Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@smurthys Nowadays, for loop, but (if at all possible) start with the `for (auto& x : collection)` form and teach the `for (base case, check case, increment step)` form as a special case. Get people in the mindset that the first one is preferable if available, and the other is usable when needed.

#cplusplus

"Oh no... that value changed unexpectedly. That's probably... A memory leak. I'm gonna have to recompile with... *gulp*... The address sanitizer."

*intense grinding noises*

@lauren "Lots of Farqaad" is what I've heard through the grapevine.

@adrianhon You know, I've never actually asked ChatGPT to write a Hacker News comment response before.

... it's not bad at the job.

Sure, here's a possible response to the article you mentioned:
---
It's not surprising to see Facebook getting into hot water over privacy issues again. The fact that they broke their own terms and had to pay a $5 billion settlement just shows how little they care about their users' data.

What's even more concerning is that this kind of behavior seems to be almost routine for Facebook. They've been repeatedly caught mishandling user data and facing consequences, yet they continue to operate with minimal accountability.

It's high time for regulators to take a harder stance on companies like Facebook, who put profits before their users' privacy. Let's hope that this settlement serves as a wake-up call for Facebook and other tech giants to start taking their users' privacy more seriously.

@ids1024 @rauschma That's hard to quantify, but I think it's a really good way to think about it and definitely worth putting in my slide deck. "I'd rather have the compiler panic than have the compiler generate code that just wilds into unallocated memory."

@jonahstein That's the best I can think of too. The issue is that I imagine a grim email-like future where the average case has become so untrustworthy that new instances start with a score of 0 and to be federated to, like, fosstodon.org or mastodon.social, you need a score of 2.0 or something. Experiments like this have a tendency to either fizzle out or become so big that they are targeted by malicious actors and have to bifurcate into "The world that regular people use" and "The busted, spam-filled, scam-filled world that the original protocol describes."

Perhaps this future is unavoidable and the right solution is to get in on the ground floor with one's own instance *now* if one wants to be part of the future trusted federated network.

@rauschma Sorry to hear it. I've been keeping an eye on Rust as a possible replacement for C++ in some tasks I'm responsible for, but "Sometimes the compiler just panics" is going to be a real hard sell to my teammates.

Open #Fediverse though / question.

On a thread about someone being brigaded here (and being able to use the tools available to shut out the bad actors and several of their servers, working as intended), it was mentioned by someone that it's relatively straightforward for bad actors who've had their servers banned to create new servers and start again.

To my knowledge, there is nothing really blocking that scenario. What are the options? Because the risk is that if it's as easy to set up a bad actor in Fedi as it is in, say, the email server ecosystem, then the long-term trend of this experiment is we end up where we are with email: a few big players with a heavy first-mover advantage because new nodes are assumed default-hostile, and it becomes nearly impossible to set up one's own independent node and have one's messages seen by people on the established servers.

@rauschma Uh-oh. I'm curious the context on this one.

#JavaScript is hard because it's the language of web browsers.

#Cplusplus is hard because it's the web browser of languages.

There's a lot about how #cplusplus (the language) behaves that boils down to C++ (the implementations). In other words, "Look, the most popular compilers are implemented in phases, this thing is resolved in phase 1, and you have to be explicit here even though the language allows you to be implicit elsewhere because in phase 1 it hasn't built the lookup tables to guess what that symbol means, so you are forced to tell it."

... this is only one step away from "It is that way because it is that way" which is, I think, one of the reasons the language is so slippery in my brain.

@3psboyd Unless the context was "In the middle of a cloudless summer day, for hours, shirtless, with no sunscreen on," there is no scenario I can imagine where "It's not how white men fight" wasn't framed in some *buuuulllllshit.*

#Gmail just needs a big "DECLARE BANKRUPTCY" button that archives all non-starred unopened emails older than 1 day.

@hatter @tante I don't think those metrics are either necessary nor sufficient, unfortunately. Gasoline is popular and people are willing to pay for it, and its common use might exterminate the biosphere. Search engines are popular and people are unwilling to pay for them, and they've become one of the most transformative tools of the information age; hardly a "Torment Nexus" kind of thing.

@lauren Details from the blog post at https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-password/ are a little thin on the ground; I'm going to have to seek out an implementation explanation.

I think my biggest question is "If Google, being a private company and not beholden to government oversight regarding its account use policies, arbitrarily decides one day that I've violated their ever-changing terms of service and deactivates my account, am I now screwed vis-a-vis every single company I only have a passkey-based login with?"

Because that alone should give pause.

@arstechnica What "policy?" Twitter isn't a public company anymore; it's one rich man's playground and he pays people to maintain it for him.

@tante I think the problem is it can be real hard to see which ones are gonna be the Torment Nexus before it's built.

Fire burns and cooks food.

@seachanger Interestingly, editing posts is one of those per-instance features. The instance I'm on allows delete-and-re-draft but doesn't allow modification.

@jsrailton It's his privately-owned forum to do with as he pleases.

At this point, Musk is. known quantity. The interesting question now is "Why do people want to interact in that space instead of the myriad other options available to them?" Because it's a *big* Internet and nobody *has* to keep showing up at the bully's house to hang out.