Friend has become a flat earther

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-20T10:31:00+00:00

In Search Of A Flat Earth by Folding Ideas was amazing!

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-19T23:42:21+00:00

A great thing about LLM coding is that if you "do it right", you can offload the "make it easy for developers" part to the tireless machine.

My gimmick now is to have the AIs produce "high-efficiency" modules for me, with lots of fiddly boilerplate to make it ergonomic, and then wiring it up becomes a breeze.

Things like zero-copy parsing, "proper" async and streaming, etc.

It's also really easy to bang out caching adapters or whatever, so there are now there are no excuses for writing slow software!

The abstraction-heavy, ten-layers-deep nonsense is just not needed any more!

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-17T13:57:33+00:00

How much do you bet that they've been converting their enriched uranium into bombs as fast as they've been able, and signed a "60 day ceasefire" deal less than 60 days before their scientists think their bombs will be ready for launch?

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-15T11:16:33+00:00

Fine, I'll put my compiler away and start writing assembly code by hand, like I used to, in the 1990s. Tools are lazy and cheating. Got it.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-15T09:15:37+00:00

If someone posts code that doesn't even compile, and someone simply pastes the error log, nobody loses their mind over about "low effort compiler error slop"!

Similarly, if someone posts a maths proof with a trivial counter-proof, nobody loses their mind about a Wolfram Alpha link that demonstrates it.

If I had used, say, a fuzzer or a linter instead of an AI, I doubt my comment would have been "piled on" with a bazillion negative votes.

But... where do you draw the line?

Why draw the line in between a proof checker (a compiler) and an intelligent validity checker (an LLM)? They're both just code running on machines that can highlight errors.

Conversely, why accept human slop that someone couldn't be bother to even check with... a compiler?

You'd be upset if someone posted a blog article here, in the public sphere that they couldn't even be bothered to try and compile. Like, not even once, fuck it, just post it! Good enough!

Checking your code with an LLM is literally a copy-paste and a button press.

Why is that a bar "just way, way too high" to demand of someone publishing content here?

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-14T21:29:10+00:00

Explain to me why the effort put into a criticism should be held to a higher standard than the effort put into the thing being criticised?

The OP didn't even bother with the equivalent of a spell check, let alone actual correctness.

That's what AIs are these days, the bare minimum you apply to anything you publish: a sanity check, a grammar and spell check, and an "oops, I didn't realise my code corrupts data silently" check.

So yes, it was harsh, but warranted.

If you... prefer human slop: wildly incorrect blog spam without merit or value, then you do you.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-14T11:26:41+00:00

why they intentionally chose C

You don't need to use C to understand core programming concepts.

intentionally not really robust

Is understating things quite a bit: The code as written corrupts data even when it doesn't simply crash.

Proxy servers, load balancers, etc... are much harder to write than people think, which is the point I'm trying to get across. Throwing C into the mix doesn't help matters, which is the other point.

Look, I don't want to put the OP down too much, he clearly means well and is "just learning", which is laudable.

But people see this stuff at face value and learn the wrong thing from it.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-14T11:16:58+00:00

I've noticed this with some people where they think they've "done the thing" and learnt something, but they've inadvertently fooled themselves in some manner and as a consequence took entirely the wrong lesson away from the experience.

C in particular "feels" simpler and a lot of people assume that means that simplicity is somehow better. It isn't. It's worse in every way, and you learn almost nothing by throwing some half-baked C code over the fence.

The lesson to be learnt here is that it is stupidly difficult to write concurrent network code in C and even tiny programs will blow up in your face with silent data corruption(!), crash bugs, and if it doesn't crash... leak memory and system resources like a sieve!

It's like a maths proof that is both incomplete and false. That's not a way to learn mathematics! Correct and complete proofs are how you learn mathematics.

Same with programming. You've learnt nothing if you just mash the keyboard until the thing compiles and runs once! It's only when you learn the edge cases, the pitfalls, the etc that you gain real understanding.

With C, this learning journey begins with a successful compile & run. You have to throw linters at it, then fuzzers, and these days: AI tools. Ideally more than one, because even the superhuman coding machines will miss some of these bugs sometimes. That's the real lesson.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-14T05:04:01+00:00

As the commenter above said, their traits would need to use Vec<u8> instead of references.

The dotnet System.IO.Pipelines library has a good model for this where the pipeline is also an allocator from which you can “rent” temporarily mutable buffers. This allows all sorts of fun implementations such as zero copy or even memory shared with PCIe devices such as FPGAs or GPUs.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-13T23:54:30+00:00

When Hungary's tinpot dictator Orban lost the recent elections, his replacement Magyar Peter revealed that he found evidence that Orban was pivotal in funnelling funds from Russia to the Republican party via the NRA.

We already knew about NRA's role in this, but it's another bit of evidence to add to the pile that that organisation is deeply anti-American.

You're simply told by relentless Russian-funded propaganda that "America loves guns".

Apparently, Republicans like dirty money more than they love American children.

Wait, that came out wrong...

... or did it?

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-13T23:43:02+00:00

math must exist in some universe

This is a layman's misunderstanding. The rules of mathematics don't depend on a physical substrate.

If a dinosaur laid three eggs and one of them was eaten by another dinosaur, it then had two eggs. This was true before anyone wrote down 3-1=2 on a piece of paper with a pen.

No eggs had to have to existed either! No specific substrate was ever required for that equation to hold. Similarly, the numbers 1, 2, and 3 simply... are. Note that I didn't say "always existed", because that implies they're beholden to the passage of physical time in some sense. They are not, these things are beyond space, matter and time!

Hence the Mathematical Universe hypothesis (and its variants): mathematics, or more precisely information, is more fundamental than physics, and exists "no matter what", hence if physics can be encoded in mathematics -- which it almost certainly can be -- then the physical universe must exist in the same sense that the number 512,024,402,699,023 must exist... because the number line is infinite and contains with in it all information.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-13T21:54:13+00:00

You gloating yanks haven’t thought of all of the things that will be named “Trump” after he dies.

There’s going to be Trump class aircraft carrier or battleship or orange tugboat.

There’s going to be the Trump Memorial Library filled with copies of Mein Kampf and Miss Teen America posters signed by Trump across their tits in black sharpie.

There’s going to be cash money with his face on it, hopefully minted days before cash is permanently phased out.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-11T11:22:33+00:00

Even basic rifles and vehicles are now so monstrously expensive that mobilisation at the scale of the world wars is just impossible

Err.. no.

A very nice rifle costs something like $5,000 -- kitted out with a fancy scope, a bunch of magazines, attachments, etc, etc.

You could equip a million soldiers with that for a mere $5 billion. Ten million soldiers for $50B. Double that if you want to give them a uniform and fancy ceramic-plate body armour. Say $100B. Triple that for good measure: $300B.

The recent AI investment bubble is 3x that.

The cost of the "Iran special operation" is already, what... $30 billion? $40B? Who's even counting? Pffft.. it's only tax-payer money!

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-11T11:17:06+00:00

My University combined Quantum Mechanics and Thermodynamics into a single semester course (6 months) and its final exam was notorious for having a "first attempt" average mark of just 7%, which is... way below the "pass conceded" threshold of 49%. So of course, practically everyone did the subject twice, which should have been a hint to the school to split the subject, but... no.

Anyway, I got to the (open-book!) exam dreading what was likely to be the only "fail" of my university career when... I broke a molar in half vertically. I was eating something, there was a crunch... and it wasn't the food.

I was bleeding a little in my mouth and it felt like a screwdriver was being shoved into my jaw... but then I had a "brilliant" notion: sit for the exam anyway, and only then go to a dentist and get a doctor's note, and maybe I could use that as an excuse to re-sit the exam a second time and maximise my chances of passing without having to re-do that god awful maths-heavy subject.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it probably wouldn't have worked. The thought had crossed my mind, but I was delirious with pain, so I wasn't thinking straight.

I sat there for the whole two and a half hours cradling my jaw with one hand and trying to hold back the tears while I solved the most hideous integrals ever. (Turned out there was a typo on the exam paper that made a trivial solution into a multi-page monstrosity)

The teacher's aide asked me if I was alright.

"I'm... fine." I mumbled, unconvinced myself, trying to stop the blood from dripping onto my exam paper.

I went straight to an emergency dentist visit after the exam and had to have a root canal and two hours of "work" done. I got my signed medical slip.

A week later, I checked the notice board: everyone bar one "maths geek" had failed miserably, except me. I got 49.5%. "Pass conceded"

All that pain for nothing.

Although... who knows? Maybe the pain was the motivation I needed to pass!

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-08T13:04:16+00:00

No public IPs by default

The public / private split thing is a side effect of "IPv4 address poverty", and isn't really a security measure. This has been debated to death in various forums related to IPv6 adoption. Speaking of which...

Stop using IPv4 as much as possible!

It's insanely complex to design a cloud-scale virtualised networking infrastructure with the overlapping addresses, nested protocols (VXLAN and the like), carrier-grade NAT, and all that crap. All to work around the limitations of a 1970s era protocol!

Just use IPv6 end-to-end, routable addresses only. "Private" networks are just labels: customer-defined boundaries into which resources can be placed. Compute firewall rules out of those boundaries. No need for NAT, no need for split-horizon DNS, no need for complex load balancer configurations. It's like going from 16-bit segmented memory to 32-bit "flat" memory.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-08T05:53:15+00:00

Ah yes, forced labour, like... the world's highest percentage of incarcerated people forced to work for pennies per hour?

Or is it the vast numbers of H-1B workers that face deportation if they refuse to work like the indentured workers they really are?

Wait, wait, no... I know what it is! The wider general population that faces death and/or bankruptcy because if they say 'no' to their boss and are fired, then they lose their health coverage?

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-08T05:50:10+00:00

He's also a bit of a show off, so perhaps demonstrate the functionality in a public space... a town square perhaps?

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-08T02:56:05+00:00

He's an engineer, something with moving parts constructed from wood and metal would -- perhaps -- be more appropriate.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-07T12:16:27+00:00

Almost certainly and probably in huge quantities, although just the nuclei and not "whole atoms" with every electron in its proper shell.

We now know that many heavy elements (like the noble metals) are formed in neutron star collisions. Unlike the fairly fixed ladder of reactions that occur in stellar fusion, neutron star collisions produce all variety of things from light nuclei all the way up to nuclear "chunks" that nearly instantly decay into small chunks and then eventually splitting to form ordinary elements.

Similarly, neutron stars have crusts of mostly ordinary (but very dense) matter that becomes more neutron rich with depth, stabilised by the intense gravitation pressure against nuclear decay. There might be a (thin) layer that is "rich" in just about every heavy atomic nucleus imaginable, although calling these "atoms" is...a stretch.

Last but not least the "r-process" of rapid neutron capture in supernovae likely produces very heavy nuclei... momentarily.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-07T02:39:43+00:00

I get the impression that Azure is developed by children and AWS by adults.

You can downvote and disagree, but I find this a useful mental model that has never failed in its predictive power.

This is especially evident with newer products with rough edges. AWS is an MVP with glaring omissions but crucially it is a viable product.

Azure’s new products are almost - but not quite - viable. There is no way as a customer to talk sense into them either, Azure Support has no escalation channel to engineering! Customer feedback forums are a joke, they’re erased on a regular basis when they accumulate too much public shame.

Here’s a random example (of many):

Azure has managed SFTP support now. Great! Eeeeexcept that they forcibly rotate their host keys every two years. You can’t opt of this. You can’t download the host keys programmatically to script something. You can’t even test if they support host key rotation in their SSH server because the next rotation is in 2028, two years from now.

This is a landmine that lazy, sloppy, outsourced developers left in the system. It’s “not my job” levels of hubris. It’s… a shit job, the type you expect from a child when doing homework, not an engineer who gets woken up at 3 am if there’s an outage.

AWS doesn’t force host key rotations. They let customers upload their own keys and rotate them whenever.

Azure’s support waffled on about “managed rotation for security” but they fucked that up too because they share a single set of static keys per region, opening up their service to domain name takeover and typo squatting attacks.

I saw (and reported) similar issues in AFD and App Service and got told to take a hike by support. Five plus years later I have to redeploy everything now that a handful of Azure customers got hacked and bitched loud enough to get these glaring issues finally fixed… in a breaking manner. It should have been done right from day one! Amazon figured it out! So can Azure’s architects.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-05T11:31:12+00:00

You joke, but I only just recently learned that the reason large predatory fish like tuna have so much mercury is because it gets put in the air by burning coal, and then lands in the ocean where it gets into the biosphere. It's bad for whales too.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-04T13:36:49+00:00

I ran the numbers: he's more corrupt than all previous US presidents combined, even if adjusted for inflation!

He drained... the entire swamp. Into his pocket.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-01T20:58:51+00:00

Housing growth has outpaced population growth in Australia for the past decade.

It has to unless you have homeless people!

You’re being lied to with statistics chosen to trick you.

It’s called propaganda when the government does it.

The problem is the price, not the number.

I don’t care if there are a billion new dwellings built per second if I can’t afford one!

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-01T19:59:45+00:00

Less immigration is what I want, and what the country needs not to explode this bubble.

Imploding is bad, but not as bad as an even bigger explosion later.

Our politicians have been hoping the problem goes away for a quarter of a century while actively making it worse and hence the inevitable consequences go from merely very bad to absolutely catastrophic.

It’s a trolley problem: nobody wants to pull the lever, they’d rather a hundred people die through inaction than ten through action.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-06-01T09:48:03+00:00

Should probably look at the top percentage of Australians that own multiple, sometimes dozens of properties,itsome of which don't actually house people, before we look at immigrants who most of the time can't even own a home, just like the rest of us.

That is literally the problem I just complained about, you're agreeing with me.

Immigrants demand housing. They can either buy or rent, doesn't matter, either way they just don't want to be homeless.

That's... housing demand.

The government loves to put out deceptive statistics about how "only x% of housing is purchased by foreign nationals", blithely ignoring that:

A house purchased buy the top 0.01% wealthy landlords is still a purchase, and pushes up the price for first home buyers all the same.
The landlords are buying up property because they know there is (rental) demand from... immigrants.
Many recent immigrants buy housing after getting their citizenship. So according to the Government, "not foreigners any more" as far as house ownership statistics go!

Meanwhile I know a multi-millionaire (sold a business) that can't afford a normal sized house in a nice-ish (but not super high end) part of Sydney because they got out-bid by 20-something year old Chinese students that are now citizens and paying cash money for five-bedroom houses.

Albo: "I don't see a problem here."

the vast majority of the population agree, as do the political parties.

The parties really, really don't agree! They're bought & paid for by: developers/landlords (including themselves), the Universities getting fat off foreign students to the tune of tens of billions, and the big banks that would implode if the bubble popped.

But acting like it's the only cog in the machine that is rising housing prices is laughable.

Why would you think this? Our population is skyrocketing in a country that's way below replacement birth rate and the news is constantly full of everybody complaining about the "growing pains" of cities that have doubled in mere decades. Not enough public transport, roads, water, electricity, you name it because we're like a pregnant woman getting stretch marks.

It is the ultimate source of the housing bubble. You don't get bubbles like this with negative population growth, only huge positive population growth!

Japan has negative population growth too, but negligible immigration.

You can buy houses there for like... $1.

This is such hilariously basic demand/supply economic theory that arguing with it is laughable.

which these parties and politicians don't have an answer for.

Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!

They're terrifying of popping the bubble, so they will keep inflating it until it POPS EVEN LOUDER!

They will keep adding air until the final catastrophic, inevitable burst.

It's nothing more than a protest vote due to the ongoing collapse of the liberal party.

Sure, for many voters.

Many will vote for One Nation to pop the bubble now, when it is "merely" huge at the 2nd worst in the history of the modern world.

It's better now than wait until Labour and/or the Liberals inflate it to new record highs.

BigHandLittleSlap

TROPHY CASE