The mod correctly removed my commentary from the story because, per the guidelines (which I missed), it should be in a separate comment. So in reference to your question I’m copying the removed comment here for context:

Some highlights:

• Tesla cars run on sketchy software that’s connected to the Internet 24/7
• Tesla power charging stations will blacklist you if a complicated algorithm decides you need to be blacklisted
• Employees can “ssh into” all cars
• China wants new cars to report their locations to government databases

I share this as a public service announcement — to those who are considering buying a Tesla, please consider purchasing something that isn’t connected to the Internet for your safety and the safety of others. If you are working for an auto manufacturer, please consider how many lives you are putting at risk by connecting a 1+ ton speeding vehicle to a centralized server where hackers, or you own employees, can command and control them.

As far as what cars you can buy, there are many cars, new and old, that don’t have an Internet connection. Shop around. I personally plan to stick to used petrol based cars until auto manufacturers are able to design an electric car that I actually like.

Performance penalty of “trap on overflow” can be reduced by clever modeling, for example by allowing delayed trap instead of immediate trap. As-if Infinitely Ranged is one such model. Immediate trap disallows optimizing a+b-b to a, because if a+b overflows the former traps and the latter doesn’t. Delayed trap allows such optimization.

I’m a bit puzzled why the author seems to think that integer wrap on overflow behaviour has something to do with C and undefined behaviour.

You are mixing up underlying behaviour of the processor with defined (or un-defined) behaviour of the language. Wrap on integer overflow is indeed the natural behaviour of most common processors, but C doesn’t specify it. The post is saying that some people have argued that wrap-on-overflow should be the defined behaviour of the C language, or at least the implementation-defined behaviour implemented by compilers, and then goes on to provide arguments against that. There is a clear example in the post of where behaviour of a C program doesn’t match that of 2’s complement arithmetic (wrapping).

The same thing happens with nearly all languages which use the processor’s integer arithmetic, because those semantics are provided by the processor itself.

That’s the point - in C, it doesn’t happen.

I’m a bit puzzled why the author seems to think that integer wrap on overflow behaviour has something to do with C and undefined behaviour.

They are related, yes. E.g. whilst signed integer overflow is well defined in most individual hardware architectures (usually as a two’s compliment wrap), it could vary between architectures, and thus C leaves signed integer overflow undefined.

The whole argument is odd.

I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.

edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.

The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).

It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).

Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.

Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.

You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.

Switching to the individual perspective.

I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.

As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.

Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.

Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.

P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.

One part of it is that we already have net neutrality, and it’s easier to try to hang on to a regulation than to create a new one.

The personally identifiable information Facebook and Google have about me is certainly not low precision. Just because they don’t target me doesn’t mean that they don’t have the data. Facebook not allowing highly targeted ads anymore doesn’t mean that the data they could use to make those highly targeted ads has gone away.

I have a lot more confidence that people would subscribe to things if they had good options to subscribe to than you do, I guess. People said for years that they’d stop torrenting if they could watch good movies on a paid subscription service, or if they could listen to music in decent quality with a subscription, and people said they were the exception if they were even telling the truth. But with the popularity of Spotify and Netflix and such, it’s proven to be true. I don’t know anyone that torrents most of the stuff like watch and listen to, and those that do still torrent things are downloading TV shows that aren’t on New Zealand Netflix, music that is blocked on New Zealand Spotify, etc. Old BBC TV shows that haven’t been on in years and aren’t even available on DVD. Not out of laziness or greed but because it’s literally impossible to get it any other way.

Now sure, Spotify does have a free advertising-supported mode, but nobody wants frequent repetitive advertising while they’re listening to music so they pay the subscription fee. And Netflix is subscription-only. People are fine with subscribing to things. People would subscribe to news media again if they produced news media of decent quality. I’d subscribe to the newspaper again if half the pages weren’t advertisements and it stopped getting thinner every year. And I’d definitely subscribe to news websites if they weren’t all free, ignoring for a moment that the best quality news website in NZ by far is the Government-operated RadioNZ.co.nz, the rest essentially being tabloid junk.

As for ‘literally everything you think you like is funded by advertising either directly [or indirectly]’, I certainly would not say I like Firefox, Chrome or node.js. There are non-advertisement-funded alternatives to most things, and if there aren’t, there could be. There’s no real reason that Firefox couldn’t be free but with a subscription if you want to have your tabs/settings/bookmarks/etc. synced between devices, except that it’s competing with browsers for which that isn’t true. But if they weren’t competing with ‘make everything we offer free so that competing with us is nigh-impossible’ Google it could become a viable model. Drew DeVault’s sr.ht plans to have a subscription model instead of the VC funding model of GitHub. Free software was completely fine for my purposes when it was all developed by volunteers because they enjoyed doing it. If anything it was better before the corporatisation of the Linux world.

So I rather heftily reject the claim that everything I like is funded by advertising. In fact, the things funded by advertising tend to be crap designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator because numbers are more important than anything else in advertising.

In theory the poor benefit from ad-funded services because they use them for free while richer people pay for the things being advertised, but in practice let’s be honest: Coke doesn’t advertise so it will appeal to rich educated people.

This came from realizing that useful products do not really need much marketing.

But, they do need some. You have to be aware a product exists, outside of shifting power to an intermediary between you and the product – what do you consider acceptable?

Perhaps you are just refusing to see how you have been influenced by adverts.

It’s interesting that you say that. I try to consciously avoid paying attention to ads or seeing them at all. I don’t watch broadcast television, for example.

But ads undeniably get in there anyway, and think about it: think of a fast food place. Think of a brand of toothpaste. Ads aren’t just about yelling at you to go buy a particular thing, they’re also about brand awareness. There are the really obvious ads like the Coke ads where they have people drinking coke and looking like they’re happy, but they’re quite transparent. What I really hate is the pervasive advertising of brands just so that you, when you think of a product, think of their brand. And that’s hard to stop, even if you’re consciously aware of it.

the abandoned android port is depressing

As a follow-up, in the conclusion you say:

I think that in practice they may not be making real life shipped code a lot more secure - also because not that much actual Rust code is shipping.

While just one of the undoubtedly many examples which could be brought up, I hadn’t realized the Quantum CSS engine from Firefox was so short! More seriously, the achievements in Firefox are remarkable and inspiring, and is a large amount of code shipping to real users, and used every day.

One thing I like very much about the borrow checker is it took memory access problems and turned it in to a generic resource safety problem. Using the simple primitives available I’m able to easily encode usage requirements, limitations, and state changes through borrows and Drops and have them checked at compile time. This is really powerful, and I very much appreciate it.

For whatever it is worth, I’m a rubbish C dev – not to be trusted to write a single line – who has found Rust to be an comfortable and pleasant experience in only a few weeks of free-time practice.

Hi - I worded this incorrectly. What I meant to say was that the FAQ says performance will disappoint unless you go into unsafe mode. “For example, a doubly-linked list requires that there be two mutable references to each node, but this violates Rust’s mutable reference aliasing rules. You can solve this using Weak, but the performance will be poorer than you likely want. With unsafe code you can bypass the mutable reference aliasing rule restriction, but must manually verify that your code introduces no memory safety violations.”. I’ve updated the wording a bit. Apologies for the confusion.

Optimizations do depend on “pointers are not integers” or inability to guess/manufacture pointers. Otherwise you can’t even prove external pointers do not alias with local variables.

More like morale will remain high and productivity low until beatings begin.

As for making the overflow behaviour “sane”, the notion that you could add two positive integers and then meaningfully check whether the result was smaller than either was bat-shit crazy to begin with.

Wow, so all that work in finite field theory is bat-shit crazy?

The C standard defines “int” as fixed length binary strings representing signed integers and even has a defined constant max value. C ints are not bignums and C does not ask the compiler to detect or prevent overflows or traps or whatever the architecture does. As a consequence of the definition of ints, x+y > x cannot be a theorem. If it was a theorem, it would follow that ints can represent infinite sets of numbers which would be a great trick with a finite number of bits.

Can people stop “explaining” that making C into Java would be hard and would lose performance or that C ints are not really integers or other trivia as attempted justifications of these undefined program transformations?

Since compilers already provide options for wrapping integer overflow, I think it’s a reasonable to propose to make those options default. After all, people who want undefined integer overflow for optimization or otherwise can use options to do so after default is changed. (If this sounds inconvenient, the exact same applies to “use options and stop complaints”.) Note that this change is backward compatible. (Although going back won’t be.)

Same applies for strict aliasing. I am much more uncertain about other undefined behaviors, for example null dereference, because when there are no pre-existing options such standard change would require (in my opinion quite substantial) additional work for implementations.

I think your comment could be a valuable historic source in the future.
It shows pretty well the kind of rationalization “western developed worlders” do of the oppression they foster and benefit from. Teenagers abused in retail stores learn “real world” just as girls that were abused in Nigeria.

Just because criminals do it, it’s not something we should teach.

In a slavery, the ultimate threat is the threat of violence.

Some consider tortures as a form of violence. And starvation is a form of torture, you know?
Just because it’s inflicted by a community instead of a deputed soldier, it does not means it’s less violent.

She is better of being given this opportunity.

You should really read more carefully.
These people pay for this “opportunity”. They literaly take loans on their house to pay for it.
And, it turns out, they pay to be enslaved. The product does not match the promises. They are tricked.

Because you know, when private people have the power to remove your civil rights if you don’t do what they want, you are a slave. And if they can remove your civil rights when you get pregnant, you are a slave. And they can force you to pay for a job, you are a slave…

Every society has got to go through this process. […]
The surplus of poor people will always ensure that there’s some people ready to be ‘abused’ for $2 a day..

Honestly I find this argument pretty disgusting.
Exploting people weakness just because you can is not something that have a place in a civil world.

As someone who claim to “fight for freedom”, you should really consider what kind of freedom you are supporting. The freedom of western consumers? The freedom of western IT companies? Who’s the freedom you care about?

many employers also confiscate and hold workers’ passports in order to keep them from leaving an untenable situation

Work makes freedom - as you point out.

The surplus of poor people will always ensure that there’s some people ready to be ‘abused’ for $2 a day

I know that I won’t convince you to change your worldview by typing into a text box on a website where you have put your very worldview into your username, but please consider the possibility that poverty is intentionally created and sustained to maintain a cheap labor market.

What would that look like? Who would benefit? What would they say to keep it going? Does that imaginary world match what you see in the real one?

I think the argument is that just because you can’t prevent all evil doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to prevent some evil. That seems sensible to me. Certainly, it’s something I try to live by.

I do somewhat agree with the gist of your argument though. I find a lot of the moralizing and attention around this issue to be pretty inconsistent. But that’s nothing new and is true of a lot of other things too. With that said, trying to tell people that they should be exercise boycotts and be outraged in a properly proportionate and consistent way is just never going to go over well.

Harping on the inconsistency might seem like a trite affair given what’s happening, but it always comes back to tribalism. It seems inescapable.

Whether (any policy involving different treatment for carers of kids) is discrimination against non parents depends on perspective. Every person benefits (once, as a child) from them, after all - unless you manage to spring fully formed from the earth.

Your opinion is grotesque.

Yeah… Some problems are not so clear cut. There are big differences between short term and long term outcomes, also between intent and outcome, as well as adjusting plans that don’t work well currently vs having evil intent.

• Would I say Trump has much empathy? … no.
• Is the right wing sadistic and enjoy suffering? I would also say no.