how on earth does openssh not only have incredibly fucked versioning but is the only package i've ever seen to mention a "privilege separation" chroot path which actively breaks non-root builds. are you fucking kidding me bruh. "privilege separation chroot" defaulting to /var/empty and it immediately errors if it can't create it????? why are your version strings like that bruh?????
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oh wait i forgot they literally said "sorry we can't support openmp that's too many APIs for us to maintain. we will stick with the intel-specific threading library that actively sucks shit for this problem"
https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3/pull/457#issuecomment-4229630358
i was like "literally i want to package this software and the intel library says contact our marketing team for support"
the AMD aocl-crypto library does this very impressive thing where it has an arch/ subdir for machine-specific code and the crypto code has meaningful function names and very clearly maps to simple steps of mathematical operations
like yes obviously all of those qualities should be table stakes for a portable cryptographic library but having official support from the processor vendor is completely unbeatable
and you could argue it's smart because this means people will use your library on your competitor's machines and now they've lost the ability to neg users into hardware upgrades
like that was a huge motivation for the development of AES instructions which to my knowledge were difficult to support and had some failures in the initial intel implementation. i actually think AES instructions as a corporate strategy is much more evil than SIMD which followed them, because they're actively useless for 99.999% of code, but crypto scares users who don't understand that math is what makes them safe
@hipsterelectron why is SIMD evil?
@aeva so the primitive evil construct i assert here is price distinctions in product lines that cannot be said to derive from corresponding distinctions in:
(a) actual expense to build or get built
(b) direct or indirect expense to develop
(a) is "thicker wires that don't catch fire as option require more copper" type shit. if that leads to poor people's houses catching fire, that's when the government steps in:
- tell NIST it's time to start some fires for the record books again
- establish minimum wire thickness in building codes
- throw money at the public universities to cheat physics
(b) is because i get that nonlinear difficulty curves are extremely common, and shit just comes up sometimes. this does tend to cover forms of "intellectual property", but it also covers "every experiment costs a million dollars each". VCs do not have the patience for funding actually novel research. the meme has to be dead in the water already. if you took a risk with your own money to fund scientists, you are braver than all of the troops
@aeva if you double the price because you can coerce people through deception, monopoly or otherwise making people desperate (i.e. actively harming people without the financial means to pay for it), that's generally evil in my book.
note that deception has no moral valence in itself, nor does coercion without context (the president of the united states can be coerced to sign a peace treaty, for example).
@aeva the sound byte i once heard (attributed to stallman) was describing how software has no per-item cost to produce, which makes it different from other products. it's actually a great example of how his narrow libertarian view forced him into shallow utilitarianism and technological exceptionalism:
- cost is something that is paid
- you can extrapolate costs linearly
- software developers are not working-class
- when i am personally inconvenienced, that is strange and probably sinister
- software is the first thing that has ever had this property
@aeva i actually think x86 SIMD is pretty good. i was more worried about it maybe 2-3 years ago, when i was trying to understand whether investment in learning/experimenting with hardware-specific instructions was going to make me into a pawn of capital (LIKE WRITING RUST LMAO!!!!!) who could dictate my ability to make use of that effort
@aeva i think AES instructions are basically turboevil and processor vendors are actually not as tightly integrated with the security state as they could be. i also think the security state is absolutely incapable of ever accepting any strategy that's not just "they'll never be able to discover the backdoor" for the 800th time. mathematics is morally righteous and they have subconsciously understood that capital coercion is their only advantage, but can't say it out loud.
https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/116967776288587387
@aeva like, symmetric encryption would not have been turbofucked whatsoever. the worst case scenario requires someone very creative to design something very boring in every respect. mathematics is morally good, statistically speaking.
@aeva the way SIMD instructions COULD be evil is the way e.g. AVX512 had existed for many years but isn't on my laptop. i only checked that because the super down to earth head of the twitter cortex ML team who had phd in computational statistics back when you could still research that and get funded for doing real science. he asked me (as in, officially requested for twitter business goals) to look into avx512 specifically for the c++ compiler toolchains i was tasked with supporting for his team's work. i remember reading the wikipedia page several times and not understanding any of it
@aeva his name was pavan and he's fucking awesome and hero-coded, and he absolutely knew exactly how to make use of that shit. and twitter inc is a corporation, who would profit from that. corps can just borrow money, so "coercion" is not even misleading but even false. but even if intel/amd were able to coerce (in particular, demanding free money in return for not setting a hardware flag), i just think that's a losing strategy for any business.
like, i went to the marketplace of ideas and nobody knew you
