Ethan

The person who uses the shitty tool is a moron. The person who makes the shitty tool is an asshole. At least in this case where the shitty tool is actively promoting shitty PRs.

If the ask is, why was the hardware like that in the first place the answer is because it can’t be fully validated.

But that’s not the question. There are two questions: Who should be responsible for patching hardware vulnerabilities? And if the answer is “the kernel” then should speculative but never demonstrated vulnerabilities be patched? Linus’ answer is the hardware manufacturer, and no.

Is this really the hardware vendor’s problem though? It’s the consumers problem.

Maybe we’re running into the ambiguity of language. If you mean to say, “Who does it cause a problem for? The consumer.” then sure. On the other hand what I mean, and what I think Linus means, is “Who’s responsible for the vulnerability existing? Hardware vendors. Who should fix it? Hardware vendors.”

If the ask is why should a speculative fix go into the Kernel […]

Depends on what you/we/they mean by “speculative”. IMO, we need to do something (microcode, kernel patches, whatever) to patch Spectre and Meltdown. Those have been demonstrated to be real vulnerabilities, even if no one has exploited them yet. But “speculative” can mean something else. I’m not going to read all the LMK emails so maybe they’re talking about something else. But I’ve seen plenty of, “Well if X, Y, and Z happen then that could be a vulnerability.” For that kind of speculative vulnerability, one that has not been demonstrated to be a real vulnerability, I am sympathetic to Linus’ position.

Who said anything about fully validating hardware? “Hardware vendors should solve their own problems” is not the same as “hardware vendors should fully validate their products”.

I have to strongly disagree with you. I’ve used WSL 2 with VSCode, and I experienced waaaaaaaay more weird broken shit than I ever have running Linux. And even if it weren’t for that, it’s still not at all worth it IMO because using WSL 2 means every interaction I have with my development environment has to go through a Linux-to-Windows translation layer. I will never use Windows again for anything beyond testing unless I’m forced to.

How are you using it for data crunching? That’s an honest question, based on my experiences with AI I can’t imagine how I’d use them to crunch data.

So I always have to check it’s work to some degree.

That goes without saying. Every AI I’ve seen or heard of generates some level of garbage.

it’s not inconceivable it could happen in the next two generations.

I am certain that it will happen eventually. And I am not arguing that something has to be human-level intelligent to be considered intelligent. See dogs, pigs, dolphins, etc. But IMO there is a huge qualitative difference between how an LLM operates and how animal intelligence operates. I am certain we will eventually create intelligent systems but there is a massive gulf between what LLMs are capable of and abstract reasoning. And it seems extremely unlikely to me that linear algebraic models will ever achieve that type of intelligence.

Intelligence is just responding to stimuli

Bacteria respond to stimuli. Would you call them intelligent?

I don’t know, have you ever used JavaScript? I’ve run into some really fucking weird bugs. I’ve also spent hours trying to find the source of an error message only to discover the error message was lying and caused by some other error.

The point is that AI stands for “artificial intelligence” and these systems are not intelligent. You can argue that AI has come to mean something else, and that’s a reasonable argument. But LLMs are nothing but a shitload of vector data and matrix math. They are no more intelligent than an insect is intelligent. I don’t particularly care about the term “AI” but I will die on the “LLMs are not intelligent” hill.

I’m the opposite. AI is best (though not great) at boring shit I don’t want to do and sucks at the stuff I love - problem solving.

Their rules have stopped me from being able to do my job. Like the time the AV software quarantined executables as I was creating them so I literally could not run my code. When security enforcement prevents me from working, something needs to change.

It’s not clear to me that AMD is in breach of contract, though I admit I haven’t looked into it in detail. But regardless, the contract is irrelevant to the open source thing unless that was in the terms of the contract.

If I steal code and release it with an open source license, that license is not valid. The author released his work open source based on an email from AMD. AMD is now saying that email was not legally binding thus the author did not have the right to release it under and open source license thus that license was not legally valid. If you had forked it and continued to use it, AMD could take you to court and say that the license you are operating under is legally invalid.

if you work in a shared codebase then PLEASE just follow whatever convention they have decided on, for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

That goes without saying; I’m not a barbarian.

“readability” is subjective. much like how there is no objective definition of “clean code”.

Did you not see the part where I said it’s less readable “in my opinion”?

i am insisting that people use a common standard regardless of your opinion on it.

I can read this one of two ways: either you’re making an assertion about what people are currently doing, or you’re telling me/others what to do. In the first case, you’re wrong. I’ve seen many examples of self-closed <br> tags in the open source projects I’ve contributed to and/or read through. In the second case, IDGAF about your opinion. When I contribute to an existing project I’ll do what they do, but if I’m the lead engineer starting a new project I’ll do what I think is the most readable unless the team overwhelmingly opposes me, ‘standards’ be damned, your opinion be damned.

The spec says self-closing is “unnecessary and has no effect of any kind” and “should be used only with caution”. That does not constitute a specification nor a standard - it’s a recommendation. And I don’t find that compelling. I’m not going to be a prima donna. I’m not going to force my opinions on a project I’m contributing to or a team I’m working with, but if I’m the one setting the standards for a project, I’m going to choose the ones that make the most sense to me.

If a spec tells me I should do something that makes my code less readable in my opinion I am going to ignore the spec every time.

AppArmor is part of the kernel. Why does it require patches?

I’m about ready to rehome my RTX 2080 and get an AMD card so I don’t have to deal with Nvidia’s proprietary garbage or the shit-tier open source drivers.

hackthebox is essentially a puzzle solving platform where the puzzles are designed to teach you hacking. You’re not supposed to hack the platform.

Sure. But in a sane language doing something totally nonsensical like that is an error, and in a statically typed language it’s a compiler error. It doesn’t just silently do weird shit.