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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I explained a little about buffer overflows, but in essence programming is the act of making a fancy list of commands for your computer to run one after the other.

    One concept in programming is an “array” or list of things, sometimes in languages like C the developer is responsible for keeping track of how many items are in a list. When that program accepts info from other programs (like a chat message, video call, website to render, etx) in the form of an array sometimes the sender can send more info than the developer expected to receive.

    When that extra info is received it can actually modify the fancy list of commands in such a way that the data itself is run directly on the computer instead of what the developer originally intended.

    Bad guy sends too much data, at the end of the data are secret instructions to install a new program that watches every key you type on your keyboard and send that info to the bad guy.


  • There is a ton of literature out there, but in a few words:

    Rust is built from the ground up with the intention of being safe, and fast. There are a bunch of things you can do when programming that are technically fine but often cause errors. Rust builds on decades of understanding of best practices and forces the developer to follow them. It can be frustrating at first but being forced to use best practices is actually a huge boon to the whole community.

    C is a language that lets the developer do whatever the heck they want as long as it’s technically possible. “Dereferencing pointer 0?” No problem boss. C is fast but there are many many pitfalls and mildly incorrect code can cause significant problems, buffer overflows for example can open your system to bad actors sending information packets to the program and cause your computer to do whatever the bad actor wants. You can technically write code with that problem in both c and rust, but rust has guardrails that keep you out of trouble.




  • I think Harris is trying to capture a group of Americans that hardlines on immigration, unfortunately some of what she’ll concede on during this election cycle will likely alienate progressives in favor of tempting the opposition. It’s strategically valuable because progressives will still vote for her, but maybe a few conservative voters will be swayed.

    Imo it’s more important to pay attention to how she’s voted, how she acts, and whether she will change her mind when presented with important information. In that way she’s by far our most trustworthy candidate even on issues like this one.








  • No, I live here.

    I hate

    • religious zealotry
    • massive dichotomy in polotical ideologies
    • identity politics
    • warmongering
    • brainwashing (pledge of allegiance?!)
    • poor treatment of poor and homeless
    • prison complex
    • poor education system
    • incredibly expensive healthcare
    • terrible zoning laws and car centricity
    • hiroshima, native genocide, iraq, and so many more. The US has shed so much blood and terror inflicted on the world population
    • world police, vigilante, the US is basically every bad movie villian in country form
    • regressing views on women’s rights
    • the history of slavery