Martin Uecker

Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering
Graz University of Technology

Institute of Biomedical Imaging, TU Graz: https://ibi.tugraz.at/

Last Notes

2026-05-10 09:53:16 UTC

Debian will require reproducible builds!This is a huge milestone.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/05/msg00001.html
#Debian #reproduciblebuilds

2026-05-02 13:09:59 UTC

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The Chinese room argument is fairly unconvincing though. It would not be the person mindlessly following a rule book who can speak Chinese, but the system consisting of the rule book (software) and the processor (person in the room). Nobody would argue that a CPU / GPU is conscious either, but this does not logically preclude a computer with suitable software from being conscious. (no, I do not believe modern Chat bots are conscious, but they also do not pass a real Turing test)

2025-03-23 06:51:22 UTC

Sie hätten Hitler stoppen können
https://zeitung.faz.net/fas/politik/2025-03-23/d974bf1f6eef25ff6c6c0e6a23436a89/?GEPC=s10

2024-08-11 08:07:40 UTC

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It is because the command line is stable and does not change all the time. GUIs also generally lack consistency and modularity. It could be different in theory. i don't know why GUIs arre so bad and need to be change all time.

2024-07-20 06:11:53 UTC

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The argument that a memory safe language would have prevented the problem is incorrect, because terminating the program (kernel) on invalid operation *is* something that could also happen in a memory safe language and seems even the default in Rust for many things. Whether you could have done it differently (certainly!) and whether Rust makes this easier or not is a different discussion.

2024-07-20 05:47:09 UTC

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You can not do what? Forcing people to use at instead of [] in C++? Would certainly be possible. But the discussion what "you could do" misses the point completely. What would happen in reality in a poor code base written on limited budget? Most likely would simply panic, or?

2024-07-19 20:09:35 UTC

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Then I do not see an inherent advantage of using Rust here. Maybe the careful Rust programmer could have added the code to do something else than crash. The people implementing the page fault handling could have done the same. The guy writing the parser (?) could have made sure to handle all cases correctly, etc. But there many design trade offs... Fundamentally, there are higher level engineering decisions which went wrong here IMHO.

2024-07-19 19:34:50 UTC

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Not sure what the point is. We seem to be right back to "the programmer has to do a good job".

2024-07-19 18:01:49 UTC

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BUG would bring the system down. So how is the result different?

2024-07-19 17:00:47 UTC

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Wouldn't you get a panic by default for an out-of-bounds access in Rust? How would the end result be different? Also see Ariane 5 for an example how memory safety can fail rather spectacularly.