it looks like you’re basically inventing a new language within Python’s type system itself, which is a little weird. That said, I feel like I learned a lot from reading this, and it was a very interesting demonstration of what you can do with Python’s type-checking system.