Monthly Archives: September 2023

Article note: ...No shit. Make employers pay for their exernalities. Tax carbon footprints. Refuse to discuss your compensation without including commute time and cost. Zone to discourage car-required lifestyles. There _is_ a lot of work that needs to be done on location, but the vast majority of office work is not that.

Article note: Motherfucker wrote a bare-metal kernel for Cortex-M3/M4 (and now M0) class parts, an ARM-on-Thumb JIT, and all the support infrastructure to host PalmOS5 on modern Cortex-M micocontrollers. Holy shit.

Article note: Interesting. Also weird that it went unreported for so long. I can't quite tell what the exploit is from the provided context. Was it algorithm substitution with a backdoored version that will interoperate with the real one? Was it a bad RNG (see: Dual_EC_DRBG)? As someone in the HN pointed out, one of the big markets for this stuff is HSMs (Hardware Security Modules: think co-processors that do the "security stuff" for a larger system) in hosted environments like clouds. Last I looked Cavium->Marvell's CloudHSM product was pretty big in the "It's totally secure to do your work on our computer" market.

Article note: It's such a "We got caught intentionally doing something wildly unacceptable to our captive customer base, please put down the torches and pitchforks and keep investing in our ecosystem, so we can go back to abusing you later." It's also _the_ classic fast route to tech companies turning awful: they merged with an adtech company.

Enlarge / Unity says it will be announcing changes to its recently revealed fee structure in the coming days. (credit: Unity)

After nearly a week of protracted developer anger over a newly announced runtime fee of up to $0.20 per game install, Unity says it will be "making changes" to that policy and will share a further update "in a couple of days."

In a late Sunday social media post, Unity offered apologies for the "confusion and angst" caused by the sudden announcement of the policy last Tuesday. "We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy," the post reads. "Thank you for your honest and critical feedback."

It's currently unclear whether those changes will amount to tinkering around the edges of the fee structure as currently planned or represent a more complete rollback of the idea of charging install fees in the first place. But even a full about-face might not be enough to satisfy some longtime Unity developers at this point.

Article note: It sounds like they're using the LLM trained on assembly not to optimize the assembly, but to select and order passes in LLVM to optimize the assembly. ...And it still regularly produces code with different semantics than the input. And optimization was measured by number of instructions, not runtime on a target. Nifty, but one of those hype>>reality things, like everything around LLMs.

Article note: End-user programming has been a hard problem for as long as accessible computers have existed. There is generally a lack of respect for spreadsheets as the people's programming tool when folks go to write about the idea. They're old and unglamorous and often used outside the target domain...but it's also probably the most common and accessible. In general, I think the environments that closely tie the usual interaction mode and the automation have the best shot, so the same reasoning and primitives continue to work, but they always make somewhat awkward programming languages. ...and, I suspect, there is the issue a rather small portion of the population have developed the necessary procedural thinking, and most of the ones that have will use a srs bsns programming language.

Article note: Fuck those rent-seeking middlemen, libgen has done more for human knowledge in the last 15 years that the whole rent-seeking textbook publishing industry.

Enlarge (credit: Maryna Terletska | Moment)

Yesterday, some of the biggest textbook publishers sued Library Genesis, an illegal shadow library that publishers accused of "extensive violations of federal copyright law."

Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is "one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world" and intentionally violate copyright laws with "absolutely no legal justification for what they do."

According to publishers, Libgen offers free downloads for over 20,000 books that the publishers never authorized Libgen to distribute. They claimed that Libgen is "a massive piracy effort" and noted that their complaint may be updated if more infringed works are found. This vast infringement is causing publishers and authors serious financial and creative harm, publishers alleged.

Article note: This is my favorite kind of history piece. ...And I'm still bewildered by the persistence of one of a series of throwaway addons to make ed less nasty and arcane, whose awkward design only makes sense in the context of painfully slow connections and particularly shitty early glass terminals.

Article note: Very cool. That's a support window that actually corresponds to the rate of hardware changes, and makes sense for the kind of institutional and/or nontechnical customers the ChromeOS ecosystem targets. They even backdated a number of models into the new windows.

Article note: No surprises here, it's long been suspected that Phenylephrine was basically a placebo which was pushed on to the market because (politically) there needed to be an alternative to Pseudoephedrine, so that could be restricted/tracked/made inconvenient over concerns of it being used as an easy Methamphetamine precursor. Now we find out what the FDA will do now that it has been firmly established that was wishful thinking and/or a lie.