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josefx

Re:We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:54AM (#50305729)
That was from an article covering the last public event mentioned by Wikipedia. Do you have any more recent sources?
Re:We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:45AM (#50303134)
At least some of the articles linked by that wikipedia page still listed various things like summons, divine rapier and illusions as disabled.
Re:We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:02AM (#50302767)
> They ran an event where the bots would play for 4 days straight and they won 99.4% of 42,729 matches.

Of course they also flat out disabled any mechanic their AI hadn't mastered.

Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:05PM (#50249269)
> because that's not what it is

Why not? Is it the lack of race conditions? The lack of crashes or memory leaks? Is it the fact that you came up with it in five seconds and it is still a million times better than what we have? Or is it the fact that the holy book of Posix spells out how to do it badly in C and because of that we are never allowed to replace it with something better?

Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @10:41AM (#50244566)
> and on UNIX, that’s, well, UNIX.

Let me clarify. There is no reason for std::env to be dragged down by UNIX, it could be its own, modern, safe thing with the Unix API living in std::pet_cemetary or some comparably clear namespace for people who have to pass runtime information to a C library through absolutely unsafe ways. Environment variables are usefull, the unix limitations make them less so.

Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:50AM (#50243698)
> Rust can't magically fix how Unix works.

Rust has no reason to touch the original Unix API. Take a snapshot of the values at startup and write an API around that, any runtime modification of the Unix environment is suspect anyway and anyone who wants to deal with that rotten mess can jump through half a dozen hoops.

> Rust is doing everything it can here, these APIs are labelled unsafe

Unix gave us C, clearly Rust should have just labeled every C standard library function like malloc and free unsafe and thrown up their hands instead of introducing ownership semantics and all that messy compiler logic around it. After all Rust can't fix how Unix works, so they shouldn't have tried in the first place.

Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @07:01AM (#50241845)
Except it still drags unsafe legacy APIs into the future as part of its core library. std::env for example isn't some safe take on how to deal with a system provided program environment in a modern multithreaded language, it is a thin wrapper around an ancient C POSIX API that is not threadsafe and cannot be fixed.
Re:There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability on Thursday October 22, 2026 @04:10PM (#50200336)
> Note that use-after-free would be prevented in memory-safe languages such as Java, Go or Rust.

There are also hardened malloc/free implementations for C based runtimes. Of course none of that is perfect, the famous heartbleed exploit for example bypassed any outside memory protection as the library agressively reused already allocated buffers, none of the languages you named would protect against that.

Re:Composite objects and C++26 the std:polymorphic type on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:04AM (#50177885)
> We've been doing this for 50 years

Code that turns into an unmaintainable mess the moment even one of the types involved contains dynamically allocated data? Yes, seen that thousands of times.

The article creates a type that has typesafety, resource management and basic copy/assignment operations backed in.

Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:16PM (#50062368)
> Yes, and then in the interim we invented having a hundred trillion dollars in GDP.

And every now and then we have to rescue banks that are too big too fail at the cost of everyone else, because someone dreamed up a way to increase short term profits that involves giving loans to people who will never pay them back.

> neither your car,

Praising a trillion dollar GDP, but can't afford a used car.

> from a flat earth

That in the same paragraph as Galileo is a bit self contradicting. The church was stuck on an ancient greek model of the universe and the greeks were very much aware that the world was round, they once spend a day or two measuring it.

Re:Platform-Independent SIMD in Go on Friday September 25, 2026 @12:55PM (#49847021)
From what I understand a data race on a simple built in feature like an interface pointer can result in a bad address / type pair, which can cause memory safety issues on any future access. I don't think you can get the JVM itself confused about what type a pointer points to.
> Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.

Is it usual for companies in the UK to just not pay their employees?

Re:Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker's death on Monday September 21, 2026 @12:05PM (#49789067)
> The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more?

Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".

Re:Optimizing a Spin-Lock on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @05:34AM (#49709930)
Unsuitable? Probably depends on your use case. Even a normal end user system shouldn't constantly kick your threads out unless it has enough other things to do to to keep every core busy.
Re:OpenAI begins rolling out GPT-6 Astra on Thursday September 03, 2026 @04:29PM (#49556447)
Didn't they hype up one of the earlier ChatGPT versions as "essentialy skynet"? For them this has always been basic marketing.
Re:A CVE Dispute on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @12:58PM (#49524682)
> auditor following a stupid (but well intentioned) checklist.

I once heard that the worst thing you can run into is someone who is both well intentioned and bad at their job.

Re:Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @02:54AM (#49357865)
> the former is very simple

Somehow most of my portability issues seem to be caused by glibc, its symbol versioning and close ties to the dynamic loader. Minor versions aren't compatible, no two Linux distros ship the same version and you can't just provide your own without also patching in your own dynamic loader.

At least as far as the defaults on Linux go I consider C the root of all evil.

Re:C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @02:55AM (#49165138)
Only if you use floating point in your filesystem checks, which I really hope nobody does. How do you even store 3.14 bytes.
Any project depending on Integer identity had years of warning that this change would come. Also given implicit primitive conversions and object pooling Integer isn't exaclty a prime candidate for object identity to begin with.
Re:GCC steering committee announces AI policy on Friday July 31, 2026 @03:18AM (#49120019)
It explicitly allows research, tests and third party tools. I am sure that any contributer can still find plenty of use for AI with that.
Re:OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court on Thursday July 16, 2026 @01:57AM (#48930825)
> is indeed just an American airline.

I would say there is nothing descriptive about calling something American. America doesn't even refer to a single country, does it operate out of Brazil? Would that even be relevant information to anyone using an Airline?

Re:OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @03:05PM (#48925604)
At least the GL part isn't something that has a widely understood meaning and I don't think any of the competing APIs are generally refered to as Graphics Libraries either.
How is Minecraft doing these days?
Re:Do you hate XML? (2010) on Monday July 06, 2026 @11:40PM (#48813437)
> By "through metadata", you mean with some external separate mechanism unrelated to the XML spec?

The code generating the xml text may not be aware of the final encoding used to store/transmit it and a library writing text to an encoded stream might not be aware that the text it is sending contains xml. So I would say allowing xml to be parsed using an externally specified encoding makes at least some sense.

> A document that initially looks like UTF-8 could be almost any of literally hundreds of encodings including all the common ISO 8859 encodings

Your own link shows that those "hundreds of encodings" are all based on ASCII, which is enough to get the concrete encoding from the declaration.

> and then switch to a "parsing" phase after rewinding to the start of the document.

So one call to fseek(stream, 0, SEEK_SET)?

Re:Do you hate XML? (2010) on Monday July 06, 2026 @04:41AM (#48802168)
By default XML is either UTF-8 or 16, any other encoding has to be identified either through metadata or an explicit declaration in the document itself.

If you are guessing it is because someone failed to properly store or transmit the document.

Re:EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track on Sunday July 05, 2026 @05:31PM (#48798144)
The candidates for prime minister and similar positions tend to be front and center during an election.

From what I remember the head of the european commission was picked from a group of people that weren't even up for election after the official candidates that were paraded around during an EU wide election where dismissed.

Re:Why does paper fold so well? on Monday June 15, 2026 @10:14AM (#48541616)
Folded paper has some structure, so not as much?
Re:Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe on Monday June 15, 2026 @04:50AM (#48538445)
> Netscape decided to add a programming language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this:

And the reason for that two language approach is given in the linked source:

> We aimed to provide a “glue language” for the Web designers and part time programmers who were building Web content from components such as images, plugins, and Java applets. We saw Java as the “component language” used by higher-priced programmers, where the glue programmers—the Web page designers—would assemble components and automate their interactions using [a scripting language].

Earlier sources clearly state that Java was intended as the primary language and JavaScript merely acting as glue.

Re:Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe on Monday June 15, 2026 @12:35AM (#48536641)
> Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask.

The entire browser ecosystem started out closed source. Even JavaScript was written to interact with closed source Java Applets.

> Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns

Browsers still are the goto target for contests like Pwn2own. It is almost like inviting the entire world to run untrusted code on your computer is not a great idea, no matter how many security buzzwords browser makers like to throw arround.

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