I worked on a project funded by the BMBF. I can tell you, those people had no idea of what they were funding. And the people running the project had also no idea for what they were being funded.
Readit Newsjcarrano commented on Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for research, technology, aerospace science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pmags
jcarrano commented on 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought nytimes.com/2025/03/19/sc... · Posted by u/Hooke
Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to insert new nodes in the linked list of spacetime, pushing galaxies apart and ensuring the complex timelines of intelligent species never have to snap together and run on a single instance. The work is constant and unrewarding, but I am thankful to Colin for his work, however mysterious it might seem to us.
They say the deadline was quite literally 6 days. Some of the employees rage-quit and started their own business (they are doing fantastic but work conditions are reportedly hellish).
As far as we know, they were still tweaking the physical constants until not long ago.
jcarrano commented on The Demoralization is just Beginning geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Steve Jobs told Obama something similar once. The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities. Basically give those workers a visa along with their diploma.
Obama thought the idea was intriguing and mentioned it multiple times to his advisors. It never went anywhere though.
Brain draining the rest of the world is one of the main reasons for America’s success. It is due to America being a nation of immigrants that we can do this.
The way they do it in Germany is very sensible. There are clear requirements: have a degree and a salary offer above a certain threshold, and if you fulfill them you are in. No lottery nonsense or employer involvement required beyond signing an offer. The salary threshold is lower for graduates from German universities.
Wow... having just gone through a 20+ hour byzantine nightmare of setting up postfix & dovecot (that's on top of an already deep understanding of SMTP, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, SASL, etc.) and now struggling through an even more kafkaesque nightmare of rspamd (with its 3 different programming languages needed to understand its 92+ configuration files, which you can't modify by the way, you have to add your own "override" and "merge" config files on top of that mess) for the simple purpose of getting it to DKIM-sign my stupid outgoing messages the way all the big mail systems want... I wish I had seen mox earlier!
Not sure its quality, but battling with postfix & dovecot's 20+ years of legacy cruft, I felt compelled many times to just throw them aside and build something like this on first principles - simple single binary mail server with modern protocol support, sans all the archaic UNIX-account timesharing-era sendmail bullshit that still lives on in the mainstays.
Going to have a look at this one, despite now having moderately deep postfix & dovecot knowledge.
I once set up qmail on a home server. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed.
Location: Berlin, Germany
Remote: preferably
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: embedded development, C, Python, C++, embedded Linux, Buildroot, EV chargers, Network/socket programming, writing Unix daemons, a bit of web dev (react, typescript), MQTT, MODBUS, microcontroller/RTOS, desktop software, electronics.
Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juancarrano/ , PDF on request.
Email: juan@carrano.com.ar
10 years experience. Done very disparate things, but mostly focused on embedded and numeric-related software (image processing, robot path planning, electric power optimization). Quite heavy on Buildroot too. Right now I'm working with video and OpenGL as a side project while building a react-router site on cloudflare.
There are plenty of attempts at "safe C-like" languages that you can learn from:
C++ has smart pointers. I personally haven't worked with them, but you can probably get very close to "safe C" by mostly working in C++ with smart pointers. Perhaps there is a way to annotate the code (with a .editorconfig) to warn/error when using a straight pointer, except within a #pragma?
> Just talk to the platform, almost all the platforms speak C. Nothing like Rust's PAL (platform-agnostic layer) is needed. 2) Just talk to other languages, C is the lingua franca
C# / .Net tried to do that. Unfortunately, the memory model needed to enable garbage collection makes it far too opinionated to work in cases where straight C shines. (IE, it's not practical to write a kernel in C# / .Net.) The memory model is also so opinionated about how garbage collection should work that C# in WASM can't use the proposed generalized garbage collector for WASM.
Vala is a language that's inspired by C#, but transpiles to C. It uses the gobject system under the hood. (I guess gobjects are used in some linux GUIs, but I have little experience with it.) Gobjects, and thus Vala, are also opinionated about how automatic memory management should work, (In this case, they use reference counting.), but from what I remember it might be easier to drop into C in a Vala project.
Objective C is a decent object-oriented language, and IMO, nicer than C++. It allows you to call C directly without needing to write bindings; and you can even write straight C functions mixed in with Objective C. But, like C# and Vala, Objective C's memory model is also opinionated about how memory management should work. You might even be able to mix Swift and Objective C, and merely use Objective C as a way to turn C code into objects.
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The thing is, if you were to try to retrofit a "safe C" inside of C, you have to be opinionated about how memory management should work. The value of C is that it has no opinions about how your memory management should work; this allows C to interoperate with other languages that allow access to pointers.
Gobjects are a nightmare. A poor reimplementation of C++ on top of C. You have to know what "unref" function to call and that type to cast. For all the drawbacks of C++, it would have been less bad than Gobject.
jcarrano commented on Some Programming Language Ideas davidbos.me/posts/some_pr... · Posted by u/toteloader
I was trying something in the line of refinement types in C++ to solve the sequential method (anti)pattern, without success. For example, one would have
ConfiguredThing Thing::configure(....) &&;
Where ConfiguredThing and Thing have the exact same members, so doing
auto y = std::move(x).configure(...);
would not copy any data around. It seemed to work with optimizations on, but then there are no guarantees that it will always be the case.
Ideally one would want RAII, but that is not always possible, in particular when wrapping C libraries that may have their own logic. Also, the object could be in different states, with different methods available in each state, and then it would be possible to prevent errors at compile time.
On a second thought, this may be more in the direction of linear types.
jcarrano commented on Some Programming Language Ideas davidbos.me/posts/some_pr... · Posted by u/toteloader
I was trying something in the line of refinement types in C++ to solve the sequential method (anti)pattern, without success. For example, one would have
ConfiguredThing Thing::configure(....) &&;
Where ConfiguredThing and Thing have the exact same members, so doing
auto y = std::move(x).configure(...);
would not copy any data around. It seemed to work with optimizations on, but then there are no guarantees that it will always be the case.
Ideally one would want RAII, but that is not always possible, in particular when wrapping C libraries that may have their own logic. Also, the object could be in different states, with different methods available in each state, and then it would be possible to prevent errors at compile time.
I don't understand why Cloudflare allowed itself to be use like this and is heading to court instead of just refusing to accept LaLiga's requests. They could just request them to provide appropriate evidence and make them pay for the time Cloudflare staff would need to review the evidence
LaLiga went directly to the courts, according to Cloudflare.