Author: peteware

The Confederacy Wasn’t What You Think

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From The Atlantic The Confederacy Wasn’t What You Think describes the Confederate Stats of America as nothing to do with states rights and everything to do with slavery and embraced centralized authority:

It purged the original of euphemisms, using the term slaves instead of other persons in its three-fifths and fugitive-slave clauses. It bound the Congress and territorial governments to recognize and protect “the institution of negro slavery.” But the centerpiece of the Confederate constitution—the words that upend any attempt to cast it simply as a copy of the original—was a wholly new clause that prohibited the government from ever changing the law of slavery: “No … law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” It also moved to limit democracy by explicitly confining the right to vote to white men.

I always remind myself that they seceded before Lincoln became president.

No justice

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In a slate article discussing Amy Cooper’s threat to call police is a good summary:

Amy didn’t call the cops because she was scared of Christian the birder. That much is obvious from the video. She called them to prevail in a power struggle with a black man who dared to challenge her authority to do as she wished in public.
…
The media has been saturated with images of similar entitlement and rage in recent weeks, as throngs of predominantly white Americans protest COVID-19 business closures and demand their states resume business as usual, knowing that black lives disproportionately hang in the balance. These white protesters, who know they have the privilege to be armed and intimidating without facing police violence, are rejecting a shared responsibility for safe public spaces. Christian Cooper’s offense was to insist that Amy Cooper, too, had a responsibility to protect a shared public space. Amy’s response demonstrated that public safety is not shared by all

Espionage or Journalism? After the Snowden NSA Leaks – The Atlantic

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From The Atlantic Espionage or Journalism? After the Snowden NSA Leaks is it paranoia if they really are after you?

Soltani and I used laptops from which we’d removed the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware, and disconnected the batteries. If a stranger appeared at the door, we merely had to tug on the quick-release power cables to switch off and re-encrypt the machines instantly. We stored the laptops in the vault and kept encryption keys on hardware, itself encrypted, that we took away with us each time we left the room, even for bathroom breaks. We sealed the USB ports. I disconnected and locked up the internet-router switch in my New York office every night. I dabbed epoxy and glitter on the screws along the bottom of all my machines, to help detect tampering in my absence. (The glitter dries in unique, random patterns.

In Trump’s own words

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A Dana Milbank column at The Washington Post is to funny and to sad to bear

A Trump fireside chat — in his own (unfortunate) words

This blindsided the world! Who could have ever predicted a thing like this? This was something that nobody has ever thought could happen to this country.

I’ve always known this is a real, this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously.

It’s a constant stream of contradictions and incoherence.

Walmart, opioids, and Trump administration

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Walmart Was Almost Charged Criminally Over Opioids. Trump Appointees Killed the Indictment.:

Opioids dispensed by Walmart pharmacies in Texas had killed customers who had overdosed. The pharmacists who dispensed those opioids had told the company they didn’t want to fill the prescriptions because they were coming from doctors who were running pill mills. They pleaded for help and guidance from Walmart’s corporate office.

…

Investigators had obtained records of similar cries for help from Walmart pharmacists all over the country: from Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, and other states. They reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions.

…

Before the Texas prosecutors could file their case, however, Walmart escalated concerns to high-ranking officials at the DOJ, who then intervened. Brown was ordered to stand down. On Aug. 31, 2018, Trump officials officially informed Walmart that the DOJ would decline to prosecute the company

Coronavirus: How Long

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The Washington Post has an article projecting what might happen with the Corona virus.

This graph is not infections but rather how many critical-care beds are needed per 100,000 people.

The surprising thing is the timeline. Assuming we do everything there’s a really big peak in September.

Corona Virus Scenarios

Coronavirus: why quarantine?

peteware

The article in OurWorldInData.org has this (symbolic) diagram that shows why it’s important to slow down the rate of infection. It’s not to decrease the number of people infected but rather to keep the healthcare system from being overwhelmed and so causing more deaths.

The horizontal line represents the theoretical capacity of the healthcare system.

Flattening the curve

CppCon 2019: De-Fragmenting C++

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Herb Sutter

  • add things (more); fix things (some); simplify (least);
  • Why not reverse this?
  • adding things (eg MetaClasses) can simplify things

A tale of two compiler switches

-fno-exceptions
-fno-rtti

  • Make things static by default
  • Dynamic by opt-in

Exception Handling

  • isocpp.org 2018-02 survey; 48% ban exceptions either fully or partially (22% not allowed)
  • error codes; expected/outcome types; exceptions
  • std::error_code. std::filesystem supports both dialect

Root cause

  • Today’s exception handling is not zero-overhead. Just enabling increases size
  • throwing an exception not statically boundable space and time overhead. Violates you can’t reasonably write it better by hand
  • Lack of control

Key definition

  • what is a recoverable error
  • A function cannot do what it is supposed to do. Mirriam webster definition of “error”
  • A precondition violation is always a bug in the caller

Four coordinated proposals

  • Enable zero-overhead exception handling
  • throw few exceptions (90% of all exceptions should not be)
  • support explicit try for visble propagation

static exceptions

  • throwing values of static types means by value. No dynamic memory
  • isomorphic to error codes
  • share return channel
  • Need to be backward compatible. Opt in
  • As-if returning union(Success; Error;} + bool
  • doubles down on value semantics

Proposal

  • Add a noexcept-querable allocator proprety for “reports vs aborts” on allocation failure.
  • recommend conditional noexcept based on the relvant allocator
  • babb on GitHub.com/HerbSutter

Part 2: Run-time type information

  • Same for exceptions
  • Joe Bialek Wendesday Root cause of CVEs by patch year.
    • Type confusion increasing (e.g. static downcast)
    • static_cast perhaps because RTTI is banned
  • RTTI allowed in 68%

static_cast down-casts

  • Peter Collingbourne
  • Uses vtable ordered in memory so downcast is just a range check
  • down_cast

    5 instructions

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