I strongly suspected it was going to be a Honda before even clicking the link. I traded in my RSX-s many years ago for Cherokee because kids. I miss that car, that was a lovely engine even though the low-end torque was a bit anemic.
It's a nightmare managing all this stuff. Roblox, Minecraft, Meta Quest services, Fortnite, the list goes on and on. These companies are not helping us either.
Thankfully my son and his friends have somehow iterated away from Fortnite. It's no longer cool so they just stopped playing it. That's one less thing I have to worry about.
I let my kid play Roblox for a couple of weeks and I was absolutely horrified by all the inducements to seek Robux. So I removed it from her iPad, which is locked down.
I play Roblox with my daughter from time to time and we have lots of fun. I’ve explained the dangers to her (strangers messaging, gambling style games, etc), and I see it as an opportunity to teach her while she still listens to me. When she’s older and I’m not privy to everything she does on a computer I don’t want her stumbling across these things uninformed.
A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
I've had a similar approach. My kids computers are setup next to mine and I keep an eye on what they're playing.
I've instigated a purchase wait period of at least 3 days. Very often they themselves realize that the thing that they wanted to spend their pocket money on was a brief desire.
I was super proud when I heard my son say "meh, this is pay to win" as quitting a random roblox game he was trying out.
They don't have to have those. Depending on your definition of "kids", most people on HN I imagine are not giving their kids phones, laptops, or tablets at young ages (maybe less than ~13?). And if they do, I imagine the devices are somewhat locked down and monitored.
I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.
I agree desktops are best, and they are what my kids started with, but there is a lot of pressure to give kids phones.
For example, where I live, the cheapest (monthly) bus tickets require an app, so kids need a smartphone to get to school (or their parents have to pay a lot more for daily tickets).
There is a lot of social pressure on the kids too. There are lots of activities that have either moved online or are organised online. Lots of ways to get left out.
This is such a good approach. You're sharing interests with your daughter and teaching her valuable skills to confront problems she will absolutely face as an adult. Having the good foundation will give her a leg up later in life for sure and I wish more parents followed this example.
To summarize a bit glibly, you're saying to be a good parent. Which of course is awesome, and it is important for people like yourself to explain how to do that using the available tools, etc.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
My son plays Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 on the Playstation sometimes, if all his homework is done and his room is tidyish.
No inducements to buy in-game currencies, no weird people chatting to my child online, no deeply profoundly unsettling user-generated content. About the only downside is that I occasionally have to remind him that his teacher probably doesn't really want to hear about Screaming Females or Rough Francis or Bad Religion, although it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions about them.
Plus I doubt I'm ever seeing my initials on the highscore table ever again. The Future Is Now, Old Man.
The PS4 remake is excellent. Sure, the maps have been restyled a bit, but the warehouse looks just as good as you remember, and you remember it as looking a hell of a lot better than it really did.
THPS1 is forever intertwined with having a few pints with my wee sister, pick up a curry and some beer on the way round to hers, then watch The West Wing, then beating her boyfriend at Tony Hawks', drinking beer, and eating curry until the small hours of Sunday morning.
In the early 2000s, we really did have it all, didn't we?
The problem is that just like boycotts/individual action doesn't work (besides a handful of lucky exceptions), this won't work either if all your kids' peers are on it. Being the "odd one out" brings its own share of problems, especially in a volatile environment where any pretext for bullying is a good one.
This is why we need regulation. Both for child-focused platforms, but also for adults (regarding social media).
I agree mostly. But I would push back on the idea that you need to let your child do whatever (play on Roblox, get fancy clothes or toys, etc) because of bullying. You're trading one set of potential problems for another set of known problems, and letting your own fears dictate how you raise your kids. How do you expect your kids to stand up to peer pressure as teenagers if you give into their peers when they are younger?
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
I would be surprised if that were true. Roblox was one of the earliest games to have their digital currency for sale in corner stores where kids can buy it with cash.
There are a lot of free-to-play mobile games (say Arknights) that you can play for free and have a pretty good time. I got lucky and got two “game breaking” characters playing for a reasonable time but if you have the idea that you absolutely have to have a specific character or collect all of them boy you can spend a crazy amount of money and those people pay for all the rest of us.
I still let my kid play a couple of hours a week, but told him no robux at all, it just wasn't something we were even going to consider. Let's see how it lasts, hopefully I can get him interested in something else but somehow his entire local social circle collapsed when we made him cut back on his play time. Its not even strangers at this point, but kids at school that have caused conflicts.
Minecraft by itself is benign, but online servers? Oh boy.
Full tilt P2W servers, ran by low key cybercriminals, with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children. And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by selling paid mods - for Bedrock only, which is the version most children play.
Then there's the usual boon of online gaming - getting to interact with the shadiest characters you've ever met online.
Not OP, but for me I'm wary whenever I see in-game currency (Minecoins). Thankfully there are no gambling mechanics tied in to Minecoins directly, but the server ecosystem is still rampant with gambling just the same[0].
I agree regarding in-game currency. I find it distasteful. But in my mind, paid mods are a different thing that can exist independently. I don't find those distasteful. I find their existence slightly positive.
For sure. But the unofficial non-paid mods for Bedrock allow for gambling mechanics, so long as it's not linked to real world currency, which I still find problematic for a game marketed towards kids. Link I posted is from years ago claiming that featured servers in Bedrock almost all have gambling, and nothing has changed since then.
Java edition is a lot more wild west and next-to-impossible to enforce their EULA due to the nature of distribution and installation of Java edition mods.
> Any Mods you create for Minecraft: Java Edition from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them
Is that legally enforceable? If a mod doesn't contain code / assets from the game itself, what legal rights does Microsoft have over the distribution of that mod?
Yes courts have found that game mods, even if they don't directly include any content from the original game in their distributable, count as derivative works under copyright.
> The ruling continues to apply to the legal status of video game modding, with mods viewed as derivative works that require the consent of the copyright holder. While this may legally limit the creation of mods, machinima, broadcasts, or even cheats, many game developers have authorized and encouraged some of these activities.
If it's made by randoms, then Microsoft is barely better than a rent-seeking middleman. If it's made by Microsoft, they should just put it in the f-ing game or move on to making something new to get more money.
It feels like monetizing something that used to be free and built by passionate tinkerers for its own sake. It's destroying yet another part of that hacker culture some people so very often reminisce about on this site.
Me personally, I absolutely hate it. I got into programming to mod my favorite games of the time, Minecraft among them. My first exposure to actual code was through reading open source mods and trying to modify them to achieve my own ideas.
As far as I know, you can still write free mods outside the mod store to your heart's content, just as you ever could. The existence of paid mods doesn't seem to limit your ability to do that.
I don't really understand why those things are bad? Making your server executable available for dedicated servers is common (and good!) and selling paid mods just seems like selling software to me
edit: the private server operators might be bad, but I don't see how this is Minecraft's fault (or how it doesn't apply to every game that allows dedicated servers)
The Minecraft you know and love is a fantastic game, especially for kids. Top 10 all time, IMO, in terms of creativity and education and development. And you can easily set up a personal friends and family server/realm, and there are tons of free mods and maps.
The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.
I am probably not the right generation but all attempts to engage with Minecraft with my children have always ended badly. It seems very tedious and clunky. The learning curve seems steeper than playing factorio casually.
Yeah, I tried playing it with my son, but I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do.
I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.
You're supposed to build a place to live and sleep, and then you find some magma and water and create a portal to a less friendly place. Eventually you find the bad dragon and murder it.
That was added to the game after its creator got cynical about it. He said it needed an ending to justify being 1.0, then he sold it to Microsoft because he hated being popular and wanted the game destroyed, as well as money. The actual goal of Minecraft should be whatever it was in Alpha 1.1.2_01.
There are several ways of enjoying Minecraft. I play it a lot with my kids (5 and 10) at the moment. They love creative mode, spawning mobs and just building strange houses. When I played with my friends, sibling snd parents, it was all about survival mode everyone would create their own huge buildings and connect up via railway, visit each other and make fun stuff. Then there was the whole red stone rabbit hole…
It's a cultural thing. The learning curve has always been bad but it was bypassed by the initial cultural penetration of people playing it on youtube and now the learning curve is a thing learnt through prior knowledge instead of trial and error
Microsoft forces login these days for single player play, and jams ads, social networking crap.
As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.
So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?
Exactly, everything wrong with Minecraft started with Microsoft. They took a fun, harmless, and free game so that they could profit from it and they've been working at making it increasingly harmful ever since.
Have you considered not tying your encryption keys to your child's online activities? I can understand the thrill of danger, but I'm not that much of a gambler myself.
I was fine with Minecraft until the kids started wanting to install all kinds of mods, which as far as I know are random executables you download from shady websites.
just another surface for predators to access underage targets. I guess one thing with Minecraft specifically is there’s a veneer of positive / educational content to smuggle that access beneath - schools have lessons that include Minecraft play, you don’t get that with Fortnite or Roblox, so it seems more ‘innocent.’
Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.
But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.
Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.
where would creeps even contact kids on Minecraft? the only officially sanctioned servers are on Bedrock and tightly moderated, everything else is plastered with Microsoft-sanctioned warnings about unmoderated play
Agree massive headache. Our kids go to the boys and girls club after school where they were playing roblox during computer time. Some parents apparently complained and it’s now banned. Not sure of that is local or nation-wide. They were kind of annoyed but they seem to understand why. I am definitely worried about giving them the tools they need to navigate the online jungle when they are older.
School (or parents) running local servers for kids in school to play to avoid the whole bunch of dangers of open online would be interesting turn back to gaming roots
What's wrong with Minecraft? I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan, but am pretty impressed with how little control they have so far exerted over Java Edition, they even made modding easier recently by removing obfuscation. You can run your own server as much as you want with no fees, obligations or anything. And unless the kids know a server address, they can't easily join some third party server with weird stuff going on. Not that I ever heard of one of those, but I'm sure they must exist.
As others have said there's a big difference between the Minecraft "we" (the tech community growing up on Beta versions of Minecraft) know and the Minecraft of today.
The subsequent versions also developed the game mechanics a lot to turn it into something closer to an RPG than the early, bare-bones sandbox game with minimal, well-understood mechanics and the rest purely up to the players' creativity.
There's nowadays an abundance of Pay-to-Win servers with custom mechanics to enable that, and I'm sure a lot of unsavory people preying on children. The social media (YouTube/etc) community around it has exploded too in a way I don't recall it before (I used to be into Minecraft videos back in the ~2012 era, and what I see nowadays grosses me out in comparison).
Java Minecraft (the old version, moddable, self-hostable) and Bedrock Minecraft (windows/console only, no self-hosted servers) are quite different.
The sad thing is that Bedrock is super simple. You can get it on any tablet, pay like 5-6€ a month to Microsoft for a "realm" and you can play with 3-4 friends online. They can join even if they don't pay, any mobile device, console or windows PC will work.
With Java you need someone to host the server or pay for hosting, then you need to give the address to your friends and have them connect. Then you need to worry about whitelists, because there are multiple services scanning for open Minecraft servers and people WILL come in and fuck your world up (happened to me).
Physical play is nigh impossible. It means getting other kid's parents to let them out. And then you need to spend your full-time supervising them. Can't just let them out with their bikes on the streets.
I think the problem is that either you can give children freedom to explore the world, or you can make them accountable for their actions. Can't have both, and parents will protect their kids by not letting them get into trouble.
Summer's highest case of kid accidents that ended in hospital in my country were the escooters, parents just buy whatever looks good in ad, not caring to train kid (technically moped license is needed) or even get one that's actually legal (with speed limit).
End result - machine capable of going 50km/h or faster (think they caught one doing 90) in hands of young teen or outright kid. Hell, there was even a trucker that reported getting overtaken by one...
I dug into this statistic for my city recently and found the majority of reported "scooter accidents" were actually occurrences of car drivers crashing into someone on a scooter.
I'd been riding bikes with my friends around the block since the age of 6. Parents didn't chase us around and minded their own business instead of nanomanaging us into absolute snowflakes that modern children have become. We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks, bolts and nuts, and showed up at home just to check in and have a quick lunch. We did a bunch more things many parents would deem insane these days (and even our own, should they know)...
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom and came into adulthood with a bunch of wonderful warm memories of our childhoods, free of any stigmas or psychological trumas.
This modern fear-based attitude towards childhood is beyond sick.
Now before anyone says "but pedophiles and terrorists" - mind you, that was 80's USSR, Chikatilo had still been at large, the gossip was there but wasn't amplified enough to put everyone into scared trance like modern mass-media does.
Literally nothing has changed in the society since then, maniacs were around just like they are now, but the attitude towards the outside world has been so blown out of proportion today, that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
> that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
There's a lot of blame for parents, much of it deserved. But when you have CPS being called for kids playing in the woods or parents charged with manslaughter when some one else runs over their kid you realize this is now going against the grain to resist this stuff.
It just seems insane to me that this mentality has been allowed to take root. I live in an area where kids on bikes are a regular sight, any time the weather is even halfway decent. Just last year, I came across a brother and sister riding up the forest preserve bike trail with fishing poles. But the media-driven "fear, fear, fear, nothing but fear" narrative has really done a hell of a lot of harm to society.
I always wonder what happened here. I remember hearing about how CPS was chronically underfunded in the 90s and did not even have the resources to investigate every case of serious abuse. But now they have the resources to go after parents that let their 10 year olds walk 2 blocks to a park? Did we start pumping funding into CPS or something? This is like if the cops started ticketing people for jaywalking.
> We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks
As someone who thinks kids should have freedom, like kids in Germany or Japan have, I hate it when ridiculous arguments like these show up.
Look, if you was regularly doing all that, you probably should not have all that freedom. But, most kids are actually more reasonable, if raised right.
What problem with me as I am now would you solve if you had any power to prevent me from being a kid and doing pretty common things kids were doing then?
See, neither me nor any of my friends became terrorist bombers, heck, there is not even a single stuntman around us! On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision. We knew what we did. No amount of nannying will fix kids who lack the touch with the harsh reality, as it takes feeling some pain sometimes to be responsible and not inflict pain on others.
> On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision.
I have no reason to believe that. The issue with 2 out of 3 activities you listed is also the danger or damage to OTHERS and their property. Which you do not even noticed, clocked or cared about. The only thing you care about is you feeling some pain, presumably.
Cool, stop everyone else from being a nanny then. You pull the stuff you and I did as kids in most places now and you'll have the police and CPS show up.
Also nothing says survivor bias as statements like:
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom
It is nonsense to use your own example and imply it was safe, because you are mostly blind to the failure modes of the counterhistorical damaged or dead.
However, I agree with you. Kids raised in dangerous rural areas do learn. I had my fair share of close calls as a child in my city! I feel lucky to have had so much freedom. 30 years later I was told one guy I knew as a child was convicted of pedophilia: I still remember his awesome basement but I don't recall any bad close call with him (perhaps I was ugly : sorry sicko).
We don't notice many dangerous close calls.
Hopefully we learn from from other close calls we did notice... I remember hammering a blank gun cartridge (ramset) until it exploded and thinking I shouldn't do that again. I also did a lot things with fire that I shouldn't have!
till you are with that kid that is a bit too brave and a bit too eager and they do drop in some hole and break a leg or worse. That's what parents are afraid of, they remember some "close" accident in their childhood and want to make their kids not get chance to do a mistake.
Now ideally parents would just keep an eye on them, teach the kids, and maybe even "help" in potentially dangerous-yet-fun-for-kid stuff to make it not dangerous
...but parents now don't want to spend time just like parents back then didn't wanted to spend time and let kids alone to their own devices. Only difference before parents kicked kids outside while now parents give them ipad...
In no way was I a neglected kid. Parents still spent a huge deal of time with me, dad taught me drawing, astronomy, English, played guitar for me, we listened to music together, played games, walked together, printed photos, rode snow slegde downhill in the winter. Me being allowed to spend time outdoors with my friends was perfectly a part of their caring, not an attempt to get rid of me.
This is in stark contrast with the way parents want their children to be near and observed, but separated with black mirrors.
Now, please don't think that I blame every modern parent out there. There are enough good parents around even today. What I talk about are the trends in general.
Unfortunately, I don't see how kids would stick to offline experiences anymore if you just turn them loose in the neighborhood, because one of the other kids will undoubtedly have unfettered internet access, so the kids will likely just end up clustered around their computer or phone.
> made explosives out of match sticks, bolts and nuts
I used to do similar crazy things, had this friend who liked to play a kind of a game of chicken with an M-80, see who will hold on to it the longest. He would've been 45 years old today. /s
My elder brother would've been 47 this year should he not die aged 2 of sudden acute disease that doctors of that day and place couldn't stop. What's your point?
That "things were better in the old days, all this safety culture is pointless" overlooks the tragedies we became inured to back in those days?
I cannot count the number of times I've heard "we never bothered with that" with things like refrigerating leftovers, and its unspoken rider of "and it was fine" is never followed up with "look how foodborne illnesses are rising, or at least not dropping". Very curious.
Schools group together only one age of kid for socialization and only 20-30 of them. If your kid is not into the same thing as enough of the other kids in that group, they will likely be ostracized, even unintentionally. So you must let your kid do the things their friends do.
Broader society does not restrict the age of who you can socialize with. My friends vary in age quite a bit. My friend's kid can play with my kid despite being a different age, but that's much less than the 30 hours a week spent in school.
If the all class plays Fortnite and that is the only way they get socialized, his parents should consider moving him to another school. Many kids don't play this kind of stuff and actually prefer hanging out.
This kind of approach is also invalid. So what everyone plays Fortnite? There are many places to get socialized with other kids. The kid likes basketball? Sign him up to a basketball team; he likes to play music? Sign him to some band; etc. Kids shouldn't surrender to peer pressure.
I agree schools are also a problem, but not the main problem.
Yes, it's quite easy to change to the school with the "correctly"-behaved children in the USA. It won't solve any of the other structural issues that grade-separation causes, but at least this one has an easy answer!
Has an authority ever forbid you to do something and you still did it?
If so, was it a problem that you didn't listen?
I'm not a parent, but fortnite is not like smoking or drugs, common. If you don't let kids grow over this kind of bad content, they will never become good discriminators.
If they grow on it they will normalize this bad content. If someone didn't grow on Fortnite and then hear somebody wastes 6h a day on Fortnite, they will think "this guy is nuts".
Everybody consumes bad content when they are a child, and everybody grows over it, becoming bored of it, and then looking for something better to do.
What show did you like when you were a kid? Do you still like it? Are you eager to consume it in the same amount as you did? If not, it means you grew over it.
When I was a child I loved the Monkey Island series, completing them several times a year. Solving the puzzles made feel smart, and the jokes made me chuckle. But now? I could hardly complete the high-res remakes or even the latest title. The puzzles are either too simple or just nonsensical try-and-error, I find the story boring and shallow (compared to other content I consume now), and none of the jokes really hit the spot anymore.
I think forbidding kids to access content they crave is wrong and cruel, as you are basically forbidding them from exploring their tastes, forbidding them from becoming interesting adults with refined and deep tastes.
Even in the case of alcohol, I think people should explore it and their limits (getting wasted) when they are young. I have an aunt who never tried alcohol until she was in her 40s, and she went through the same phases as teenagers; however, at that age getting too drunk too often has serious social consequences. She spiraled out of control, becoming alcoholic, and then later addicted to other drugs. I am not a psychology expert, but I always thought that her problem was that she was too old to explore this path.
In my country we have an idiom I like: "potro que no galopa, de caballo se desboca", which means "colts that don't gallop become wild horses".
People are downvoting this but it's the correct response. I will never worry about Roblox because my child will never be able to play it at home. Problem solved. I understand that maybe non-technical people might not know to think about these things, but in this crowd this response should be the most upvoted. These things are poinsons. Don't feed your children poison. It's pretty simple. "They'll be left out!" Good! While other children consume poison my child will be left out from consuming poison.
I'm happy parents like you exist. I was growing up in the time it started being acceptable to give 10 year olds smartphones, and I desperately wanted one. My parents didn't get me one (mostly because we were broke). I eventually got one and while I will sing the praises of letting kids access the internet with less guardrails, the instant always connected access to the internet did a number to my mental health and I eventually switched to a dumbphone.
Same. I read his other replies, he definitely comes off as somebody who does not have experience with the complexities of raising children in today's world.
I like the idea and used it for a couple years, but the lack of functionality was a bummer.
Ghostty with shaders on the other hand gives me all the functionality AND the effects. Some people may not have figured this out yet but you can stack multiple shaders on top of each to get some really cool combination effects.
As somebody who's Blender curious but not a 3D graphics designer (I have minimal CAD experience, that's about it), I'd like to know what makes 5.0 special. The release notes are too technical and granular for me.
I prefer to treat testing like insurance. You purchase enough insurance to get the coverage you need, and not a penny more. Anything beyond that could be invested better.
Same thing with tests, get the coverage you need to build the confidence in your codebase, but don't tie yourself in knots trying to get that last 10%. It's not worth it. Create some manual and integration tests and move one.
I feel like type safety, memory safety, thread safety, etc. are are all similar. Building a physics core to simulate the stability of your nuclear stockpile? The typing should be second to none. Building yet another CSV exporter? Who gives a damn.
This is a perfectly reasonable argument if memory safety issues are essentially similar to logic bugs, but memory unsafety isn't like a logic bug.
A logic bug in a library doesn't break unrelated code. It's meaningful to talk about the continued execution of a program in the presence of logic bugs. Logic bugs don't time travel. There are ways to exhaustively prove the absence of logic bugs, e.g. MC/DC or state space exploration, even if they're expensive.
None of these properties are necessarily true of memory safety. A single memory safety violation in a library can smash your stack, or allow your code to be exploited. You can't exhaustively defend against this with error handling either. In C and C++, it's not meaningful to even talk about continued execution in the presence of memory safety violations. In C++, memory safety violations can time travel. You typically can't prove the absence of memory safety violations, except in languages designed to allow that.
With appropriate caveats noted (Fil-C, etc), we don't have good ways to retrofit memory safety onto languages and programs built without it or good ways to exhaustively diagnose violations. All we can do is structurally eliminate the possibility of memory unsafety in any code that might ever be used in a context where it's an important property. That's most code.
All of that stuff doesn’t matter though. If you look close enough everything is different to everything, but in real life we only take significant differences into consideration otherwise we’d go nuts.
Memory bugs have a high risk of exploitability. That’s it; the threat model will tell the team what they need to focus on.
Nothing in software or engineering is absolute. Some projects have decided they need compile-time guarantees about memory safety, others are experimenting with it, many still use C or C++ and the Earth keeps spinning.
If your attacker controls the data you're exporting to a CSV file, they can take advantage of a memory safety issue in your CSV exporter to execute arbitrary code on your machine.
> Building yet another CSV exporter? Who gives a damn.
The problem with memory unsafe code is that it can have unexpected and unpredictable side-effects. Such as subtly altering the critical data you're exporting, of letting an attacker take control of your CSV exporter.
In other words, you need quite a lot of context to figure out that a memory bug in your CSV exporter won't be used for escalation. Figuring out that context, documenting it and making sure that the context never changes for the lifetime of your code? That sounds like a much complex proposition that using memory-safe tools in the first place.
Since they're all RPI alternatives anyway and you don't get the ecosystem benefits, you should try an Intel N100. I switched my personal services over to one of those a couple years ago, and it's a great bang-for-your-buck small server. Being an Intel chip, stock Ubuntu just works. I've had no compatibility issues.
N100 indeed looks like a good alternative. I own one N100-based mini PC and I see there are some N100-based SBC as well. x86-like support for ARM/RISC-V SoC would be a miracle ;-).
Yeah, I love it. Losing access to the RPI ecosystem addons kind of sucks, but I found I don't really use them anyway. I think you can get a USB GPIO if you really need that, but personally I've moved more towards N100 for services, ESP32 for devices.
How comfortable are you with naming and shaming the company? I don't think things are going to change if we don't call this stuff out loudly and publicly.
That's awful but I'm glad you were able to figure this out. I've had my own problems with insurance companies, but nothing to this level. I can't imagine the frustration, especially with YOUR CHILD'S HEALTH on the line.
Five years back I ended up getting surgery for a herniated disc. I was in immense and crippling pain. Before having the surgery, we decided to go through a round epidural shots. I had done that 20 years previously and it resolved the problem, so why wouldn't I?
Turns out my insurance company (who I will name: BCBSIL) delegated the approval for the epidurals through some kind of extra bureaucratic process with a 3rd party. It took days and additional effort on our end to get approved.
I remind you, I was in crippling pain at the time.
The delays getting this approved lead to me taking more Ibuprofen than I would otherwise have taken, which in turn lead to signs of internal bleeding. I had to ease off the Ibuprofen and significantly increase the amount of codeine (a drug which does not sit well with me) just to get by. Now not only did I have to wait for the approval, but I then had to wait for the signs of internal bleeding to go away before the doctor would give me the shot (which was the right call, even though it sucked).
Delays, compounding delays, compounding delays, all while I was absolutely miserable.
Anyway, I finally got approved and got the shot and it kinda helped, but didn't fix the issue. I had a second shot, got worse, and then decided we had no choice but to schedule the surgery.
The most frustrating thing (but something I am glad for) is that the surgery was approved immediately.
It's so maddening how inconsistent the whole thing is.
> How comfortable are you with naming and shaming the company?
Don't forget about the individuals responsible. Both the ones that made the denial decision, and the ones that instituted the internal system that incentivizes such denials.
Oh I'm with you. I've been trying to clean up my setup and the Pi5 is still a problem. Even my Intel N100 NUC is using a USB-C to barrel jack adapter and working great with a perfectly normal multi-port GAN charger, but the Pi5? "Undervoltage Detected"
I'm really digging Ghosty's shaders. It finally feels like a gimmicky terminal done right. Want a Fallout or CRT theme without compromising on other features? You can finally have it. It brings back memories of the early days of Linux when everything was fun and not trying to mimic the most bland OS out there. Think Enlightenment before everything got gnomified.
