This is great news. I had hacked together some bash and fish scripts to mostly do this but they still had some rough edges. I missed that uv now had this ready for preview
Think of how safe we'd all be if we were on camera 24/7/365!
Let me put it this way: I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but damned if I want someone watching me in there. Everyone has their line they don't want crossed. Klein's - and the EFF's, and mine - is somewhere past the NSA monitoring every single communication in the entire country without a warrant. I have no objection with them monitoring specific suspects with a court order, but I don't want them listening to people who aren't being actively, personally investigated.
Just because your communications data or metadata exists in some bulk dataset somewhere doesn't mean that it's being actively and personally investigated by anyone.
As with the issuance of a warrant for wiretapping, there would need to be a proportionate and legitmate reason for your communications within a such a dataset to be looked at.
the problem is that this data exists somewhere where i have no control over it and was collected without my consent, in clear violation of my constitutional rights. perhaps you have perfect trust in the current and future good faith of the US federal government, but perhaps you can understand why others do not. i would not want the local police keeping copies of all of my emails "just in case", why would it be any better for unaccountable strangers to keep secret dossiers on me?
Why would an analyst at the NSA be looking at your communications data?
It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that requires investigation, then they're not going to.
This is just a rewording of the "nothing to hide" argument.
And your edit seems to ignore that the analysts are humans. Police get caught abusing their access to data resources for personal gain frequently, why are NSA analysts different?
(Not even touching on the fact that mistakes happen, leaks happen, breaches happen, laws change, political winds change direction)
> It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that requires investigation, then they're not going to.
Yes, it is a bit like this. Except in this case the police don't need a warrant, they can enter your home for any reason at their discretion. You're putting a lot of trust in a bunch of people you've (I'm assuming) never met working for an agency that has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for the constitution. Either that or you're a really terrible glowie: "How do you do, fellow tech enthusiasts??"
Maybe they want to look at the naked pics being sent between you and your sexual partners, as has happened many times. Maybe they want to spy on their own sexual partners or prospective partners, which has also happened many times. Maybe they want to blackmail people for their own gain, which has, once again, happened many times. There are innumerable reasons with plenty of precedent for each and every one.
I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.
Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution, including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime), including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it to congress.
Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.
You won't get any argument from me. I agree. And even in agreement, I still say that there's a much larger grey area in Snowden's case. We can and should discuss whether his actions were justified. I think they are. But I can at least appreciate that people who disagree have legitimate reasons to see it otherwise.
Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.
The moment which struck me the most from all the recent confirmation hearings was the parade of senator after senator asking Tulsi Gabbard if Edward Snowden was a traitor. It was like the #1 priority for them that people believe that, and they would skip any relevant questions about the job only to pursue that one topic over and over.
No argument from me with what you wrote, either, I just wanted to make sure I was doing my interpretation justice by sharing it - there's certainly no shortage of posters parroting the other side's talking points.
It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic in the first place, and if not much, who was pulling the strings to draw attention to practices that our own government had an obvious interest in repressing and concealing discussion of.
Could be that Snowden took it to The Guardian, a foreign and international news outlet. The story how British intelligence folks showed up at the Guardian HQ and symbolically destroyed a hard drive, and the way Guardian management used their New York offices to work around restrictions in UK law to publish the story, that's quite a story itself, and of course journalists know how to get coverage and reach.
Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast. The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit in mind, not making a story big.
The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant ordinary people were and still are about both whistle blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)
> Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.
"Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it.
He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables.
Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally."
It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless collection of close to all global electronic communications.
And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts.
"We kill people based on metadata."
- General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA.
This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. Deliberately. "Acceptable collateral damage" is the euphemism used to mask the moral evil of deliberately murdering women and children.
And now he's nice and cozy in a country that is busy invading its neighbor... But one that the US President has himself cozied up to the leadership of as of late.
It's an odd world that makes odd bedfellows. One wonders depending on how the next four years go if Snowden could even catch a pardon.
... or if he did, the Russians would even let him leave.
In a parallel universe there must be a world where those choices of his serve as a reminder that the world, and the people within it, are not nearly as simple and convenient as narratives and principles would suggest.
Let's think it through. Say you're pretty passionately pissed off about what you directly observe (in this case spying), so you go full hero and do what he did. Then consequences come and the only lifeline you're given is... Russian.
You tasted the reality for a bit there, that was rough, but luckily you're safe and out. But wait, now you're being compelled into becoming an asset. And no lifelines are around anymore. Suddenly you realize that the reality of the stronger dog fucking never disappeared, and that choice you made was much more grave than you thought, and there's no real going back.
And it doesn't matter if this is what actually happened to Snowden, what matters is that this is a very reasonable possibility. People are not fairy tales, and especially not perfectly consistent in their thoughts and beliefs. Not spatially, not temporally. He may have at some point thought that doing the noble thing was his choice, but wouldn't now. He may have been swayed in other ways since, and now takes both stances at the same time, regardless how contradictory they are.
The real lie here is treating people larger than life. One can appreciate a result without subscribing to everything the person ever did or does, or labelling them one way or another.
He did not support the invasion of Ukraine. He just doesn’t comment on it. Which has somehow turned into an anti-Snowden talking point, despite the very obvious reasons why he doesn’t talk about it.
> Do you think he'd receive a fair trial if he came back to the US?
Honestly, yes. He was extremely visible and it was the Obama administration. I think it was well-understood how much damage it could have done to Democratic party interests if they nailed him to a wall for exposing behavior that was extremely unpopular among their constituents. Manning did far worse with far less duty-of-care and received a pardon after seven years.
For all its flaws, the US is actually a place where fair trials happen most of the time (especially when someone's in the media's eye). Snowden, much like Assange or Manning, wasn't in a position where he could just be disappeared. I think he traded, at most, a decade of discomfort for a lifetime of exile.
But it's his call. It's not like the US is the only good place to be; maybe a lifetime of exile is fine.
> Thank goodness he [was more willing to betray his position for moral reasons] than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities,
Which dilutes to this when challenged:
> he didn't oppose [the invation of Ukraine] for the same reason very few other Russians opposed it.
Those perspectives both can't be correct! If he was willing to face jail and expulsion for opposing US crimes, and to be celebrated for that, surely the same logic should hold for Russian crimes, no?
Snowden is complicated for sure. I think it's not unreasonable to ask why these decisions were different and to at least ask what differences he might have in loyalties and personal aims might lead to them.
He has never expressed himself to be anything other than a patriotic American. Why would he be putting his life on the line for a country that he does not identify with?
People who do that ti support just cause like Ukraine have my respect. But I wouldn’t expect if of anyone.
Uh, sure they can: he saw an opportunity where he could make a difference and bring a program to light where the NSA was otherwise blatantly lying to Congress and the American people, and he took it.
There is nothing he can or could do to stop the invasion of Ukraine.
Which is to say, he didn't merely oppose US crimes. He brought them to light. Everyone already knows about Ukraine.
He would have had a fair trial which would ultimately result in the dismantling of the entire US surveillance apparatus and would usher in the birth of the internet the forefathers intended.
Probably because the US empire had deteriorated enough by that point that revoking passports for exposing the blatant lies and crimes of our government was on the table by then.
Of course, it's different these days. These days they'd just kill Snowden. And Mark Klein, for that matter.
Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.
> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other
I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on
I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.
My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.
That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections" with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a manhole.
As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.
I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right circumstances -- instead of digging up your street connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the cost of replacement and works just as well.
We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the service line; past that would have been a lot more elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.
As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.
A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering them to just leave them alone.
how far is that sewer line run, 6 miles? they usually just bore it out and put a PVC sleeve inside. This is done with the cast iron sewer lines, because if they're not properly taken care of, they will rust into nothing and then you just have a suggestion of a hole through the dirt to the sewer line.
my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call me an ambulance.
I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from that company looks like.
It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this up and find the video, for what it's worth.
Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer inspection work. :)
I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of the movie Enemy of the State.
I hope the owner of the company doesn't read this. They probably like their designs! :)
I just went to Google maps to the address written on the van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle and not just a van, that's their look (they also have black versions if you look around): https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...
I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw
(The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)
That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
I would think that anyone working in a sewer inspection van would keep the door open because it is highly likely that sewer inspection vans smell like, well, sewer.
If the van is loaded with equipment, or even if it isn’t, theft and robbery are common in most of the US. You can’t leave a van door open and not be extremely vigilant.
One thing for certain: that is absolutely NOT a sewer inspection van. Seriously, you ever worked trades? It is way too clean on the interior and not fitted for working dirty jobs, to say nothing of the visible surveillance workstation.
The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?
I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from Germany (nationalplant.com and the specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread and I double-checked it.
Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or something? What are the odds, huh?
I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.
For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.
In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.
That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than:
1. Spotless.
2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.
3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.
And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans was snuffed.
`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet, but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers.
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people. There are enough checks and balances in the system to ensure that there is no change forthcoming.
> You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing.
> If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the electorate.
> That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
The joys of being old enough to remember the Church Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations, The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.
It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his face about his predicament.
I think Rust is harder to learn, but once you grok it, I don't think it's harder to use, or at least to use correctly. It's hard to write correct C because the standard tooling doesn't give you much help beyond `-Wall`. Rust's normal error messages are delightfully helpful. For example, I just wrote some bad code and got:
--> src/main.rs:45:34
|
45 | actions.append(&mut func(opt.selected));
| ---- ^^^^^^^^^^^^ expected `&str`, found `String`
| |
| arguments to this function are incorrect
|
help: consider borrowing here
|
45 | actions.append(&mut func(&opt.selected));
|
I even had to cheat a little to get that far, because my editor used rust-analyzer to flag the error before I had the chance to build the code.
Also, I highly recommend getting into the habit of running `cargo clippy` regularly. It's a wonderful tool for catching non-idiomatic code. I learned a lot from its suggestions on how I could improve my work.
> I think Rust is harder to learn, but once you grok it, I don't think it's harder to use, or at least to use correctly. It's hard to write correct C because the standard tooling doesn't give you much help beyond `-Wall`.
When I say Rust is harder to use (even after learning it decently well), what I mean is that it's still easier to write a pile of C code and get it to compile than it is to write a pile of Rust code and get it to compile.
The important difference is that the easier-written C code will have a bunch of bugs in it than the Rust code will. I think that's what I mean when I say Rust is harder to use, but I'm more productive in it: I have to do so much less debugging when writing Rust, and writing and debugging C code is more difficult and takes up more time than writing the Rust code (and doing whatever less debugging is necessary there).
> Also, I highly recommend getting into the habit of running `cargo clippy` regularly. It's a wonderful tool for catching non-idiomatic code.
That's a great tip, and I usually forget to do so. On a couple of my personal projects, I have a CI step that fails the build if there are any clippy messages, but I don't use it for most of my personal projects. I do have a `cargo fmt --check` in my pre-commit hooks, but I should add clippy to that as well.
If you're using VS Code then you can add `"rust-analyzer.check.command": "clippy"` to your `settings.json`. I assume there's a similar setting for rust-analyzer in other editors.
That's a fair distinction. Basically, it's easier to write C that compiles than Rust that compiles, but it's harder to write correct C than correct Rust.
Regarding Clippy, you can also crank it up with `cargo clippy -- -Wclippy::pedantic`. Some of the advice at that level gets a little suspect. Don't just blindly follow it. It offers some nice suggestions though, like:
warning: long literal lacking separators
--> src/main.rs:94:22
|
94 | if num > 1000000000000 {
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ help: consider: `1_000_000_000_000`
|
Vulnerabilities are bugs, so the C code will have more bugs than the Rust program.
You might say that the C and Rust code will have the same number of logic errors, but I'm not convinced that's the case either. Sure, if you just directly translate the C to Rust, maybe. But if you rewrite the C program in Rust while making good use of Rust's type system, it's likely you'll have fewer logic errors in the Rust code as well.
Rust has other nice features that will help avoid bugs you might write in a C program, like most Result-returning functions in the stdlib being marked #[must_use], or match expressions being exhaustive, to name a couple things.
Rust allows to provide more information about types (generic types, pointer usage) and checks it, while in C you have to rely on doc comments and checking the code manually. Or am I wrong and C allows to specify pointer nullability, pointer ownership and array bounds?
None of those things feature in any problem I deal with on a daily basis, whatever language I use.
So for example today I dealt with a synchronization issue. This turned out to not be a code bug but a human misunderstanding of a protocol specification saga, which was not possible to code into a type system of any sort. The day before was a constraint network specification error. In both cases the code was entirely irrelevant to the problem.
Literally all I deal with are human problems.
My point is Rust doesn't help with these at all, however clever you get. It is no different to C, but C will give you a superset of vulnerabilities on top of that.
Fundamentally Rust solves no problems I have. Because the problems that matter are human ones. We are too obsessed with the microscopic problems of programming languages and type systems and not concentrating on making quality software which is far more than just "Rust makes all my problems go away" because it doesn't. It kills a small class of problems which aren't relevant to a lot of domains.
(incidentally the problems above are implemented in a subset of c++)
> it's still easier to write a pile of C code and get it to compile than it is to write a pile of Rust code and get it to compile.
As someone who is more familiar with Rust than C: only if you grok the C build system(s). For me, getting C to build at all (esp. if I want to split it up into multiple files or use any kind of external library) is much more difficult than doing the same in Rust.
> Also, I highly recommend getting into the habit of running `cargo clippy` regularly.
You can also have that hooked up to the editor, just like `cargo check` errors. I find this to be quite useful, because i hace a hard time getting into habits, especially for thing that i'm not forced to do in some way. It's important that those Clippy lints are shown as soft warnings instead of hard errors though, as otherwise they'd be too distracting at times.
* Rust errors can be equally unhelpful. Also, the error you posted is hands down awful. It doesn't tell you what went wrong, and it's excessively naive to rely on compiler to offer a correct fix in all but the most trivial cases. When errors happen, it's a consequence of an impasse, a logical contradiction: two mutually exclusive arguments have been made: a file was assumed to exist, but was also assumed not to exist -- this is what's at the core of the error. The idiotic error that Rust compiler gave you doesn't say what were the assumptions, it just, essentially, tells you "here's the error, deal with it".
* In Rust, you will have to deal with a lot of unnecessary errors. The language is designed to make its users create a host of auxiliary entities: results, options, futures, tasks and so on. Instead of dealing with the "interesting" domain objects, the user of the language is mired in the "intricate interplay" between objects she doesn't care about. This is, in general, a woe of languages with extensive type systems, but in Rust it's a woe on a whole new level. Every program becomes a Sisyphean struggle to wrangle through all those unnecessary objects to finally get to write the actual code. Interestingly though, there's a tendency in a lot of programmers to like solving these useless problems instead of dealing with the objectives of their program (often because those objectives are boring or because programmers don't understand them, or because they have no influence over them).
I don't follow your first point—the compiler is pointing out exactly what the problem is (the argument has the incorrect type) and then telling you what you likely wanted to do (borrow the String). What would you see as a more helpful error message in this case?
The compiler says "expected X, but found Y". I don't know how to interpret this: is the type of the thing underlined with "^^^" X or Y? "Expected" and "found" are just like "up" and "down" in space: they are meaningless if you don't know what the compiler expects (and why should it?).
What it needs to say is something along the lines of "a function f is defined with type X, but is given an argument of type Y": maybe the function should be defined differently, maybe the argument needs to change -- it's up to the programmer to decide.
I dunno, I feel like if you've used a compiler regularly, "expected X, but found Y" is a pretty common idiom/shorthand that people understand. Your wordier version of that feels unnecessary to me.
C is a low level language and deals with things close to the metal. It's probably not fun to write a large business app in barebones C but you having control over low level things makes other things possible and very fast too. Depending on the type of problem you have use the appropriate and favorite language.
Since it's underlining code you wrote, it must be "found" that is highlighted, not "expected". Much like up and down, gravity exists to ground all of us in the same direction.
I'm over here with TTS: Underlining in a terminal rarely translates to audio. It isn't the only consideration that needs to be made, when making things clear.
I'm still going with Brother. There was a recent claim that they disabled 3rd party toners but there were lots of anecdotal stories of people who had no such trouble with it.
If Brother ever truly loses the plot, my next printer will be the local FedEx store. Life's too short to fight hostile hardware.
I have a Brother multifunction colour inkjet (MFC-J995DW). I generally only printed in B&W on the very rare occasion I printed, so when a colour ran out (usually because one of my children errantly printed some giant colour thing) it was perfectly happy to keep printing black content using the giant, very full black cartridge.
A recent (as in the past two years) update removed that benefit. Now it fully refuses to function in any capacity if a colour cartridge is out. It won't let me print fully-black content, and it won't even let me scan.
"Night Mission Pinball" wasn't created by Budge but rather Bruce Artwick, the same guy who created the Sublogic Flight Simulator (and early versions of the Microsoft Flight Simulator which descended from it).
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