Fair!

So for sure, everything you said is correct. One compiler, the push to rewrite software (This one I do 100% agree with, I do write Rust, but for greenfield stuff, it’s not really useful to rewrite working, stable, secure software, in Rust). Security work isn’t mutually exclusive, and what agencies do elsewhere doesn’t represent what it doe here.

I guess my best argument here is that I don’t think Lunduke cares about what he claims, I think he’s a right wing propagandist that looks for any reason, no matter how small, to push controversy and pull people to his blog to make money.

So yeah, you’re right, security wise it’s not a nothing burger, and is suspicious. Though I will still say that even though the Rust evangelists have rightfully been told to back off a bit, there’s lots of companies that have decided to rewrite a lot in Rust.

About this issue:

The self-replicating back door is a… real stretch of an argument. This is the kind of things that governments and billion dollar corporations think about. It’s (one of) the reasons the Apple has maintained it’s own programming languages. Big tech agencies often house their own compilers and make their developers use it (even if it’s just a copy of the open source ones) to ensure that if a compiler is compromised, they can continue working on it under their own direction. Also, if Germany could get a self-replicating compiler vulnerability in a compiler, it would hit much harder and further to just attack GCC, which is the main compiler for 90% of c code, which is 90% of the infrastructure of software (Yes, many of those language libraries you use, use C underneath, or at least, their compiler is written in C).

Furthermore, this is a problem for any language that only has one compiler, and a second implementation of rust has been in the works for gcc for awhile (gccrs I believe). Also, there’s many many places where there’s a push to move C code to Rust to increase security, this isn’t ‘wierd’.

There are so many other problems to consider before going down this route. supply chain attacks, trust verification, code signing, all these come in play way before this. Plus it’s not like Germany owns rust, they can’t necessarily inject a compiler issue into rust the way Lunduke argues.

The real issue is that most security vulnerabilities are caused by things Rust seeks to fix, use-after-free and double-free causing crashes that can be taken advantage off by a clever malware writer. Writing in Rust is (a slow and somewhat painful way of) making software more secure, not less.

About the agency

Additional note, this govt agency (and I’m no fan of Germany’s govt necessarily, but just to note) has given millions to many open source projects. Let’s encrypt, pypi, yocto, the openprinting stack, activitypub (you know, from the fediverse, how this platform runs…). They’ve also recommended languages other than Rust for projects too.

About Lunduke

He’s a racist transphobe maga hat wearing techie (keeps the hat hidden, also don’t know if he’s actually a fan of trump, but he’s an alt-right conspiracy theorist). I’m “passionate” about talking about him because I followed him for a number of years, now kinda regrettably (we all make mistakes, it’s best to learn and move on, but still, this one hurt, I was a big fan for awhile).

He used to live in Portland, Oregon, and during the pandemic, he moved away because the city had become something that he “didn’t like”. That was when the city started to show its real anti-fascist and anti-Trump sentiments. That was also when the whole anti-police movement happened in Portland and Seattle.

I became suspicious of him after that, and then he basically said that he didn’t want to talk in public about the things he actually wanted to talk about, but that you could pay him money to subscribe to his journal and he would actually discuss those topics. He then left YouTube on his other channel and, I think, left the Lunduk Journal channel, but later came back for a video once in awhile.

I found some of his writings that were public and non-paid, and he talked about anti-trans topics, gender-neutral bathrooms, and things like that. He has a big enough base that he can pretty much single-handedly create controversy. Although he’s a big Linux fan, he’s a massive critic of all the diversity, equity, and inclusiveness that the field tends to promote.

He really fuels the conspiracy that “the left” is the worst part of technology. He wants to make technology seem like a right-wing thing. He’s been denouncing the fall of Linux for a while now, mostly because he thinks the developers of Linux are too woke.

Yeah, not everything he says is necessarily garbage, but he’s a maga hat wearing techie who keeps the maga part under wraps because of the “woke police”. He has a written blog that’s more public, and talks anti-trans and whatnot.

He’s convinced all govt is bad, but not for the reasons us commies do :P

Rule of thumb is that if he’s complaining of something, it’s probably some alt-right nazi shit underneath (But a broken clock is right twice a day soooooo)

There’s a difference between “some people try to commit fraud” and “China is inflating its numbers to look innovative when it’s actually not”.

Of course some people commit fraud. Of course, some people actually do try to take government money and run with it.

The former is basically true in every single country no matter where you look. The latter is actually the conspiracy theory that China isn’t innovative because “1.4 million patents are all universally bullshit” or something to that extent.

That’s my 2c

Keep in mind these are conspiracy theories. Literally. 1.4 million patent applications? How many people have to be “in” on it before someone speaks about the lie? At some point the lack of evidence is damning. This can’t possibly be true without clear and obvious evidence.

Sent! Good luck!

Though I’m not in electronics, I am in software development, and I have tried using various language models for basic circuit development for very small side hobbies, and I have found it to be mixed at best.

It works better when it’s integrated into a search engine so that it has real humans explaining things so that they can just do the summary and not build something from scratch.

Efficiency problems aside (hopefully R1 keeps us focused on increasing efficiency while still being useful), I find it super useful when you set a pattern and let it fill it out for you.

On a side project, I built out 10 or 15 structs and then implemented one of them in a particular pattern and I just asked it to finish off the rest. I did like 10% of the work, but because I set the pattern, it finished everything else flawlessly.

“It is difficult and time-consuming to do the work to lie about China all the time.”

Fixed that for you Beth!

Didn’t I put this in freechat? It was a rant. You can stop gatekeeping now.

I absolutely love this guy because he’s actually not pro-China for the most part (that I know of). He just understands that they’re beating America at their own game.

Sometimes he’ll say something, and I think to myself, Dammit, don’t tell them! Stop interrupting my enemies when they’re making a mistake!

For the military, I’m sure this is a cost-cutting measure. I’m guessing they get to fire some people And make the rest of them work double time, but with AI assisting them.

For the working people, it’s another argument that you can point to to get people radicalized :D

Yeah they all do that to each other. Pretty standard practice actually.

The big deal is the low cost, and using weak GPUs, to train a comparable AI.

Trumps gonna be Trump though. Embarassing to live here.

Yeah, unfortunately we’ve known that for a while.

There were actually some Google employees that protested this, and they’ve all been fired, of course.

Exactly. The people who spout “apolitical” all the time are just a part of the global elite.

It’s the rich that will tell the poor to stop being political and go find a job.

It’s the white people who will tell the black people to just stop doing crime instead of getting political.

It’s always your boss that says to keep politics out of the office, just show up on time and do your job.

The oppressor always tell the oppressed to stop getting political. Because getting “political” is the only way that you could potentially stop the oppression.

Bro, just one more compromise with the fascists, bro. Bro, if we just compromise one more time, everything will be fine!

A note about those queues.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between policy and material conditions. The USSR wouldn’t have had queues (or very long queues) if they were a rich country like the United States. Any socialist country that is rich would have plenty of materials that nobody would ever have to wait in line (at least not a long line, no longer than in current day USA)

Of course, under socialism, certain excesses would be limited, but at the same time, if your country literally already had what it needed because of the overcapacity built by capitalism, then under socialism, basically all needs would be met very easily.

I need to do some more reading by other people on this topic because I’m no expert, but it makes sense to me.

Libs are worried about it, reference: https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/deepseek-crushes-openai-o1-with-an-mit-licensed-model-developers-are-losing-it/

So my experience right now with using & reading about AI and the opinions and feelings from people about the AI is that China is still a little bit behind, but catching up so insanely fast that everybody should just agree that they’re already ahead of the United States and that the race is on. (Oh and they’re running on last year’s hardware because they’re banned from getting the latest Nvidia chips, so they’re actually training better AI, with weaker processors, and less data. Though they are probably leveraging ChatGPT for some data generation, which is what most people who build open models do anyway.)

Eric Schmidt was a previous CEO of Google, and still a board member. 9 Months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cnce06/eric_schmidt_says_the_us_is_23_years_ahead_of/ Last month: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5042031-artificial-intelligence-danger-eric-schmidt/

Eric is about as libed up as you can get (Co-wrote a book with Henry Kissinger…) So if he admits that China has caught up and will surpass us, it’s because the evidence is OVERWHELMING. This would be the equivalent of orthodox Jews admitting that Israel is committing a genocide. If THEY are saying it, it’s been true for a LOOONG time and is undeniable.

Also, they are open sourcing their models, which is freaking awesome. Anyone can use the absolute massive beast of R1 and compete with o1 directly, without even training their own models.

Also Colloquially, AI’s trained in China absolute dominate the open source rankings. Qwen2.5, DeepSeek 3, DeepSeek R1, QwQ (Qwens equivalent to R1) and derivatives from these lead almost every category. LLama (Facebook) is right behind though. For small models, Phi (Microsoft) is up there (Good for running on your phone or laptop, but not the smartest).

AI moves so fast that by the time you’re done reading this something will be out of date 🙃

What I’m curious about, and have not yet asked on 小红书, is whether there is an online space that kids aren’t allowed in so that people can talk about things that they don’t want kids to be exposed to, but isn’t illegal.

LGBTQ topics come up first. Their excuse is, hey, we don’t want kids seeing that, but it’s totally fine if you are and it’s not illegal. So I wonder if there’s a place that you can talk about that stuff that is age restricted.

On a separate note, to keep everything in one comment, I do think that America brains have some issues with censorship that they don’t understand. Sure, the government doesn’t have that many rules around censorship, but every single platform does, and you’re gonna get kicked off or banned from one platform or another for saying certain things. It’s just that in America, those things are inconsistent, and you can get banned for whatever reason the CEO wants you to be. This just fractures our online environments and creates tribalism, which leads to more infighting, not less.