OmarAssadi (u/OmarAssadi)

OmarAssadi commented on Notes by djb on using Fil-C cr.yp.to/2025/fil-c.html... · Posted by u/transpute

EPWN3D · 2 months ago

Even if you can't use something like Fil-C in your release/production builds, being able to e.g. compile unit tests with it to catch memory safety bugs is a huge win. My team use gcc for its mips codegen, but I'm working on adopting the clang bounds-safety annotations for test builds for exactly this reason.

OmarAssadi · 2 months ago

Yeah, I haven't yet taken a serious look into it from that perspective yet, but similar came to mind; while, outside of bootstrapping the JDK from GCJ, Boehm GC hasn't been super relevant to me for "release" builds of anything, it's been useful in leak detection mode on occasion.

I figure even if you cannot use, or do not want to use, something like Fil-C in production, there's solid potential for it to augment whatever existing suite of sanitizers and other tools that one may already build against.

OmarAssadi commented on Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio mitchivin.com/... · Posted by u/mitchivin

mitchivin · 3 months ago

some of those redditors don't know what they're saying then, huh? thats such a good point - couldn't I run XP on a CRT monitor today if i wanted to

OmarAssadi · 3 months ago

Nothing stopping you from using one with totally modern systems as well, except for the ever increasing prices, I guess. Anyway, yeah, same as some of the others already mentioned, but I don't think I actually owned any sort of standalone display—be it a monitor or television—that wasn't CRT until ~2009 or so?

I used my mom's iMac G3 (CRT) probably until 2004 or so, because I distinctly remember getting stuck on Tutorial Island on RuneScape as a kid, since you had to Right-click -> "Prospect Rock", and at the time, I had no idea how to actually do it with Apple's single-button mice lmao.

Aside from the couple of laptops that came later, I don't think I had moved on [for the worse] until a bit after I put together my first DIY computer (Phenom II 920, etc); I still had a CRT TV in my room long enough to have been using it when Halo Reach came out.

OmarAssadi commented on A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/dougb5

Spooky23 · 3 months ago

My son’s middle school English teacher comes up with various schemes to make it hard to use AI, or if you do, it makes your ideas better.

The magic of AI is it amplifies what’s there. Smart or diligent people get better. Dumb and lazy people kick the can down the road.

OmarAssadi · 3 months ago

Do you happen to have any examples, if you're allowed to share and comfortable doing so?

Always found differences in teaching styles and curriculum interesting as is, but I am curious about how others are balancing the new additional challenges of combating LLMs without making the material significantly more difficult to understand.

OmarAssadi commented on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own hugotunius.se/2025/08/31/... · Posted by u/K0nserv

chongli · 4 months ago

Doesn't your second paragraph run against the grain of your first? If streaming services like Netflix are harmful then we should avoid using them. Thus it should not be important for our freedom-preserving computers to be able to access Netflix.

Now, if you want to do an in-depth study of film and television material as a whole, you're actually better off avoiding Netflix and making use of archives such as public libraries, university libraries, and the Internet Archive.

OmarAssadi · 4 months ago

I mean, I agree that you should be able to avoid things like Netflix and make use of libraries and other archives, but that's sort of the point; there is a ton of media that never even gets a physical release anymore; once one of these platforms goes under, or something enters licensing hell, or whatever else and gets removed, all you can do is hope someone out there with both the know-how and access went out of their way to illegally download a copy, illegally decrypt it, and illegally upload it somewhere.

I say "know-how" and "access" because, while I'd still argue decrypting, say, Widevine L3 is not exactly super common knowledge, decrypting things like 4K Netflix content, among other things, generally requires you to have something like a Widevine L1 CDM from one of the Netflix-approved devices, which typically sits in those hardware trusted execution environments, so you need an active valuable exploit or insider leaks from someone at one of the manufacturers.

But also on top of all of that, you also need to hope other people kept the upload alive by the time you decide to access it, and then you also often need to have access to various semi-elitist private trackers to consistently be able to even find some of this stuff.

The legal issues with DRM here are hardly exclusive to Netflix and other streaming services, but at least in the case of things like Blu-rays or whatever — even if it is technically illegal in most countries to actually make use of virtually any backed-up disc due to AACS — you usually don't have the same time-pressure problem nor the significant technical expertise barrier.

>If streaming services like Netflix are harmful then we should avoid using them. Thus it should not be important for our freedom-preserving computers to be able to access Netflix.

I generally do avoid them whenever possible, though, yes. And I've explicitly disabled DRM support in Firefox on my computer. But I am just one person and I don't think my behavior reflects the average person, for better or for worse.

OmarAssadi commented on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own hugotunius.se/2025/08/31/... · Posted by u/K0nserv

cm2012 · 4 months ago

There are dozens of sources of online streaming entertainment, and its not exactly a vital good.

OmarAssadi · 4 months ago

Sure, Netflix may not be as important as, say, housing, food, or whatever else, but I think there is something to be said about the cultural importance of [at the very least some] film and television.

There's a lot of media worth studying, analyzing, and preserving. And in that sense, between the constant churn of catalog items, exclusive content, and the egregious DRM, I think these sorts of streaming services are, unfortunately, kind of harmful.

OmarAssadi commented on A deep dive into Rust and C memory interoperability notashes.me/blog/part-1-m... · Posted by u/hyperbrainer

TechDebtDevin · 4 months ago

Do you see Emojis in tables/code now and assume the person is using an llm? I dont really see it.

OmarAssadi · 4 months ago

Personally, it is one of the flags, yeah. It's been a while since I've tried ChatGPT or some of the others, but the structure and particular usage felt a lot like what I'd have gotten out of deepseek.

It's not a binary thing, of course, but it's definitely an LLM smell, IMO.

OmarAssadi commented on Zhaoxin's KX-7000 chipsandcheese.com/p/zhao... · Posted by u/ryandotsmith

999900000999 · 8 months ago

Plus the vast majority of work computers don’t need to be particularly fast. Add a lightweight Linux distro, and that’s more than enough for paperwork.

OmarAssadi · 8 months ago

Early into high school, I needed something to take to class, but since I already had a decent desktop at home, plus we were broke, I picked up some cheap Asus K55N; AMD A8-4500M, 4GB DDR3, etc -- nothing particularly fancy; only upgrade I did to it was removing the mechanical hard drive and swapping in my old 120GB Corsair Force GT.

I eventually upgraded, went off to university, etc. When I finally came home, I found out my mom apparently "borrowed" it, figured out how to install Ubuntu, and has been using it ever since for grading papers and what not.

No idea how much longer it will remain in use, but aside from the awful screen, ironically, honestly, I think the browser and the seemingly ever increasing resource requirements of the web will eventually be the only thing that finally causes an upgrade.

OmarAssadi commented on AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards amd.com/en/newsroom/press... · Posted by u/pella

OmarAssadi · 10 months ago

I feel that.

It's difficult to justify any new hardware until I'm in a better place; while it'd be nice, I'm not suffering enough to /need/ a new system.

Until the beginning of 2020, during university, I was still on a 3930K from launch-day in ~2011 and GTX 680. Honestly, I'm not sure I would've bothered if it weren't also for the fact that I wanted to be able to test AVX2 implementations of some of my code without relying on an emulator or someone else's machine every time.

It probably helped that I mostly only care about Source games and RuneScape. But I haven't really played anything since my ex-girlfriend and I broke up in ~2022.

I took his RX 480 to have a display-out and gave him my 2070 Super so it wouldn't go to waste.

OmarAssadi · 10 months ago

Oops, realized too late that I deleted a sentence by accident; I gave the GPU to my younger brother.

OmarAssadi commented on AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards amd.com/en/newsroom/press... · Posted by u/pella

theandrewbailey · 10 months ago

> I applaud you for avoiding latest-and-greatest syndrome, but even upgrading to an older CPU generation would be a significant boost.

Being out of a job for a while makes me very loathe to upgrade hardware that still works OK. That 1800X still does what I want it to do, and does it 'fast enough', though how far into the future that will last is unclear. Cyberpunk 2077 being the most demanding game that I've played probably helps. :D

OmarAssadi · 10 months ago

I feel that.

It's difficult to justify any new hardware until I'm in a better place; while it'd be nice, I'm not suffering enough to /need/ a new system.

Until the beginning of 2020, during university, I was still on a 3930K from launch-day in ~2011 and GTX 680. Honestly, I'm not sure I would've bothered if it weren't also for the fact that I wanted to be able to test AVX2 implementations of some of my code without relying on an emulator or someone else's machine every time.

It probably helped that I mostly only care about Source games and RuneScape. But I haven't really played anything since my ex-girlfriend and I broke up in ~2022.

I took his RX 480 to have a display-out and gave him my 2070 Super so it wouldn't go to waste.

OmarAssadi commented on Linus Torvalds comments on the Russian Linux maintainers being delisted phoronix.com/news/Linus-T... · Posted by u/itvision

michaelmrose · a year ago

The legal reasons is the sanctions against Russia for their illegal war of aggression. All of Russia and all who live within its borders are responsible for these actions.

OmarAssadi · a year ago

There is something beautiful about how U.S. news outlets were always going on about how Russia is a dictatorship, with rigged elections, where you'll be beaten, arrested or killed for protesting or speaking out--Russians supposedly have no agency. And yet simultaneously, now, Russians apparently must be held accountable for everything their government ever does, because they "voted him in" or "should overthrow Putin".

We can't have it both ways. Either Russia is a functioning democracy (which I don't personally believe exists anywhere but that is another topic), or perhaps the average person does not actually have very much say in such events.

Sanctions are meant to harm innocent people as much as possible, on purpose, with the idea being that it will cause so much unrest that the government either caves to the pressure or the people revolt. While I find that very sick in and of itself, I would at least appreciate it if we were honest about that rather than making contradictory moral statements.

That said, worse yet, almost hilariously, I cannot think of a single time sanctions have ever truly worked in a situation even remotely similar to that of Russia. Just think about countries like North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, etc -- like it or not, these countries have not toppled as a result of the sanctions. Do they hurt? Yes, of course, but they evidently do not destroy nations the way we believed they would.

Instead, the innocent are hurt, as was the intention, yet the goal never gets achieved. North Korea still has nuclear weapons, and all we've done is force Iran to develop its own industry, such that, ironically, it is now capable of sending weapons to aid Russia.