There’s a lot to be said for the scale of damage that can be done with something, especially relative to the effort needed to do that damage.

These days tech companies are doing enormous damage to people’s brains (saturating our dopamine receptors to the point that many people have depression and executive dysfunction) to turn us all into consumption machines that can only find happiness by consuming content and buying commercial products and services.

Imagine how much more harm they’ll do when they have direct access to our neurons, without even LED pixels as a buffer in between.

This is a very important concern. Tech companies already exert entirely too much power over society through smart phones and their accompanying apps. The damage they would do with direct access to your neurons is incalculable.

The only thing that comforts me is that I firmly expect that society as we know it will entirely collapse before this technology can really be capitalized. It’s not a very comforting expectation, but it somehow bothers me less than the idea of techno-fascist corporate feudal states taking control of everyone’s thoughts.

In many of those cases, the building/department security sided with DOGE and physically forced the government employees to comply. There wasn’t much they could do to resist without ending up assaulted and detained having accomplished nothing.

My biggest fear over the next few years is how many people who have chosen a career in “enforcement” are just salivating at the chance to be part of Team Nazi.

This doesn’t look anything like a humanoid robot that’s being used in a factory. This looks exactly like a humanoid robot in a research lab (probably academic), attached to a safety harness for testing purposes.

They were clearly running tests, probably trying out a firmware or software update, and they found a liiiiittle bug. This erratic behavior can easily be caused by a tiny subtle memory error in C/C++ code or by transcribing the wrong bits into the serialized joint motor commands.

Please use safe languages and verifiable methods when developing software for humanoids, folks.

Of course I agree with you, but the sad reality is that they’re getting away with this stuff so far. I think Hegseth’s time will be up when they finally need someone to do jail time for the team. Until then they’ll probably keep him around because his incompetence is strategically advantageous for their puppet master’s goal of undermining the republic.

It’s not really up to me, it’s up to the judgment of Trump and whoever pulls his strings.

But looking at historical precedent, maybe something like the Iran-Contra affair that landed Oliver North in jail while sparing Reagan from any accountability.

I guess a good rule of thumb would be whether the scandal will involve jail time.

He’s a fall guy. They’ll get rid of him once they have a big enough scandal to pin on him that he’s otherwise lost his usefulness.

Social accountability (meaning being called out on social media, being fired from a job, or being boycotted) for unapologetically spewing hate speech or sexual harassment and whatever else “wokism” is against… is not the same as inflicting violence on people. Your failure to understand the difference between accountability and violent authoritarianism says a lot about your character.

I wonder if they anti-DEIed away all the competent service members, leaving only brain-rotted skinheads running the place.

Probably the most important thing is keeping up with security fixes. I’m not an expert in web security, but my impression is that there’s a never-ending cat and mouse game between hackers and browser developers to find or patch exploits. And since browsers play such an important role in the activity of hundreds of millions… billions?.. of consumers, it has the largest possible attack surface for hackers to target.

Then there’s things like better support for web assembly (how I would love the web dev world to break the JavaScript hegemony), and the constantly shifting web standards that are meant to make websites more capable, easier to program, and more performant. E.g. things like websockets and WebRTC.

Sorry for being pedantic but the toddler with stage-4 cancer that got deported was a US citizen, not an illegal immigrant.

No no, that would hurt the feelings of the man-children that get triggered by vegans existing. They’re too sensitive, they can’t take it, it would be an act of cruelty towards animals that have no personal agency, which we all know is something vegans can’t condone.

This is exactly my point though: What if people with autism weren’t disadvantaged in society? Then the idea of “curing” it would be meaningless.

I understand that you’re frustrated by the challenges you’ve dealt with in your life, and I acknowledge that I’m speaking from a place of privilege as someone that doesn’t have any disability. But personally I’d rather see a world where people don’t feel like they’re disadvantaged for not matching the status quo than a world where everyone is equal just because everyone is the same.

To what extent are those behaviors something inherent to the neurological condition versus something exacerbated by the conditions that society places on those people?

There people who argue that transgenderism shouldn’t be tolerated because there’s a strong correlation between being transgender and being depressed to the point of suicide. They believe that “humoring” the “sickness” just leads to more suicide. But the reality is that transgender people aren’t generally depressed when they’re part of a supportive community rather than being alienated.

I’m not an expert in neurology, and I acknowledge this is a large degree of speculation on my part, but maybe these outcomes can be different if we collectively approach the matter with more understanding and empathy. If the tantrums truly can’t be helped, then create space for the tantrums to happen in a way that minimizes disruption to others and doesn’t elicit judgment.

As a manager I’ve been on the receiving end of a very aggressive tantrum directed at me from someone who reports to me that I suspect may be on the spectrum. He didn’t feel like I was paying enough attention to his work, and rather than bringing it up to me in a respectful and constructive way, he had an outburst one day where he scolded me in a very demeaning way, essentially accusing me of being negligent as his manager. I suspect a lot of people in my position would have escalated that to HR right away, but instead I took the time to listen to his grievances and acknowledge that I could have done some things better as his manager but also that he is accountable for communicating his needs to me in a timely and respectful manner. He acknowledged that he could’ve handled the situation better and we came up with a system that makes it easier to get what he needs from me.

In the end no one’s feelings needed to get hurt, no one’s career needed to be damaged, and no one needed to deal with HR, because I was willing to understand the outburst for what it is and not take it too personally.

Also it’s pretty fucked up for people to talk about “curing” neurodivergence. It’s not all that different from “curing” queerness or transgenderism. Ultimately the biggest problem with autism is a misalignment with social expectations, which leads to social disadvantages. So maybe it’s really society that needs to be “cured”. Maybe we should structure society in a way that doesn’t punish people for being different.

Why would they refer to a respectful distancing as “slamming”?

I think it’s debatable whether RAII should be called “memory management”. Whether dealing with Rust or modern C++, you don’t need to “manage” the memory beyond specifying a container that will determine its lifecycle behavior, and then you just let it drop.

You could certainly choose to manage it more granularly than that in Rust or C++, but in the vast majority of cases that would be considered bad practice.

That’s a qualitatively different user experience than C or pre-2011 boostless C++ where you actually need to explicitly delete all your heap allocations and manually keep track of which pointers are still valid. Lumping both under “memory management” makes the term so broad that it almost loses its significance.

More likely it’s so they can use their personal phone to show the conversation to their Russian bosses without needing to bypass security measures.

There are several ways to achieve an effect equivalent to operator overloading in Rust, depending on exactly how you want the overloading to work.

The most common is

fn do_something(arg: impl Into<Args>) {
    ...
}

This lets you pass in anything into the function that can be converted into the Args type. If you define the Args type yourself then you can also define any conversion that you want, and you can make any construction method you want for it. It’s a small touch more explicit than C++'s operator overloading, but I think it pays off overall because you know exactly what function implementation all different choices of arguments will be funneling into.

I’ll admit there’s one thing from C++ that I frequently wish were available in Rust: specialization. Generics in Rust aren’t exactly the same as templates in C++ but they’re close enough that the concept of specialization could apply to traits and generics. There is ongoing work to bring specialization into the language, but it’s taking a long time, and one of my projects in particular would seriously benefit from them being available.

Still, Rust will have specialization support long before C++ has caught up to even a quarter of the benefits that Rust has over it.

Even with modern C++ it’s loaded with seg fault and undefined behavior footguns.

The times when C++ feels more ergonomic than Rust are the times when you’re writing unsafe code and there’s undefined behavior lurking in there, waiting to ambush you once you’ve sent it to production. Code that is 100% guaranteed safe is always, and I really want to emphasize this: always more ergonomic to write in Rust than it is to write in C++.

Show me any case where C++ code seems more ergonomic than its Rust equivalent, and I will always be able to show you how either the C++ code has a bug hiding in it or how the Rust code can be revised with syntactic sugar to be more ergonomic than the C++.