Viewing profile — Chris_Newton

The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well in…

Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes …

I’m with andreyvit on this one. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had read a subject involving a lot more essay-writing at university. In subjects like the mathematics and computer s…

I also prefer to have a smaller network of people I actually know. I haven’t found LinkedIn to be a very valuable channel for finding new clients, but it’s always nice to see past …

Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time. Sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean here. What do we win by being faster at producing the wrong things…

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are…

Interesting, thanks. In the UUID example you mentioned, it seems the CodeQL model is missing some information about how FastAPI’s runtime validation works and so not drawing correc…

This is true and customers do a lot of unfortunate things in the name of security theatre. Sometimes you have to play the cards you’ve been dealt and roll with it. However, educati…

OK, but all I said before was that CodeQL’s approach where it supplies a specific example to support a specific problem report is inherently resistant to false positives. Clearly i…

I too found that my LinkedIn account had suddenly become “temporarily” disabled a little while ago, for reasons unspecified. I too was invited to share my government ID with some v…

If you replace a dependency that has a known vulnerability with a different dependency that does not, surely that is objectively an improvement in at least that specific respect? O…

CodeQL seems to raise too many false-positives in my experience. I’d be interested in what kinds of false positives you’ve seen it produce. The functionality in CodeQL that I have …

Sorry, I don’t understand the point you’re making. If CodeQL reports that you have a XSS vulnerability in your code, and its report includes the complete and specific code path tha…

Dependabot has some value IME, but all naïve tools that only check software and version numbers against a vulnerability database tend to be noisy if they don’t then do something el…

MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic. Yes, but the “MVC” pattern used by various back-end web frameworks that borrowed the term…

In the original MVC architecture, the fundamental idea was that the model was responsible for storing the application state, a view was responsible for rendering output to the user…

B5 is still one of my favourite TV shows of all time. The common criticisms are largely true: it does start slow with some weak episodes in season 1, some of the acting is a bit wo…

I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, …

The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public …

Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now. Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwar…

I can only speak anecdotally, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been unlucky with this particular box, but I’ve seen a few quite serious issues going back over the past few …

Instability is one of the biggest but perhaps also the least understood downsides of NixOS, IMHO. Contrary to the name, even the stable branch of NixOS can have problems while inst…

I once had a well-known LLM reproduce pretty much an entire file from a well-known React library verbatim. I was writing code in an unrelated programming language at the time, and …

I think I prefer languages that realize things can improve and are willing to say if you want to run 10 year old code, use a 10 year old compiler/runtime. IMHO, the trouble with th…

IMHO, the ideal for package management in a programming language ecosystem might recognise multiple levels of “standardisation”. At the top, you have the true standard library for …