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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • metiulekm@sh.itjust.workstoProgramming@programming.dev...
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    7 months ago

    I really need to try out Mercury one day. When we did a project in Prolog at uni, it felt cool, but also incredibly dynamic in a bad way. There were a few times when we misspelled some clause, which normally would be an error, but in our case it just meant falsehood. We then spent waaay to much time searching for these. I can’t help but think that Mercury would be as fun as Prolog, but less annoying.

    I actually use from time to time the Bower email client, which is written in Mercury.


  • My understanding is that all issues are patched in the mentioned releases, the config flag is not needed for that.

    The config flag has been added because supporting clients with different endianness is undertested and most people will never use it. So if it is going to generate vulnerabilities, it makes sense to be able to disable it easily, and to disable it by default on next major release. Indeed XWayland had it disabled by default already, so only the fourth issue (ProcRenderAddGlyphs) is relevant there if that default is not changed.






  • In Poland:

    • driver’s permits are not a thing. In general, it’s illegal to drive without a professional instructor (with parents, for example) before getting a driving license, though a lot of people, especially in the countryside, will still do so,
    • you can only drive after turning 18. You can start the course a few months earlier, but you can only take the final exam after you turn 18 (there exists a category that allows you to drive after turning 16, but it’s limited and IME extremely unpopular),
    • you need to go to a paid course, which includes theory classes and at least 30 hours of driving with the instructor,
    • most people drive in a car owned by the instructor or the driving school, as the car must have another pair of brakes for the instructor,
    • you need to pass a theoretical and a practical exam in one of the centers (Wojewódzki ośrodek ruchu drogowego),
    • the theoretical exam is just closed questions. You need to get 68 out of 74 points, but (AFAIK, this has changed over time) all the questions are known, so people will just cram them,
    • the practical exam is first some maneuvers on the center grounds, and then a ride around the city. The exam is rather objective and is failed if you do any big mistake or fail any exercise twice,
    • the exams are not easy. The data I found is for each WORD, but in general I feel like the pass rate is around 50% for the practical exam and 70% for theory. It’s not incommon for somebody to only pass their practical exam on like 5th attempt,
    • there were supposed to be some restrictions for new drivers, but they had been discussed for a long time, even back when I passed my license before the pandemic, and I have no idea if they ever actually came into force,
    • some people think that the system is super flawed. Here’s some discussion by the Supreme Audit Office in Polish: https://www.nik.gov.pl/aktualnosci/system-szkolenia-kandydatow-na-kierowcow.html,
    • costwise, it’s apparently like 4000 zł for the course right now. Exams are paid per attempt, 50 zł for the theory and 200 zł for practice. 1 euro is 4.33 zł as of writing, but you need to take into account the difference in purchasing power and it’s probably not much cheaper than Germany even if you pass both exams the first time.


  • As a data point, I have a Green Cell battery in my X220. I have bought the battery on July 24, 2022 and I have been using my X220 regularly but lightly. The battery was marketed as 6600 mAh at 10.8 V. As of writing, the OS reports design capacity of 73.26 Wh and current capacity of 60.6 Wh:

    POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=BAT0
    POWER_SUPPLY_TYPE=Battery
    POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Discharging
    POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1
    POWER_SUPPLY_TECHNOLOGY=Li-ion
    POWER_SUPPLY_CYCLE_COUNT=0
    POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_MIN_DESIGN=11100000
    POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_NOW=11783000
    POWER_SUPPLY_POWER_NOW=28726000
    POWER_SUPPLY_ENERGY_FULL_DESIGN=73260000
    POWER_SUPPLY_ENERGY_FULL=60600000
    POWER_SUPPLY_ENERGY_NOW=54960000
    POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=90
    POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY_LEVEL=Normal
    POWER_SUPPLY_MODEL_NAME=45N1023
    POWER_SUPPLY_MANUFACTURER=SANYO
    POWER_SUPPLY_SERIAL_NUMBER= 9001
    


  • Edit: Actually, I thought about it, and I don’t think clang’s behavior is wrong in the examples he cites. Basically, you’re using an uninitialized variable, and choosing to use compiler settings which make that legal, and the compiler is saying “Okay, you didn’t give me a value for this variable, so I’m just going to pick one that’s convenient for me and do my optimizations according to the value I picked.” Is that the best thing for it to do? Maybe not; it certainly violates the principle of least surprise. But, it’s hard for me to say it’s the compiler’s fault that you constructed a program that does something surprising when uninitialized variables you’re using happen to have certain values.

    You got it correct in this edit. But the important part is that gcc will also do this, and they both are kinda expected to do so. The article cites some standard committee discussions: somebody suggested ensuring that signed integer overflow in C++20 will not UB, and the committee decided against it. Also, somebody suggested not allowing to optimize out the infinite loops like 13 years ago, and then the committee decided that it should be allowed. Therefore, these optimisations are clearly seen as features.

    And these are not theoretical issues by any means, there has been this vulnerability in the kernel for instance: https://lwn.net/Articles/342330/ which happened because the compiler just removed a null pointer check.



  • You could make an argument that not using banking apps decreases your security, since most banks use either SMS or those apps as the second factor while confirming the operations. It is true that the apps are of varying quality, but SMS is not really a serious alternative. Some banks do have apps that are limited to confirming operations, and one bank where I live did recently start accepting U2F, which is amazing news.