No, a photographer engaging in his art, or cameras catching spectators aren't examples of surveillance. Surveillance is the intentional monitoring of people, not the incidental recording of people.
Realistic calculations should include both sides. New way vs old. In this case AI assisted vs manual. Here intentionally only one side considered. Because comparison does not produce desirable result. Which makes in attention attracting BS.
How about thin C++ wrapper? The language with the same features, but more human friendly. It should be easily directly translated to C++. Preferably both ways.
There are languages like D and Carbon that attempt this. But there are too many existing large C++ code bases to not continue evolving C++ itself as well.
I didn't say replace, but complexity is the biggest barrier for newcomers. A lot of typing comparing to other languages. I use professionally since 90th, the more popular it gets the better. And complexity is the major problem, not memory management like some argue.
C++'s semantics are also broken in interesting ways: UB, implicit conversions, arrays, exceptions, exceptions from destructors, etc. Papering over them won't help all that much. It's more efficient to just swallow the bullet and switch to Rust (or maybe Zig).
Many of these inadvisable semantics are fixable in practice, they are just a default that requires additional effort to minimize or eliminate.
That aside, it isn't that easy to switch languages because C++ is more expressive in a systems context in important ways. Porting existing modern systems C++ to e.g. Rust makes this pretty obvious. (I think porting to Zig would likely be a bit easier but I've never actually tried.)
Yeah no switching a group of developers over to some new language is not more efficient. It is a lot of work. And on top of that you will need to add time to either wrap your existing code base or rewrite it with developers who are new to the language they are using. You will have folks who like that and can do it, but you will also have a lot who would have a much harder time with that. Most corporations would legitimately ask what is switching the language gaining us and is it worth it. Now the conclusion might be that it is worth it, but it is equally possible that they decide against it. Never underestimate inertia.
The thing is the luck as usually on the side of bigger battalions. Smaller teams don't have the rich and width of bigger companies. All in all we need the full spectrum from single person startup to mega corporations.
Some people like working for big companies so this is fine. It’s a shame that outside of Silicon Valley there isn’t a high density of small software companies.
That's what Amazon is doing. They simply increase the output norm and promise mass layoffs again. MS promises too, I'm not sure about details, but likely they don't cut the projects. Which means use of some sort of copilot is expected now.
The question is what happens to developers. Will they quit the industry or move to smaller companies?
What's the point? Looks like today Rust is like 3D printing was. As if it makes something better. Printing was hyped and advertised by printers sellers and manufacturers. Finally they run out of money.
As for project, it's cool if compatible with old soft. Otherwise suitable mostly for education and masochism. Long way to become practical anyway even if it gets traction.
The idea of Rust is not that it is 100% safe, but rather that it is able to encapsulate unsafety and divide the program in two parts:
- unsafe code plus modules that support it (the "trusted base")
- all the rest
Rust's promise is that there is no way to trigger any undefined behavior from bugs happening in "all the rest" of the code. If that code makes for more than 95% of the total, then that's a huge win compared to a completely unsafe language.
Also, Rust's support for inline assembly is in my opinion better than C's, it's much easier to specify and figure out the constraints on the boundary between Rust/assembly.
You can write memory safe code in any language, but having a machine i.e. the Rust compiler check it for you is less error-prone than if a human does it.
Also if you look at the repo, only 3% of the codebase is in Assembly.
IMO if >95% project is in Rust, you can definitely claim it's a Rust project.
Well, the point is to experiment with Rust no_std+no_main environment while trying to educate myself on how the things work under the hood. The project itself is part "just" a rewritten system (from C to Rust), and part an enhancement of such system furthermore. It lacks the external program execution though yet.
Russia and China totally expected, they don't help much. Except for Turkey NATO on Israel's side, not surprising. Iraq open sky used for airstrikes. Muslim 'allies' probably help refueling Israelis planes. The rest of the world doesn't care much.
After arrest of Durov in France I think the same. Doesn't change the fact that any single Russian soldier is not using WhatsApp. It's considered compromised with very convincing evidence, along with some other apps (I don't remember all the names, possible to find in military news channels if you know Russian).
There were evidence of leaks of soldiers' messages from WhatsApp.
I do not know for sure if there are leaks from Telegram, but I think that Durov was pressed for enabling backdoors for CIA when he was arrested in France.
It's not like there's a registry of compromised apps in Russia that is available to public. When there were WhatsApp leaks it was widely published on Russian news channels, that's why I know about it and tell everyone to not trust WhatsApp.
But I don't closely follow every news item from the front, I know that some other apps are also considered compromised (mainly some navigation apps), but I don't know the whole list or if Telegram is being used on the front.
I guess the safest option is to not use telephone at all at war, since there are probably backdoors everywhere starting from cell modem firmware. I guess that since about middle-end of 2022 all military personnel has the same opinion and stopped using smartphones altogether or use them in flight mode with communications disabled.
> but I think that Durov was pressed for enabling backdoors for CIA when he was arrested in France.
Durov was pressed from every side from the beginning, no doubts about this. But CIA or FSB cannot demand it legally even with secret court orders. There were news that since arrest in France he started providing some info on criminals. Not sure how far did he go. But it's good to know that Whatsup is fully cooperating with governments even when they don't have to. Putting people at risk.
As for smartphones, there are so many security holes that it's impossible to secure. Many harmless applications are calling home, pictures are geo-targeted, cell towers can request info from connected phones, every update can turn OS or app into trojan. If infected it's a perfect audio and video collection device. Put together with soldiers' IDs it shows where the unit is. Add to that CIA and alike working with weakening everyone's security and getting priority access to sensitive information.
If it is a surveillance then street photography is too. Camera pointing at spectators isn't good either...