Daily Tech News 18 May 2025

• Proton - the company behind secure email ProtonMail and also ProtonVPN - has said it will leave Switzerland if new legislation passes that would require all internet service to maintain IP logging. (Tech Radar)
  
  Proton keeps only very short-term logs to keep the system running, and only provides customer information reluctantly and with a court order. Proton's CEO says the new laws would violate privacy in ways already forbidden in the US and EU.
  
  
  
• So where would Proton go? Well, not anywhere in the EU, which is planning legislation that would outlaw security entirely. (Tech Radar)
  
  The proposed rules would mandate backdoors in all end-to-end secure protocols, affecting not just Proton's services, but every website and app in the world except for those that are already not secure.

• Introducing Pyrefly, a new tool that hacks type checking into Python after the fact. (Facebook)
  
  Use a type-safe language in the first place.
  
  
  
• Like Seed7. (Thomas Mertes)
  
  Probably not, because this is a language written by one guy in a cave with a box of scraps.
  
  But maybe, because it looks to be well-designed and well-documented. It's a pretty conventional member of the Pascal family of languages - not at all a bad thing - with a pretty solid set of built-in types and structures. If you have a passing familiarity with any language descended from Pascal you can read Seed7 code.
  
  
  
• No, the universe will not disintegrate in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years. You idiots. (Azimuth)

  Thus, if the underlying space-time admits a everywhere time-like Killing field, the vacuum state is indeed stable and phenomena such as the spontaneous creation of particles do not occur.

  Fair enough.

  This condition of having an "everywhere time-like Killing field" says that a spacetime has time translation symmetry. Ashtekar and Magnon also assume that spacetime is globally hyperbolic and that the wave equation for a massive spin-zero particle has a smooth solution given smooth initial data. All this lets us define a concept of energy for solutions of this equation. It also lets us split solutions into positive-frequency solutions, which correspond to particles, and negative-frequency ones, which correspond to antiparticles. We can thus set up quantum field theory in way we're used to on Minkowski spacetime, where there's a well-defined vacuum which does not decay into particle-antiparticle pairs.

  I know several of those words.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow just committed suicide. (DevClass)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• I've said many times that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site. It tries to express every human language ever - including some imaginary ones - using a single character set. But since the same character is used in directly contradictory ways in different languages, the Unicode team ended up with multiple character codes for visually identical characters.
  
  Oh, not only is Unicode a complete semantic disaster, but both Unicode and the fonts used to display it are Turing-complete - the text is a programming language that executes itself. (Stack Exchange)
  
  Which gives you an infinite attack surface for every program written using Unicode, which these days is all of them. (Daniel Stenberg)
  
  SIXBIT or bust.
  
  
  
• Silicon Power's new CUDIMMs run at 9200MHz. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Albeit at 1.45v. The standard voltage for DDR5 memory is 1.1v.
  
  And also only on Intel CPUs. On Ryzen 8000 and 9000 CPUs they drop back to default speed, which is just 3200MHz. On Ryzen 7000 CPUs they don't work at all.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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