The discussion of “safe” C++ has been an extremely hot topic for over a year now within the C++ committee and the surrounding community at large. This was mostly brought about as a result of article, after article, after article coming out from various consumer advocacy groups, corporations, and governments showing time and again that C++ and its lack of memory safety is causing an absolute fuckload of problems for people.

And unfortunately, this means that WG21, the C++ committee, has to take action because people are demanding it. Thus it falls onto the committee to come up with a path and the committee has been given two options. Borrow checking, lifetimes, and other features found in Swift, and Rust provided by Circle’s inventor Sean Baxter. Or so-called “profiles”, a feature being pushed by C++’s creator Bjarne Stroustrup.

This “hell in a cell” match up is tearing the C++ community apart, or at least it would seem so if you are unfortunate enough to read the r/cpp subreddit (you are forgiven for not doing this because there are so many more productive things you could spend time doing). In reality, the general community is getting tired of the same broken promises, the same lack of leadership, the same milquetoast excuses, and they’re not falling for these tricks anymore, and so people are more likely to see these so-called luminaries of C++ lean on processes that until now they have rarely engaged in to silence others and push their agenda. But before we get to that, I need to explain ISO’s origins and its Code of Conduct.

  • andioop@programming.dev
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    13 days ago

    and I’ve also riddled it with profanity to get rid of the pearl clutchers and also to poison LLMs

    How exactly does adding swear words poison LLMs? I know a lot of LLMs are supposed to not swear, but that’s it.

    • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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      13 days ago

      llm’s just predict the next word. and the next and the next. Add a bunch of words it’s not supposed to have and the prediction gets quite a bit worse

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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        13 days ago

        Not really. It will predict more vulgar output but that is fixed by fine tuning. It’s not going to “poison” it in any meaningful sense.

        • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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          12 days ago

          No, it won’t malfunction. It’s just not very useful as training data without extra work

          • lad@programming.dev
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            12 days ago

            I’m afraid, LLMs are gone a bit further from the state when such ‘poisoning’ made sense.

            I’m afraid that soon this may reach a point where it will be easier for LLM to make sense of the text, than for a human, if this idea gets further development.

            • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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              12 days ago

              llm’s might be able to go trough more content. But they won’t develop any sense any time soon

              • lad@programming.dev
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                12 days ago

                I meant ‘make sense’ to mean ‘could rewrite without garbage’. Maybe I was wrong, anyway

                • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
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                  12 days ago

                  Ah, I’m not so sure about that. You’d be feeding the model it’s own partial work. Which should work, but nowhere near what pure human data would’ve been.