https://lemmy.ml/post/24719810

I’m starting to think using fossil fuel, and having a strong dependency on other countries for energy supply, may not be a good idea after all.

Rest of the world: We’re deprecating C++ due to lack of memory safety. Please consider doing something for safety.

C++ commite: Here’s a new convenient operator to make it easier to do a potentially unsafe, multi-level pointer dereference.

It sounds surprising given the headline, but looks quite reasonable when looking at the details in the article:

• The requirement is part of a tender for €1bn worth of grants to develop batteries. It only affect companies who engage in this tender.
• This is in part a response, at a smaller scale, to China’s own regime that "pressures foreign companies into sharing their intellectual property in exchange for access to the Chinese market. "

Says the man always dragging his feet when time comes to support Ukraine’s self-defense

Does this attack scale linearly with key size?

Using the D-Wave Advantage, we successfully factored a 22-bit RSA integer, demonstrating the potential for quantum machines to tackle cryptographic problems

That attack is a threat only if it scale better than existing attacks.

What about winning hearts and minds?

Fighting ennemies while antagonising civilians create new ennemies. I fear that strategy is fueling an endless war, rather than ending a war.

Translation: We’re extremely short staffed, so we are shaming our employees into sacrificing their vacation

NOYB has the right to send a complaint if it think a company infringe upon right to privacy. Mozilla isn’t entitled to special treatment or special notice before filling a complaint.

Mozilla should have expected this. They claim to defend users privacy so they should understand why consent for data collection is important. Also there was public outcry and criticism of opt-out, and yet they haven’t backed down.

If Mozilla resolve these issues, NOYB could ask for the complaint to be dropped. I hope they do resolve this, and do drop the complaint.

Thanks for the links, it’s interesting background. In that article from February 2021, The Artlantic states “There was also never a default”.

There was indeed no default as of February 2021. The default occured later, in April-May 2022, so we can’t expect a past article to include that information.

All major lenders need to take part in restructuring the debt indeed. That occured in 2023, and multiple lenders asked for a restructuring deal similar to the first one signed with China. I don’t know about the US, but Japan/India/French lender were looking for a similar restructuration terms. That sounds fair to me.

A debt rework between Sri Lanka and countries including Japan, India and France was also expected this week, but news of the EXIM deal took them by surprise. The three nations request comparability of debt treatment with China.

“As far as the information we have is concerned, conditions set by China are comparable to ours,” Kanda said.

The country’s default is clear evidence the overall debt wasn’t sustainable. Both Sri Lanka and its lenders have a responsibility on this. China is often the first mentioned because it was (still is?) Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign lender, although it would be good to have transparency of the country’s debt and interest rates on a per-lender basis, to see which ones are the most sustaonables.

The 2022 bloomberg article you cite first state:

It didn’t provide details on the value of the loans which it said matured at the end of 2021, nor did it state which nations owed the money.

I couldn’t read much further due to the paywal.

The Bloomberg article has too few details to make conclusions. We don’t know if AP and Bloomberg articles are referring to the same countries, nor whether it’s a significant portion or that country’s debt toward China.

The Reuters 2021 article has more details, and cite write-offs, as well as specific countries benefiting from deferrals: Angola, Pakistan, Kenya, the Republic of Congo. It’s good to read there’s some willingness to accomodate some countries.

Sadly that didn’t prevent Zambia and Sri Lanka from defaulting. China has lended hundred of billion of dollars with unsustainable terms, and this contributed to countries defaulting. That’s a bad situation for everyone involved.

I hope Tanzania and Zambia read the fine pints on the loan/inversement agreement.

Scientists don’t have to explain why they’re leaving twitter. The reasons should be obvious to anyone familiar with Twitter.

Journalists need to explain why they’re still on Twitter, given that platform has so much bots, trolls, hate and lack moderation.

Don’t forget the 15% minimum corporate tax. This now have to be turned into law.

Taxing individuals by itself cannot solve shortcomings in the tax system. The super rich have corporations and shell companies in tax heavens to avoid taxes.

That’s interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

My point is having a very old constitution isn’t much of a boast if keeping it as-is causes political issues.

Tradition and inertia.

The USA is proud to have the oldest and longest-standing written constitution. The fact it hasn’t been rewriteen in a long time help explain why there’s still an electoral college, slavery for prisoners (13th amendements), and weak regulation of campaign finance.

This is a common issue in software, not limited to scripting. Software are getting more and more layers of wrappers/adapter code, like a Russian doll. It contributes to dependency hell, as each layer brings new dependencies.

Developers often find it easier to wrap existing apps and software, and add another layer on top, rather than improving or replacing what exists.

Okay, I misinterpreted your comment.

Having a backup at a cloud provider is fine, as long as there is at least one other backup that isn’t with this provider.

Cloud provider seems to do a good job protecting against hardware failure, but can do poorly with arbitrary account bans, and sometimes have mishaps due to configuration problems.

Whereas a DIY backup solution is often more subject to hardware problems (disk failure, fire, flooding, theft, …), but there’s no risk of account problem.

A mix is fine to protect against different kind of issues.

That would indeed be a good backup strategy, but better be specific. “Offsite” may be interpreted in different ways.