I'm not fully sure of what is the total composition of opinions, and will not dismiss your experience. Indeed the hyper privacy all high costs group might be a small percentage. But I know several that use tails openly, despite being vehemently protective of women, while knowing less men that use tails. Certainly not "mythical" in my book. Futhermore the ignoring of viewpoints of non-tech women, the majority of women, expressing constant worry of state discrimination via information collection even though it's regularly hitting the news is bad. Tech is not the only party to this, indeed that's one of the reasons for this scenario as he correctly pointed out. His claim was overbroad so as to improve his argument, an annoying manipulation. Additionally, he used emphasis on wife/daughter, yet not including their voices, while minimizing his own position, which warrants the further parthian shot.
I have met women in tech who have been privacy conscious and paranoid about state control. Or even a healthy stream of non-tech women worried that it will be used to attack their sex and to discriminate. I don't think the author is correct in his belief that there are not a considerable amount of women worried about privacy. And to make such a board claim, and in light of my experience, would indicate either hubris or sexism.
If anything, he frames that he is concerned about his daughter as a father. The viewpoint of patriarchy.
So, no one's buying our textbooks anymore, it's getting costly to do our work, stop over claiming results for your marketing and insulting our work? I would have stuck with that.
Everything else seems to be organizational or standard politics. I would have avoided the political sections as it just sets those signatories up for getting into those fights, having not realized what they cosigned.
The issue of attribution is a hard problem that has festered for a while, that has mostly been obscured by the inability to discern an authors entire body of ingested information. I would be careful as, the proposed opt-out restrictions will be eventually imposed on people, which sorta blows up the whole math enterprise of universities/etc. Ie. the proposed leads to a book author revoking a person's ability to reference their arguments in a mathematic paper for money, spite, etc.
The nice thing about the Internet is that a person, great or small, can voice their grandiose and yet myopic views of a problem and their absurd solutions to it...freely.
Considering that the rant is using photos from Star Trek and Oliver Twist to make their points, copyrighted material with no indication of permission, they're less "creative" than a stochastic parrot.
I'm annoyed at the cost statement, as that's the sleight of hand. "$20000" at current pricing. Add some orders of magnitude to the costs and you'll get your true price you'll have to pay when the VC money starts to wear off. 2nd, this is ignoring the dev time that he/others put in over multiple iterations of this project (opus 4, opus 4.5) and all the other work to create the scaffolding for it, and all the millions/tens of millions of dollars of hand written test suits (linux kernel, gcc, doom, sqlite, etc) he got to use to guide the process. So add some more cost on top of that orders of magnitude increase and the dev time is probably a couple months/years more than "2 weeks".
And this is just working off the puff pieces statements, and not even diving into the code to see it's limits/origins, etc. I also don't see the scaffold in the repo, as that's where the effort is.
But still it's not surprising, from my own experience, given a rigorously definable problem, enough effort, grunt work, and massaging, you can get stuff out of the current models.
Opensource is a bit more complex than being a "public good". They're focusing on the low cost as a jump starting point, which make me doubt their sincerity/understanding about managing that relationship healthily.
It's not going to solve the housing issue and is mostly for press (and it's not even getting into ulterior motives), but it might help with preventing a longer term issue of large investors becoming a major issue. Additionally, I wonder about the choice in properties as properties aren't fungible.
I suggest waiting till the gcc side matures, with the minimum of a working gcc frontend for a non optional dependency. Optional dependencies with gcc_codegen might be okay. Git is pretty core to a lot of projects, and this change is risky, it's on a fairly short time frame to make it a core dep (6 months?).
Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.
No, it can track pointer bounds and validity across functions. It also targets identifying cases of UB via eva. Both rust and frama-C rely on assertions to low level memory functions. Rust has the same gaping UB hole in unsafe that can cross into safe.
If we are talking about more than memory, such as what greg is talking about in encoding operational properties then no, rust is far behind both frama-C, Spark, and tons of others. They can prove functional correctness. Or do you think miri, kani, cruesot, and the rest of the FM tools for Rust are superfluous?
My mocking was that that the kernel devs have had options for years and have ignored them out of dislike (ada and spark) or lack of effort (frama-C). That other options provide better solutions to some of their intrests. And that this is more a project exercise in getting new kernel blood than technical merits.
Yes, I know the policy that has been stated and the recent docs on it (https://rust-for-linux.com/rust-kernel-policy). A good portion of the R4L group were trying to avoid this scenario due the toxicity of such a change (especially at this early contentious point, and despite what their online advocates want). I don't think the policy will immediatly change because of his statements, but I find it pretty clear that this is where he wants the project to go.
"But for new code / drivers..." encompasses more than just "drivers" and refers to all new code. I doubt it's a mistake either due to the way the rest of the email is written. And Greg said "no one sane ever thought that (force anyone to learn rust)" just 5 months ago (https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/8/29/312). But he is now telling his C devs they will need to learn and code rust to make new code in the kernel.
Supposedly ~5% (1-29%), but I'm testing my own projects to verify (my guess is higher at 10-20%, but will depend on the code). Supposedly it's to land in gcc at some point but I dunno the time table.
Upstream fbounds in xnu has options for controlling if it panics or is just a telemetry event. They are in a kernel situation and have the exact same considerations on trying to keep the kernel alive.
Isn't this a bait and switch, that all the c kernel devs were complaining about? That it wouldn't be just drivers but also all new kernel code? The lack of candor over the goal of R4L and downplaying of other potential solutions should give any maintainer (including potential rust ones) pause.
Anyway, why just stop at rust? If we really care about safety, lets drop the act and go make everyone do formal methods. Frama-C is at least C, has a richer contract language, has heavy static analysis tools before having to go to proofs, is much more proven, and the list goes on. Or, why not add Spark to the codebase if we are okay with mixing langs in the codebase? Its very safe.
If you look at the CVE lists, about 70-80% of all c memory bugs are related to OOB Read and Write. Additionally, like rust, fbounds-safety can remove redundant checks if it can determine the bounds. My question is how likely can it be adopted in the kernel (likely high).
I will need to read their conversations more to see if it's the underlying fear, but formalization makes refactoring hard and code brittle (ie. having to start from scratch on a formal proof after substantially changing a subsystem). One of the key benefits of C/Kernel have been their malleability to new hardware and requirements.