TehPers

It’s one of the major supermarket chains in NL, which I guess isn’t that obvious to most people, but I miss shopping there because the chains where I am have rotten, moldy produce and AH always had fresh produce and packs of relatively cheap stroopwafel.

Also, related to the post, I’d almost rather be sweeping the floor there. I don’t want to sweep floors, but it’d mean I live there, so yeah.

Yes, actually. Data centers are designed to cool down components pretty efficiently. They aren’t cooking the RAM at 500°C.

500°C would be way above the safe operating temps, but most likely yes.

Server memory is probably reusable, though likely to be either soldered and/or ECC modules. But a soldering iron and someone sufficiently smart can probably do it (if it isn’t directly usable).

My experience, having actually tried this on a huge codebase: my time was better spent looking at file names and reading source code myself to answer specific questions about the code.

Using it to read a single file or a few of them might go better. If you can find the right files first, you might get decent output.

Spouting bullshit? If so, I agree.

Codebases in the 100k+ to 1m+ sloc can be very difficult for a LLM (or human) to answer detailed questions about. A LLM might be able to point you in the right direction, but they don’t have enough context size to fit the code, let enough the capability to actually analyze it. Summarize? Sure, but it can only summarize what it has in context.

TLDR: data is something you collect over time from users, so you shouldn’t let the contracts for it mindlessly drift, or you might render old data unusable. Keeping those contracts in one place helps keep them organized.

But that explanation sucks if you’re actually five, so I asked ChatGPT to do that explanation for you since that would be hard for me to do:

Here’s a super-simple, “explain it like I’m 5” version of what that idea is trying to say:

🧠 Imagine your toys

You have a bunch of toys in your room — cars, blocks, stuffed animals.

Now imagine this:

• You put some cars in the toybox.

• You leave other cars on the floor in another place.

• You keep some blocks in a bucket… and some blocks on the shelf.

• And every time you want a toy, you have to run to a different spot to find its matching pieces.

That would be really confusing and hard to play with, right? Because things are spread out in too many places for no good reason.

🚧 What the blog is really warning about

In software (computer programs), “state” is like where toys are stored — it’s important information the program keeps track of. For example, it could be “what level I’m on in a game” or “what’s in my cart when I shop online.”

The article says the biggest mistake in software architecture is:

Moving that important stuff around too much or putting it in too many places when you don’t need to.

That makes the program really hard to understand and work with, just like your toys would be if they were scattered all over the place. (programming.dev)

🎯 Why that matters

If the important stuff is all over the place:

• People get confused.

• It’s harder to fix mistakes.

• The program gets slower and more complicated for no reason.

So the lesson is:

👉 Keep the important information in simple, predictable places, and don’t spread it around unless you really need to. (programming.dev)

We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.

which has existed for much longer than has crates.io

The Rust compiler has not existed for as long as the debian package manager has. You’re still trusting it and its standard library even if your reason for trusting it is that Debian’s maintainers trust it. This is also true of any vetted dependencies you download. You’re trusting others at the end of the day, whether they are the package developers or the auditors. Only by auditing your dependencies yourself can you avoid trusting anyone else.

With that being said, you are also able to contribute here. Someone has to do the auditing. Go audit some packages!

open to any feedback, always willing to learn

A common pattern with executable Python scripts is to:

• Add a shebang at the top (#!/usr/bin/env python3) to make it easier to execute
• Check if __name__ == "__main__" before running any of the script so the functions can be imported into another script without running all the code at the bottom

The never type comes more from type theory and isn’t common in other languages (though TS has never). Similar to 0 or the null set, it exists as a “base case” for types. For example, where you have unions of T1 | T2 | ..., the “empty union” is the never type. Similarly, for set theory, a union of no sets is the null set, and in algebra, the summation of no numbers is 0.

In practice, because it can’t be constructed, it can be used in unique ways. These properties happen to be super useful in niche places.

Because if it never returns, then it has no return value.

Then how would you annotate having no return value?

I don’t know where None comes from (what’s the T in Option<T>?)

Assuming you meant (), that’s a unit type with one valid value. It’s a ZST, but can be created and returned.

! is a bottom type. It’s uninhabited. Can’t be created. Functions can never return it because they can never construct it. So why’s this useful? It can be coerced to any type.

Because the set of valid values for ! is the null set, by contradiction, there do not exist any values valid for the type ! that are invalid for any other type T. Therefore, all valid values of ! are also valid values of any other type T, and you can always convert from it to any other type.

Notably, this is already possible, but language support for it isn’t amazing:

enum A {}

fn bar(a: A) {
    let foo: Box<Arc<Rc<Mutex<String>>>> = match a {}
}

Heck you can even do this today:

// `loop {}` never returns, so its type is `!`:
let blah: String = loop {};

That title should be illegal lol.

Congrats to everyone who made this possible!

Any website using CSR only can’t have a RCE because the code runs on the client. Any code capable of RSC that runs server and client side may be vulnerable.

From what I’ve seen, the exploit is a special request from a client that functionally lets you exec anything you want (via Function’s constructor). If your server is unpatched and recognizes the request, it may be (likely is) vulnerable.

I’m sure we’ll get more details over time and tools to manually check if a site is compromised.

I’m not the one recommending it lol.

If I had to guess, it’s to improve page performance by prerendering as much as possible, but I find it overkill and prefer to just prerender as much of the page as I can at build time and do CSR for the rest, though this doesn’t work if you have dynamic routes or some kind of server-side logic (good for blogs and such though).

I think their point was that CSR-only sites would be unaffected, which should be true. Exploiting it on a static site, for example, couldn’t be RCE because the untrusted code is only being executed on the client side (and therefore is not remote).

Now, most people use, or at least are recommended to use, SSR/RSC these days. Many frameworks make SSR enabled by default. But using raw React with no Next.js, react-router, etc. to create a client-side only site does likely protect you from this vulnerability.

30 is assuming you write code for all 30 days. In practice, it’s closer to 20, so 75 tests per day. It’s doable on some days for sure (if we include parameterized tests), but I don’t strictly write code everyday either.

Still, I agree with them that you generally want to write a lot of tests, but volume is less important than quality and thoroughness. The author using the volume alone as a meaningful metric is nonsense.

This is more likely the actual incident report:

A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share more information as we have it today.

Edit: If you like reading

1500 tests is a lot. That doesn’t mean anything if the tests aren’t testing the right thing.

My experience was that it generates tests for the sake of generating them. Some are good. Many are useless. Without a good understanding of what it’s generating, you have no way of knowing which are good and which are useless.

It ended up being faster for me to just learn the testing libraries and write my own tests. That way I was sure every test served a purpose and tested the right thing.