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esjeon commented on Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company   amutable.com/about... · Posted by u/hornedhob
esjeon · 13 days ago
Hmph, AFAIK systemd has been struggling with TPM stuff for a while (much longer than I anticipated). It’s kinda understandable that the founder of systemd is joining this attestation business, because attestation ultimately requires far more than a stable OS platform plus an attestation module.

A reliably attestable system has to nail the entire boot chain: BIOS/firmware, bootloader, kernel/initramfs pairs, the `init` process, and the system configuration. Flip a single bit anywhere along the process, and your equipment is now a brick.

Getting all of this right requires deep system knowledge, plus a lot of hair-pulling adjustment, assuming if you still have hair left.

I think this part of Linux has been underrated. TPM is a powerful platform that is universally available, and Linux is the perfect OS to fully utilize it. The need for trust in digital realm will only increase. Who knows, it may even integrate with cryptocurrency or even social platforms. I really wish them a good luck.

esjeon commented on Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company   amutable.com/about... · Posted by u/hornedhob
cferry · 13 days ago
Please don't bring attestation to common Linux distributions. This technology, by essence, moves trust to a third party distinct of the user. I don't see how it can be useful in any way to end users like most of us here. Its use by corporations has already caused too much damage and exclusion in the mobile landscape, and I don't want folks like us becoming pariahs in our own world, just because we want machines we bought to be ours...
esjeon · 13 days ago
Attestation is a critical feature for many H/W companies (e.g. IoT, robotics), and they struggle with finding security engineers who expertise in this area (disclaimer: I used to work as a operating system engineer + security engineer). Many distros are not only designed for desktop users, but also for industrial uses. If distros ship standardized packages in this area, it would help those companies a lot.
esjeon commented on Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users   openai.com/index/scaling-... · Posted by u/mustaphah
bzmrgonz · 19 days ago
Someone ask Microsoft what does it feel to be bested by an open source project on their very own cloud platform!!! Lol.
esjeon · 19 days ago
Azure offers Postgres “DBaaS”, so I’m pretty sure they are no where near that stage. It’s more likely that we should watch out for the Microsoft E-E-E strategy.

Deleted Comment

esjeon commented on Is Rust faster than C?   steveklabnik.com/writing/... · Posted by u/vincentchau
steveklabnik · a month ago
What abstraction do you refer to?
esjeon · 25 days ago
Rust is actually few steps above from the bare metal, to enforce its security invariants. Boundary checks (which breaks auto-vectorization of loops), stack probe, fat pointer (wastes register), fixed index type (uint), etc.

There are other hidden costs coming from usage of std. Even `Result` is a bit of inefficiency.

I'm not saying any of these are bad. I'm just saying Rust would be slower than C if *naively* used.

esjeon commented on Is Rust faster than C?   steveklabnik.com/writing/... · Posted by u/vincentchau
esjeon · a month ago
Theoretically, C is likely faster than Rust only by an unnoticeably small margin. Still, this is unavoidable because Rust works with abstraction that (1) adds overhead per-se albeit tiny (2) forces overhead in the design level.

Practically, that little margin can be removed thru a series of engineering, as both are proper system-level programming languages, which offer tight control over the generated machine code. That is, this whole discussion is basically pointless if we mix in engineering factors.

We better talk about overall engineering costs, and personally I think Rust would not overshoot C easily, mainly due to the limitations that Rust puts on the higher level designs.

esjeon commented on How Markdown took over the world   anildash.com/2026/01/09/h... · Posted by u/zdw
chuckadams · a month ago
The author of CommonMark and Pandoc has a new format called Djot: https://djot.net/ that I've been meaning to check out. Supposedly more sane to parse, and it comes from someone who would definitely know about that sort of thing.
esjeon · a month ago
A little bit of a problem, as a Korean, is that the name “djot” (and also common word “jot”) sounds like a Korean slang for “dick” :/
esjeon commented on Six-decade math puzzle solved by Korean mathematician   koreaherald.com/article/1... · Posted by u/mikhael
esjeon · a month ago
Finding good-enough solutions is easy.

Figuring out if that's the best you can get is another story.

esjeon commented on I/O is no longer the bottleneck? (2022)   stoppels.ch/2022/11/27/io... · Posted by u/benhoyt
sroussey · a month ago
He said GPU servers
esjeon · a month ago
The point is that we did have CPU servers with TBs of RAM. These machines are still pretty much relevant.
esjeon commented on Go away Python   lorentz.app/blog-item.htm... · Posted by u/baalimago
esjeon · a month ago
Expected a rant, got a life-pro-tip. Enough for a good happy new year.

That said, we can abuse the same trick for any languages that treats `//` as comment.

List of some practical(?) languages: C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, ObjC, D, F#, GLSL/HLSL, Groovy

Personally, among those languages, GLSL sounds most interesting. A single-GLSL graphics demo is always inspiring. (Something like https://www.shadertoy.com/ )

Also, let’s not forget that we can do something similar using block comment(`/* … */`). An example in C:

/*/../usr/bin/env gcc "$0" "$@"; ./a.out; rm -vf a.out; exit; */

#include <stdio.h>

int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); return 0; }

u/esjeon

KarmaCake day1326March 30, 2013View Original