I'm about as into formal methods as you can get, with a deep background in Haskell and such. Rust is wonderful and all that, but sometimes I think the optimism is misplaced and doesn't come from a place of full knowledge. Statements like this make me scared:
> The geometry engine is manifold, which guarantees watertight meshes from boolean operations. The Rust bindings give us zero-cost abstractions over the C++ core — the operator overloads compile down to direct manifold calls. No garbage collection pauses. No floating point surprises from a scripting layer.
Floating point is incredibly surprising. People seem to believe that a typed programming language eliminates floating point error. Scripting and interpretability has nothing to do with why floating point is hard. Floating point arithmetic is as deterministic in Python as C++ or Rust. The issue is whether people understand the rules. The type system has nothing to do with this, as floating point errors are almost always value errors, not type errors. The only way to avoid floating point errors using formal methods is an actual theorem prover. Rust is nowhere close to being a theorem prover.
It is difficult to take anyone worried about the US seriously when their solution to protect themselves is to move to Canada.
Not saying anyone's right or wrong but the idea that, should America go psycho, Canada would somehow be okay is a pipe dream. Canada is essentially an outpost of the United States. Yes, I have Canadian family (even old stock "Loyalist" Canadian family) and they all feel the same way.
People need to be real.
If you actually want to be able to declare independence from America you'd need citizenship in a country with actual nuclear capability. France, the UK, China, etc
It's a step improvement: It gets you over the border to a comparable place while being close enough to family for now. The risk of "borders are secure now, nobody gets to leave" is non-zero in the US' future. The way political litmus tests are affecting civil rights here is scary as hell too.
On the military angle, I'd much rather live in a country without nukes. But I'm willing to kick the nuclear blackmail risk can down the road, my own government's threats are way more immediate.
> On the military angle, I'd much rather live in a country without nukes.
That's because the majority of the typical American with these views is extremely privileged and has never actually had to live in a country without nukes. Ukraine is the future of countries without nukes -- forced to choose between great powers or made into buffer zones without any prospects. It's all so tiresome really.
If everyone who wanted to move to Canada actually moved to Canada, Canada would be filled to the brim. It's like the modern day Shangri-la. A mythical land.. far far away.
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
I mean the simple answer here is to just develop proper frameworks for Futamura projections. There's an exact one to one algorithmic correspondence between an interpreted program and the compiled version of that. GraalVM and PyPy are good options here.
Using an LLM is overkill especially when correctness can never be guaranteed by systems who must sample from a probability distribution.
There are hundreds of elderly people in prison right now in the UK charged with supporting terrorism because they opposed a racism inspired nazi-style genocide. Greta was among them.
0 have ever threatened or supported any kind of violence against any person ever.
Social media posts on this topic are treated the same way as holding up a poster in public.
Why does that always need to be told like it's an either or thing? Why can't the stance that the Hamas are a terrorist organization, that is ultimately also screwing the local population and that Israel is committing war crimes, be accepted by "internet posters". I would say that is the position, that a lot of governments and people have.
Not one of those people expressed sympathy for Hamas. They were imprisoned exclusively for protesting racism inspired genocide that mirrors the holocaust.
They supported a group that spray painted some planes. That was the extent of the "terrorism".
Most of the people who think they deserve to be in prison are racists.
In my opinion, that's kind of the other side of the coin. For one side, anything that criticizes Hamas is a Genocide sympathizer. For the other side any criticism on Israel is terrorism. Both sides are extreme and problematic.
Some people did (and still do) say "sure, hitler was bad but something had to be done about the jews" thinking that this is somehow a moderate position.
Im more of the opinion that you are either anti genocide or you are a racist/racist sympathizer. There isnt a moderate middle ground.
If you had enough money such that reversing fraud would become a huge hindrance for your bank, you probably cannot initiate any major monetary moves without the involvement of a real person, likely one you actually know. Online banking is for amounts which the bank will just compensate you for should something happen; just a cost of doing business.
It's of course possible. In fact electronic voting could be safer. The issue is that voting has nothing to do with technical details of safety and everything to do with trust. If your electorate doesn't understand modular arithmetic, then there's no point to electronic voting.
I volunteered at Fairview development center in Costa Mesa CA, which is a place where dozens of disabled residents lived. These people could not talk, move, etc. They were essentially quadriplegics; mentally completely not there; etc. I was a high school student helping move residents to Sunday service and back and doing activities with them (volunteer hours). I clearly remember seeing nurses and others mark ballots of residents that were in no fit state to vote (unable to communicate at all; those who could were often not mentally competent enough to make their own medical decisions, let alone decide who to vote for). I don't think anyone cares to be totally honest. I was shocked the residents even got absentee ballots. Of course, competent adults should be able to vote, but at the point where you're essentially a child mentally? I mean ... how can anyone possibly figure it out. I did lodge a complaint, but nothing came of it.
> The geometry engine is manifold, which guarantees watertight meshes from boolean operations. The Rust bindings give us zero-cost abstractions over the C++ core — the operator overloads compile down to direct manifold calls. No garbage collection pauses. No floating point surprises from a scripting layer.
Floating point is incredibly surprising. People seem to believe that a typed programming language eliminates floating point error. Scripting and interpretability has nothing to do with why floating point is hard. Floating point arithmetic is as deterministic in Python as C++ or Rust. The issue is whether people understand the rules. The type system has nothing to do with this, as floating point errors are almost always value errors, not type errors. The only way to avoid floating point errors using formal methods is an actual theorem prover. Rust is nowhere close to being a theorem prover.
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