greiskul (u/greiskul)

greiskul commented on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated] cnn.com/2025/08/12/busine... · Posted by u/mastry

canucker2016 · 13 days ago

worked well for Microstrategy (MSTR). Look at the 5 year or all-time chart for MSTR - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSTR/

Not sure how they realize all those gains tho, or what happens to the stock price when they try to exit in a substantial manner.

greiskul · 13 days ago

And what projects do they have besides buying BTC like the parent comment mentioned? What tech have they built?

And yeah, BTC went up huge amounts, but certainly they were a large part of the buying pressure to get it there. But like you asked, how do they realize anything? Unless they get US government to start buying and shift their bags to the US tax payer, how do they do anything with their BTC? Besides using it as collateral to borrow even more money to inflate a even higher bubble?

greiskul commented on The EU can be shut down with a few keystrokes bitecode.dev/p/the-eu-can... · Posted by u/BiteCode_dev

dijit · a month ago

I'm really glad people are starting to wake up to this.

It's been the case for a while, but we've been sliding more and more into the hands of the US.

Microsoft used to ship software that was local first, and removing the activation servers wouldn't have affected deployed software, now though? A removal of a subscription is an immediate revocation.

It's worse with Google Docs.

And of course, nobody knows how to run servers anymore unless they're in US tech company owned and operated datacenters, this is absolutely terrifying, but truthfully it's the office products that have the most capability to cause harm.

greiskul · a month ago

It's the main reason Brazil has invested so much in trying to use open source software for goverment institutions. There is a number of reasons, but digital sovereignty is probably the argument that actually convinced our politicians that it is important. Even Lula visited the international free software forum back in 2009: https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/brazilian-president...

greiskul commented on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/m... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie

humanperhaps · 2 months ago

I feel like the default behavior should be to not write unless changes have been made. I may be misunderstanding here, but what would be getting written if nothing's been changed?

greiskul · 2 months ago

Metadata about the file like modification time.

greiskul commented on Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices apnews.com/article/iran-w... · Posted by u/rdrd

fortzi · 2 months ago

IRGC is known for funding and training militant and terrier groups globally. They also call for the annihilation of the Big Satan (USA) and the Small Satan (Israel). All the while running for The Bomb. I wouldn’t call the present sutuation stable.

greiskul · 2 months ago

> known for funding and training militant and terrier groups globally

So does the US.

> They also call for the annihilation of the Big Satan (USA) and the Small Satan (Israel)

You are literally calling for the annihilation of their state here.

> All the while running for The Bomb.

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war.

There is definitely a cold war going on between Israel and Iran. I'm not sure if it escalating to a hot war would be better. The 20th century Cold War had all the same things you mentioned, with both sides fighting proxy wars, calling for the annihilation of the other side, and had atomic weapons. And I think everyone agrees that the end of the cold war that we had was definitely better than nuclear Armageddon.

And I don't know if the 20th would have been better if only the US had atomic weapons. MAD might have saved millions of lives in both sides.

greiskul commented on Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018) kevinchen.co/blog/cant-st... · Posted by u/wonger_

cherryteastain · 3 months ago

> having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper

This is very common in British universities

greiskul · 3 months ago

Same thing for the Brazilian university I went to. Homework was optional, and there were "filter" classes like Calculus at the start of all STEM subjects where if you are not taking it seriously you are going to fail. Not a single final exam, I think we had 3 exams during the semester. Which was good so that the first exam was able to scare people straight.

And an university is not a school. Nobody should be forced to take it, if you are not interested in learning just go home. But at the same time, a quality university should have a high barrier so that only people that actually learned and have demonstrated to have learned the required subjects, in a setting where cheating is almost impossible, should be able to get a diploma.

greiskul commented on Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp lisp-journey.gitlab.io/bl... · Posted by u/Tomte

dannymi · 3 months ago

There's always tension between language simplicity (and thus cognitive load of the programmers) and features. Compare Scheme with Common Lisp.

The idea in Python is:

1. Statements are executed line by line in order (statement by statement).

2. One of the statements is "def", which executes a definition.

3. Whatever arguments you have are strictly evaluated. For example f(g(h([]))), it evaluates [] (yielding a new empty list), then evaluates h([]) (always, no matter whether g uses it), then evaluates g(...), then evaluates f(...).

So if you have

def foo(x = []): ...

that immediately defines

foo = (lambda x = []: ...)

For that, it has to immediately evaluate [] (like it always does anywhere!). So how is this not exactly what it should do?

Some people complain about the following:

    class A:
        x = 3
        y = x + 2

That now, x is a class variable (NOT an instance variable). And so is y. And the latter's value is 5. It doesn't try to second-guess whether you maybe mean any later value of x. No. The value of y is 5.

For example:

    a = A()
    assert a.__class__.x == 3
    assert a.x == 3
    a.__class__.x = 10
    b = A()
    assert b.x == 10

succeeds.

But it just evaluates each line in the class definition statement by statement when defining the class. Simple!

Complicating the Python evaluation model (that's in effect what you are implying) is not worth doing. And in any case, changing the evaluation model of the world's most used programming language (and in production in all countries of the world) in 2025 or any later date is a no go right there.

If you want a complicated (more featureful) evaluation model, just use C++ or Ruby. Sometimes they are the right choice.

greiskul · 3 months ago

> foo = (lambda x = []: ...)

> For that, it has to immediately evaluate [] (like it always does anywhere!). So how is this not exactly what it should do?

It has a lambda there. In many programming languages, and the way human beings read this, say that "when there is a lambda, whatever is inside is evaluated only when you call it". Python evaluating default arguments at definition time is a clear footgun that leads to many bugs.

Now, there is no way of fixing it now, without probably causing other bugs and years of backwards compatibility problems. But it is good that people are aware that it is an error in design, so new programming languages don't fall into the same error.

For an equivalent error that did get fixed, many Lisps used to have dynamic scoping for variables instead of lexical scoping. It was people critizing that decision that lead to pretty much all modern programming languages to use lexical scoping, including python.

greiskul commented on How Google measures and manages tech debt newsletter.techworld-with... · Posted by u/daigoba66

compiler-guy · 4 months ago

All of those things are real problems with Google, and its decisions, but they don't seem to be signs of technical debt. I suppose they _could_ be, but they could all have plenty of other causes, many of which seem more plausible to me.

1. Decreasing quality of search and poor SEO technique responses may be caused by technical debt, but they also might be the results of strategic product decisions to make more money. That isn't technical debt, that's enshittification for money.

2. Similarly. If Google chooses to do worse spam filtering in order to get more advertising in front of its customers (for example), that's a bad product decision, not technical debt.

3. Constant drops on projects are simply resource allocation decisions, unless of course, they are dropped because they are too expensive to maintain. But there are a myriad of other reasons a product might be dropped.

4. A million more things.

There are numerous valid reasons to dislike Google these days (and I say that as an employee!), but tracing them all back to technical debt is finding the wrong reason for real problems. Similarly with worse spam filtering.

greiskul · 4 months ago

Honestly I don't know how much the decrease in search quality is not just a reflection of the decrease in web quality in general. The web used to be full of indepent writers in publicly accessible websites like blogs and forums. So much of that has moved into walled gardens that are just not crawlable.

greiskul commented on AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating niila.fi/en/ai-cheats/... · Posted by u/duckling23

xmprt · 5 months ago

Really good players can get lucky pretty often because of game sense so even glass walling is hard to detect for certain if a player shoots through walls and kills their invisible opponent. We see this often even in pro play for tactical shooters.

greiskul · 5 months ago

Yup, At top level play, players know the games and the maps so much that they can get some kills through walls just from knowing that its is likely that an opponent WOULD be at the other side at second X after seeing/hearing them at second Y.

greiskul commented on The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos centauri-dreams.org/2025/... · Posted by u/JPLeRouzic

rf15 · 5 months ago

"we should definitely expand life into the cosmos."

So... an expansionist/colonialist agenda for earth-originating life

"oh also hopefully this doesn't lead to conflict"

_I wonder._

greiskul · 5 months ago

Expand life into cosmos doesn't imply expanding earth-originating life to countries that already have life.

There is definitely possibility for conflict when we encounter other life, be it inteligent or not. But what is wrong with expanding earth-life to planets devoid of life that we terraform?

greiskul commented on Make Ubuntu packages 90% faster by rebuilding them gist.github.com/jwbee/7e8... · Posted by u/jeffbee

bigstrat2003 · 5 months ago

ASLR is by definition security through obscurity. That doesn't make it useless, as there's nothing wrong with using obscurity as one layer of defenses. But that doesn't change what it fundamentally is: obscuring information so that an attacker has to work harder.

greiskul · 5 months ago

Is having a secret password security by obscurity? What about a private key?

Security by obscurity is about the bad practice of thinking that obscuring your mechanisms and implementations of security increases your security. It's about people that think that by using their nephew's own super secret unpublished encryption they will be more secure than by using hardened standard encryption libraries.