cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 42 Posts
  • 62 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

    Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).

    The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

    I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(







  • For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.

    This is an odd thing to say given that neither Wired nor their source (“the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew”) appear to be publishing any of the actual data whatsoever, beyond the handful of mostly nonspecific references to it in the article text. (Eg, lots of sentences like “The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.” - omitting names of any of these people.)

    Also, the linked archive says:

    Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.

    Someone helpfully had already made an earlier archive before that, so we can see what information Wired journalists Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova removed at the request of a Dialog representative: where it now says “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin” it originally said “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin”.


  • As others have said it is a huge amount of work to maintain a fork of such a complicated piece of software.

    Especially around security: web browsers constantly process potentially-malicious data, which gives them a large attack surface. Every browser regularly has new vulnerabilities discovered which must be fixed. Hard forking a browser means that, even ignoring any bugs in the new code the fork has added, every time a bug is discovered and fixed in the code they forked from someone needs to analyze the upstream’s fix and port it to the fork. The more they diverge, the more work this is. Failing to do this work lets any malicious website exploit the bugs and install malware on users’ computers.



















  • FYI, the day after you published this blog post, a spam blog posted… their AI reimplementation of it 🤦

    details:

    here is a snapshot of (maybe?) the “original” slop post borrowing from your title; i first saw it reposted on this slightly-more-credible-looking (at least if you haven’t seen it in previous search results and already realized it is spam) page:

    screenshot of dev dot to spam site

    i tried to archive that page with the repost of it, to avoid directly linking to spam from this comment, but it crashes archive.org’s browser:

    archive.org screenshot showing error message saying their browser crashed

    i also was curious to see if this spam is in search engines, so i searched for AI reimplementation, and… well, the good news is that your blog post is the first hit and the above-linked spam blog is pretty far down in the results list.

    The bad news is that the second hit is to yet another piece of slop/spam evidently also “inspired” by your post:

    duckduckgo screenshot