Readit News logoReadit News
zdragnar commented on Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems   techcrunch.com/2025/12/12... · Posted by u/kernelrocks
725686 · a day ago
Pretty good actually. With the salt, lack of oxygen and pressure it can last quite a long time.
zdragnar · a day ago
Presumably you'd want human habitable atmosphere on the inside of the sphere, which would radically change the equation against the use of wood unfortunately.
zdragnar commented on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence   whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/andsoitis
rudedogg · a day ago
> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?

Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.

I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.

zdragnar · a day ago
Copyright has nothing to do with banning technology. It is a set of rules around a particular kind of property rights.

There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.

zdragnar commented on An SVG is all you need   jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/... · Posted by u/sadiq
wongarsu · 2 days ago
SVG was once hailed as the Flash-killer. With SVG + CSS + JavaScript you could do anything you could do with Flash, including those fancy Flash websites or complex applications. There just weren't any good authoring tools, while Flash had an amazing one.

Then Flash just died without being replaced by anything

zdragnar · 2 days ago
Part of the problem was that browsers never really fully optimized svg, especially with CSS. Animated stroke patterns were especially rough, if my memory serves.
zdragnar commented on Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits   eli.li/gundam-is-just-the... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
ErroneousBosh · 4 days ago
Avatar is Pocahontas repainted. Fight me.
zdragnar · 3 days ago
Nah, Avatar is Dances With Wolves
zdragnar commented on Are the Three Musketeers allergic to muskets? (2014)   ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/a... · Posted by u/rolph
watwut · 4 days ago
Matchlock Musket took forever to fire. It needed all these steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTS8PQ06Qo This is powerful when in actual battle, pretty impractical in the Paris streets and situations these guys find themselves in.

Comments here make big conclusions basically out of mundane historical realities. Our modern stories about soldiers feature soldiers using arms appropriate to occasion too - not just the most powerful but least practical gun assigned to their unit.

Tl;dr modern tank battalion guy is not driving tank everywhere either. Not because there is some profound disconnect with social class or system or other people, but because he is not an idiot.

zdragnar · 4 days ago
Flintlock tech was available at the time the books were set. The pan could be primed and loaded in advance and kept ready to fire.

Still only good for one shot before you need to switch to a blade in close battle, of course, and utterly beside the point of the story, but worth calling out.

zdragnar commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?   stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
nialv7 · 5 days ago
But the author isn't saying we should program in any of these memory safe languages. The author is saying why don't we vibe code in C, or even assembly.
zdragnar · 4 days ago
This thread moved the conversation away from the posted article quite a few messages ago.

First, Rust has lots of checks that C and assembly don't, and AI benefits from those checks. Then, a post about those checks are related to memory safety, not logic errors. Then, a post about whether that's a helpful comment. Finally, me pointing out that checks regarding types and memory errors aren't unique to Rust and there's tons of languages that could benefit.

Since you want to bring it back to the original article, here's a quote from the author:

    Is C the ideal language for vibe coding? I think I could mount an argument for why it is not, but surely Rust is even less ideal. To say nothing of Haskell, or OCaml, or even Python. All of these languages, after all, are for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. 
It would seem that the author fundamentally misunderstand significant reasons for many of the languages he mentions to be the way that they are.

zdragnar commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?   stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
loeg · 5 days ago
> Rust doesn't prevent programs from having logic errors.

Like everything around Rust, this has been discussed ad nauseam.

Preventing memory safety bugs has a meaningful impact in reducing CVEs, even if it has no impact on logic bugs. (Which: I think you could argue the flexible and expressive type system helps with. But for the sake of this argument, let's say it provides no benefits.)

zdragnar · 5 days ago
It isn't like rust is the only language with memory safety; plenty of high level languages don't let you fiddle with memory bits in a way that would be unsafe. The tradeoff is that they typically come with garbage collectors.

If the only concern is "can an LLM write code in this language without memory errors" then there's plenty of reasons to choose a language other than Rust.

zdragnar commented on Firewood Banks Aren't Inspiring. They're a Sign of Collapse   newrepublic.com/article/2... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
zdragnar · 5 days ago
This article has so many things wrong with it, it is hard to know where to start.

The core assumption, I suppose, is that this is a sign of collapse because the systems and institutions worked before.

Unfortunately for the author, it's evident that they never did. The gaps were merely papered over by cheap propane and heating oil.

zdragnar commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden   andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui
AnotherGoodName · 5 days ago
To give backing i’m from Australia which has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth. This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is higher) etc.

Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

This is a recent development where the median wealth of citizens in progressively taxes nations has quickly overtaken the median wealth of USA citizens.

All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right? Yet things gave consistently been going the other way for along time in the USA.

zdragnar · 5 days ago
> All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right?

You could tax 100% of all of the top 1%'s income (not progressively, just a flat 100% tax) and it'd cover less than double the federal government's budget deficit in the US. There would be just enough left over to pay for making the covid 19 ACA subsidies permanent and a few other pet projects.

Of course, you can't actually tax 100% of their income. In fact, you'd need higher taxes on the top 10% than anywhere else in the West to cover the deficit, significantly expand social programs to have an impact, and lower taxes on the middle class.

It should be pointed out that Australia has higher taxes on their middle class than the US does. It tops out at 45% (plus 2% for medicare) for anyone at $190k or above.

If you live in New York City, and you're in the top 1% of income earners (taking cash salary rather than equity options) you're looking at a federal tax rate of 37%, a state tax rate of 10.9%, and a city income tax rate of 3.876% for a total of 51.77%. Some other states have similarly high tax brackets, others are less, and others yet use other schemes like no income tax but higher sales and property taxes.

Not quite so obvious when you look closer at it.

zdragnar commented on No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me   zerokspot.com/weblog/2025... · Posted by u/speckx
seg_lol · 5 days ago
The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.
zdragnar · 5 days ago
My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse.

Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.

u/zdragnar

KarmaCake day12275December 9, 2015View Original