C++ Wage Slave

@anon_opin

Arguably, they'll be worse, because some residents and some council employees will be immigrants and racists will get their knickers in a twist about it.

@johncharleswoods

I believe my fact is still of sufficiently low quality to make the grade. 😄

@lowqualityfacts

@celesteh

I'm sorry for your loss, Charles. I hope the shiva brought you some peace and reconciliation.

You're right: what we're collectively doing to the climate is violence.

@futurebird

We just call them bosps.

@lowqualityfacts

Nah. Cartographers started flat earth theory to make maps easier to fold. Have you ever tried to wrap a sphere?

@andrew_meir

Oh, #complexity is one of the perennial tussles between Engineering and Marketing: we always want to simplify, and they want the opposite.

@steeph

Have I told you about my FiL's burglary? The thieves opened up his computer and removed the hard drive. That's all they took.

It wasn't until years later that it dawned on my why they'd done it. He used to run the mailing list for a local sailing club. That hard drive gave the criminals a list of affluent people and days when they were likely to be away from home. Of course, he ran consumer-grade #Windows and #MicrosoftWorks, so nothing was encrypted. I hate to think how much misery and loss that caused.

You can be a target without even realising it. I still don't think FiL knows to this day why he was burgled. And he still doesn't use #encryption. 😟

@millihertz

@RealGene

The problem with knowing your code is that x86 processors are opaque and dauntingly complex. I suspect they're like C++ templates, in that no one understands them completely. 😄 And we don't know who's researching them for nefarious ends. So we're left guessing how bad the risks are and how best to minimise them.

@AnachronistJohn

I don't do any of those three risky things you mentioned, but that doesn't make CPU bugs irrelevant. I believe in defence in depth. #ZeroDay bugs are a fact of life, and, thanks to LLMs, we're seeing more now than ever before. I'd prefer to give the bad guys as little to work with as possible.

I don't need persuading about the merits of #AMD: my main machine runs a twelve-core #Threadripper. 😄 When I bought the machine, AMD offered better bang for the buck than #Intel, and, yes, it does seem to have fewer vulnerabilities.

@steeph

You must be getting better results than I do! My old 2009 Core Duo machine manages about 5MB/sec with Luks enabled.

I'm old. I don't have that much time left. 😄

@millihertz

@kitten_tech

Even the #MOS6502 had bugs, so I'm certain you're right, and today's microprocessors (which have eight orders of magnitude more transistors) will always be buggy.

What bugs remain to be published, and how many of them have already been discovered and exploited by the bad guys, we can only guess.

Edit: s/five/eight

We're heading into the third heatwave of the year.

This weekend, I got Mrs Wife to take the clippers to my scalp again. My hair is now 2mm long and, side-on, looks sheer like a pair of stockings. You'd be surprised how much difference it makes on a hot day.

@kitten_tech

I don't know. A lot of the bugs on that list apply to CPUs that were several years when the bugs were found.

To make things more complex, software mitigations often hurt performance, so a given PC now gets slower over time, even before we account for code-bloat.

@millihertz

It takes a reasonably modern CPU to run #Luks at an acceptable speed. Building a system without full-disk encryption these days feels like negligence. But a machine modern enough to have fast crypto instructions will also have the unfathomable complexity that presents a huge attack surface.

It's not just #Spectre and #Meltdown — dozens of similar CPU bugs have been discovered since 2018, and they're still being found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_execution_CPU_vulnerability

The foundations of modern computing are ricketier than we like to imagine.

In the past, I've always bought a decent computer and held on to it for years and years: it saves money and it's the green thing you do. My main machine right now is seven years old and still going strong. Updating the OS and apps is no problem — I run #Linux. But #CPU bugs make me wonder whether I should replace computers more often for security reasons. I really hope not.

@ephemeromorph @fesshole

Now, you see, if I hadn't known about the sticker on Imperial Leather, I'd have been reminded of this post by Mara:

https://hachyderm.io/@Mara/116789871283205082

H/t @Mara

@mcspocky

Kellyanne Conway applies.

#AlternativeFacts

@anon_opin

But there's so much more to sex than just the act of penetration.

You're addressing men who have girlfriends but can also get it up for another man (so: bisexual men), who want anal sex and can't get it at home, and whose girlfriends are also relaxed about them sleeping with men outside the relationship. That's a pretty small constituency, wouldn't you say?