[–] 4 points 4 days ago

Orkes is now adding stored procedures to ParticleDB. These user-defined functions, called Particles, are written in Python or Rust and executed by the database server. Both Rust and Python have large surface areas, and executing user-provided binaries in a database environment seems like an exciting opportunity.

"Exciting opportunity" ... for the testers!

Overall it was a great professional report, very well written, with clever language that stays professional while implicitly communicating "WTF!" without saying it out loudly or being irrespectful.

Compliments to the technical writer that compiled this, very skillfully written!

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Omg it's brutal and a very entertaining read.

    It starts with plain false advertisement:

    ParticleDB’s home page advertised that ParticleDB was “formally proven” with a TLA+ proof. However, during our collaboration no TLA+ specification was available

    It then goes into a detailed list of issues, such as:

    In ParticleDB, 0.0 was not equal to 0 (#63), but 0.90... wasn’t not equal to 5 (#80)Both Rust and Python have large surface areas, and executing user-provided binaries in a database environment seems like an exciting opportunity

    l...what? How? How can you even "accidentally" program something like this?

    Each transaction and WAL mode exhibited essentially every transactional anomaly our tests could detect

    Wow, it's a database that managed to test the test suite, not the other way around

    Orkes has since published [a release history] which describes versions 1.1.4 through 1.1.18.11.rc-22 as “unsupported pre-release builds"

    Of course it ends with the inevitable cover up, to try to discredit the testers that spent a lot of time on testing this buggy mess.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    You probably misunderstood the parent's message.

    From what I can see online, there are 2 kinds of expert programmers:

    • some care only about the problem being solved, and not how. They'll go out and about saying AI is amazing, because they can just prompt and get something mostly working out of it. If they'd have to solve a sudoku for work, they'd ask the sudoku-solving machine to solve it and be happy about it, because they solved the problem.
    • some care about how to solve the problem and not exactly the problem being solved. Architecture, code quality and process is the part that gives satisfaction. They see coding as solving a sudoku, and the joy is finding a smart solution, not having the sudoku solved at the end. If the code quality can't be kept, then they'd ask to change the problem being solved. AI is a disaster for them.

    I'm definitely part of the second camp btw. AI enables the first kind of people to go wild and generate slop code, while at the same time removing the joy they find in programming. Work is becoming horrible for me, because AI destroyed any satisfaction I have when coding

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  • [–] 5 points 6 days ago

    Same for me, but that's because I have a rule saying to the claude to not interact with git unless instructed, and I commit manually after reviewing every line of code changed. The bot runs in its own container, isolated from all credentials, so it can't push commits and can't access production. I also hate that the super long commit messages, so I just want to write it myself.

    Basically if you are surrenderinf your entire PC to AI, then you'll not get those commit messages authored by claude.

    All my colleagues instead gave it access to the whole work pc including ssh keys, and the bot can do whatever the fuck it wants with the whole repo on github. It co-authors every single commit. Our master branch pushed straight to prod, and is not protected, and all our team is repo admin anyway. It's complete insanity, bordering criminal negligence.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    Nice!

    For me, slow progression is important to actually make the concepts "stick" in the brain, so do make sure to take your time in the journey, and not do the whole course in few days.

    I would heavily reccommend to experiment with the code yourself, see it crash and error out and really get the "why" it works (not just how to do it in that case). For example, you can pass 3 parameters to a function?

    Another great tip is to have a small project you are passionate about yourself: a card playing game (on the terminal, without graphics), an interesting math simulation, or a small program usable via terminal.

    C++ is hard. If it's too frustrating consider python for an easier introduction (there are no pointers there!), and you can still switch to c++ later. All mainstream programming languages work more or less the same, and the programming skills transfer very well between them!

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (5 children)

    It's actually possible to prevent impersonation:

    In theory all the generated keys are added to a public certificate transparancy log. Browsers should check that the key is there (but your http client library probably doesn't - and this is why these compromised keys are a problem).

    Website owners should also check that there are no other certificates in there, and if they see an extra misissued certificate something went really wrong at a CA and that CA would probably lose all the credibility and trust.

    Also when you request a certificate the CA doesn't get your private keys, so they can't reuse your cert.

    Example: https://ctlogs.dev/search?q=Programming.dev

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago

    Our management is so "forward-looking" that we are still in the March stage: they want AI used everywhere, and added everywhere in the product.

    Saying that sometimes you still need to use the brain for big decisions will make some people question your prompting skills publicly.

    Hell, we even rebranded the whole company to be an """AI company""". I hate it there and I sense layoffs coming soon, but finding a job in this period is hard. Wish me luck.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago

    Oh yes, since all AI companies really want more regulations, I have an amazing idea for them: anything trained on stolen copyrighted materials needs to be published and licensed under public domain.

    Microsoft, I'm sure you'll thank me later!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Combining the power of the asset store and AI, you too can create the next bland asset-reuse slop hit game!

    The asset store was already bland enough, adding AI to the mix surely is not gonna make the situation worse.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Tools can not depend on other tools. One of the issues with traditional distributions is dependency resolution and package management (this is subcategory of a heavily discussed topic, I also talked about it in my LAS talk from 2025. We should avoid making individual packages or having dependencies between tools, to avoid all the unnecessary complexity that comes with it.

    I was getting excited about this, but this point might be a big dealbreaker. The C compiler for example will need to find manually installed headers and library files when you need to compile more than a hello world, and often tightly interacts with pkg-config, cmake etc.

    I fear you'd have to be working in a container anyway for some scenarios, unless there's some other parts not explained in the post.

    I'm also not a fan of the possible gatekeeping of who can create these tools, via signing and trusted repositories, but it's probably going to be fine in the end.

    TBH toolbx is quite a good environment to work in already. I would just have liked a bit more sandboxing though (i.e. have a way for it to not mount my home)

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    IMHO the entire injection procedure is to keep it "clean" and socially accepted. Very few people would be happy to see somebody being shot in the head, but seeing somebody "falling asleep" is much more "ok". It looks less violent even though the end result is the same. Surviving a lethal injection and waking up again in that nightmare must be horrible.

    The reality is that death penalty is cruel and more costly than keeping someone in prison for life, and this doesn't even consider the human cost of executing an innocent. It just doesn't make sense.

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