How do you count how many bugs a program has? If I replace the Clang code base by a program that always outputs a binary that prints hello world, how many bugs is that? Or if I replace it with a program that exits immediately?
Maybe another example is compiler optimisations: if we say that an optimising compiler is correct if it outputs the most efficient (in number of executed CPU instructions) output program for the every input program, then every optimising compiler is buggy. You can always make it less buggy by making more of the outputs correct, but you can never satisfy the specification on ALL inputs because of undecidability.
“Expression” is a bit of an overloaded word here. Carrying a swastika is considered similar to hate speech. Just like you cannot just make death threats in the U.S., even though you are just “expressing” yourself as long as you do not carry out the threat. Not saying those are exactly the same, but there are limits to expression, and spreading hate against large swathes of people is considered like that in Europe. Especially because that kind of speech can at some point turn into actual physical violence against the groups in question.
Threats aren't illegal because of their information content, they're effectively evidence of intent to commit violence. It's like confessing to a crime. You're being punished for the crime, not for the admission, but you admitting to it sure makes it easier to prove.
You and the parent both made good points. In Germany a swastika might be seen as more of a direct threat of specific action than other places. That makes it more sensible to classify as a threat.
That's the argument authoritarians use when they want to censor something. The problem with it is that it proves too much. Do we also get to apply it to symbols of communism because of the millions of people who died under Mao, or the US flag because of slavery? What about that book Marx wrote that led to all the horrors under the USSR; can't displaying books also be symbolic?
You don't want the government to have the power to decide things like that. It's better that they censor nothing.
With the way things are going with climate change, I think that assuming “extreme climate events in different geographies are independent statistical events” is an extremely flawed assumption to make. You acknowledge that it is a simplified model, but that is not some minor oversight. Any model that does not account for this is deeply flawed, and I think no insurance company would choose to model extreme event risk like that. There are common factors (e.g. global average temperature) that can cause many of these events to be triggered in a correlated way.
A “2% risk of default” on an individual bond is something a retail investor might be able to understand, but no one should be buying a “diversified” bundle of these things if they cannot form a reasonable understanding of how correlated they are. Why should understanding the correlation risk be left up to individual investors building their own portfolios?
I also think forming an intuition for these more “all-or-nothing” type events is more difficult than e.g. understanding that if GOOG goes down 10% then AAPL might do too at the same time because they are both tech stocks.
> Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.
That’s a very optimistic take on how “rational” society tends to be. The thought that “if things are in a certain way in society, then it must make sense (from a moral or societal point of view) for them to be that way.”
The person you are replying to shared some research by experts on the topic giving recommendations. You can argue for or against anything, but it’s useful to at least engage with the evidence being presented.
Did you look at the link? Its just a long list. There is no point in there to engage with, and regardless the point of contention is not reporting in abstract, its the exact terminology of "commit suicide", its not even clear that is explored at all.
I guess the internal exposure state would be “wrong” if the compiler removes the dead load (e.g in a pass that runs before provenance analysis).
However, if all of the program paths from that point onward behave the same as if the pointer was marked as exposed, that would be fine. It’s only “wrong” to track the incorrect abstract machine state when that would lead to a different behaviour in the abstract machine.
In that sense I suppose it’s no different from things like removing a variable initialisation if the variable is never used. That also has a side effect in the abstract machine, but it can still be optimised out if that abstract machine side effect is not observable.
The specification proves a property about an algorithm/function, namely the equivalence between a more complicated memoizing implementation and a simpler direct recursive implementation.
It is also true that no numerical reasoning is happening: the memoized version of any recursive relation will return the same result as the original function, assuming the function is not stateful and will return the same outputs given the same inputs.
However, it is not true to say that it does this by exhaustion, since there are infinitely many possible outputs and therefore it cannot be exhaustively checked by direct computation. The “n” for which we are “taking the proof” is symbolic, and hence symbolic justification and abstract invariants are used to provide the proof. It is the symbolic/abstract steps that are verified by the type checker, which involves only finite reasoning.
Of course, the symbolic steps somewhat mirror the concrete computations that would happen if you build the table, especially for a simpler proof like this. But it also shouldn’t be surprising that a program correctness proof would look at the steps that a program takes and reason about them in an abstract way to see that they are correct in all cases.
How could you say that your views are aligned with those of Descartes and Kant if you have not seriously engaged with their works and what others have written about them?
All serious works in philosophy (Kant especially) are subject to interpretation. Whole research programmes exist around the works of major philosophers, interpreting and building on their works.
One cannot really do justice to e.g. the Critique of Pure Reason by discussing it based on a high level summary of the “main ideas” contained in it. These works have had a major impact on the history of Western philosophy and were groundbreaking at the time (and still are).
I think they basically agree with your point here -- they mention Descartes and Kant to say roughly "I hold basically these ideas, but I don't mention the philosophers' names when I talk about them because 1) I came to them independently, and 2) the people I'm talking to are not familiar with the context so situating our conversation there isn't helpful." Their argument is that you can have philosophical conversations without relying on the context of the canon, and that in a first-level discussion they wouldn't bring up Descartes or Kant.
I gave the example of the U.K., a dystopian privacy violator. The U.K. is in Europe.
The entirety of Europe would not come close to making a majority of countries. Even if I grant you the "entirety of Europe", I bet I'm still right that most (i.e., more than half) of countries reserve the right to search your device at the border, and will compel you to give the password.
In the U.S., I believe you are covered by your 5th Amendment self-incrimination protections. I have some recollection that there are situations where authorities will compel you, like if you're not the one being accused of the crime.
I think the issue comes with trying to present a USB mass storage API to the host where you allow the host to write to any arbitrary byte offset of the mass storage device without the structure that is imposed by a file system.
If the host and guest both get presented with the same “array of bytes” mass storage interface, then they will compete and potentially mess up each other’s reads and writes, let’s say if they both treat that array of bytes as an ext4 file system and try to write a file system metadata to the same physical location at the same time.
Of course you have have a “virtual file system” exposed over USB, but isn’t that exactly what MTP is? The point is that USB mass storage is not a virtual file system.
Maybe another example is compiler optimisations: if we say that an optimising compiler is correct if it outputs the most efficient (in number of executed CPU instructions) output program for the every input program, then every optimising compiler is buggy. You can always make it less buggy by making more of the outputs correct, but you can never satisfy the specification on ALL inputs because of undecidability.