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Are you talking about for the AI Pac-Man or the ghosts? Because the ghosts in real Pac-Man don’t have cornering.


Pac man in Pac-man has cornering.


This is not true. NT never had fork, was always based on the assumption of an MMU and Dave Cutler was a well known fork hater in the 80s long before this paper came out and made it cool to be so. By the time Windows 95 was out, the baseline was 386 with an MMU. CreateThread was initially designed for NT in 1993 though (which didn’t support pre-386 CPUs).


As mentioned elsewhere on this page, Windows NT had fork from the start. Vide NtCreateProcess and what happens if an image file is not explicitly supplied.

* https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb...


NtCreateProcess was not a public Windows API. NT was flexible, that’s not what was being discussed, which should have been clear from the context.


NtCreateProcess doesn’t accept an image file parameter.


You haven't read the doco. I did point to some. The image file is supplied (or not) via the section object.

Think it through. Windows NT supported fork from the start in its POSIX subsystem, that subsystem was layered on top of the Native API, and this is the Native API mechanism that the POSIX subsystem employed. Although it took until Gary Nebbett for someone to publicly show how, even though people knew informally back in 1993.


NT performed unnatural acts to implement fork semantics for the POSIX subsystem.


> It's weird to leave out a mention of copy-on-write

For the intended audience of such a paper this is base knowledge.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

You can go straight to hell for making me feel old.


As a kid I absolutely loved these interfaces.



I still do, honestly.


guess who is reusing that name?

https://bob.ibm.com/

I saw IBMers wearing shirts with it at the moscone center this week at the snowflake event.


Absolutely not to defend what happened but that GAD diagnosis sets in motion the anchoring, because now you have an “established” (and recent) psychiatric diagnosis and it’s all too common that an ED is going to heavily prioritize this as a progression. EDs are just very bad in general about reconsidering a differential for a (new) chronic condition unless it’s flashing like a neon sign, especially when there is an easy enough dispo to reach for, transfer to psych in this case. But even worse, you already had an extensive outpatient workup to hang their hat on. From the history provided the history of a fall is the only thing mentioned that sounded like a slam dunk brewing neurological deficit, and it is not very specific, half the ED are people that fell. I’m sure you’ve read the MDM portion of the ED note, it may or may not give some idea of why neurological conditions were dismissed. Very unfortunate.


That is an interesting take that I hadn't thought of. Thank you for that perspective.

I actually haven't been able to get the ED notes from that first ER visit yet. They are in a different system than Brigham and Women's, which made it super easy to read notes in their app.


That’s exactly how all the current cloud chat bots and agents work now.


I use Linux as a daily driver, write and modify kernel (mainline and out of tree) and userspace drivers, have reverse engineered various things. ie beyond most of the HN peanut gallery. That said I use an iPhone because I have a day job and nothing “open” is worth dealing with.


I use Linux as a daily driver, using it on servers since 1991 (or 92 whenever boot.tgz/root.tgz was released), have been coding for 45 years, started several successful open source projects, wrote a full text search engine in Java in the 90s before there was Lucene, wrote the core Wiki markup engine that powered Atlassian Confluence for quite some time, because Mike asked me. That said I use a Google Pixel because - after decades of using Apple (from first iBook G3, first MacBook, first iPhone, first iPod, iPod nano, first iPad, Xserve, Xsan, iMac Pro and on and on an on) I left the Apple ecosystem when Steve died - to me Apple feels too constraining.

Not sure what that exchange was for, but I like it!

PS: Not a native speaker, don't know what "HN peanut gallery" means. But I like peanuts, though I think Peanuts are overrated. Though sometimes our dog looks like Snoopy, when her ears are flying.


So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest about who contributes to open source. The point is there is a certain extent I will go to maintain my ideals of using certain systems and it is more than average even for here (the peanut gallery), and on par with the influencer in question, ie I can relate regardless of their “inauthentic” persona. Most people, even those that consider themselves “enthusiasts”, simply won’t go to the effort of reverse engineering or writing drivers - if it were the case there would be a much larger ecosystem of high quality drivers and a larger pool of contributors. I am in that minority and still use an iPhone, and I don’t have a subscriber count.

2. A google pixel isn’t meaningfully more open than an iPhone (I depend on functionality that would be unavailable if rooted). This wasn’t meant to be an iPhone vs android debate. For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent.


"inauthentic" is your judgement based on your values. My post was not about judgement, just about explaining what I think happens with influencers. Your reply was based on your perception and assumptions, not on what I said it feels. Most influencers use Apple if using Graphene doesn't drive subscribers.

"reverse engineering or writing drivers"

When I encountered Linux I was already too old to be interested in that kind of things. But I did disassemble C/PM code. I was interested in blue boxing, cracking of games, infinite life reverse engineering and hacking in the 80s though.

"For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent."

Again it feels like you made some assumptions about me and what I wanted to say which are just that, assumptions.


You literally said: “They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. ”

“Inauthentic” was I still think a close enough reference paraphrase of your statement. Not a value judgement. You even used the word "authentic" in your thesis. And in general I wouldn’t necessarily disagree but I don’t see how it is necessarily related to their choice of personal devices. An internet celeb probably doesn’t use GrapheneOS because the limitations sucks for most people, not because of some calculated subscriber count play.

If you use an unrooted Pixel, why are we even having this conversation, and if not.. well maybe the dude just wants to use a secure wallet.

Regardless of this influencer's "real life" persona I see nothing incongruent about even their "influencer" persona using an iPhone. Therefore I see no relevance to anything in your original comment.


Yes I did, and you called that "inauthentic" based on your value system. I'm not a native speaker but in German "inauthentic" (unauthentisch) would not be considered a neutral description.

"So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest"

You can say "I didn't intend this a dick sizing contest" but you can't say "This wasn't a dick sizing contest". Again this is based on your judgement.


Anyone relying on a 30+ year old monolith kernel written in C to not have some exploitable LPEs lurking should stay in basket weaving and out of sysadmin.


Yep.

You should treat any system where non-admins regularly login as basically insecure/owned and rig your architecture appropriately.

TBH -- I don't have any of these kinds of boxes anymore. Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?


Not necessarily FreeBSD, but for Linux this applies to most universities with a CS program, I think.

The systems should be cut off from sensitive administrative data, but a malicious student would at the very least have access to the other students' data with an LPE.


>> monolith kernel written in C

> Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?

Am I parsing your question correctly?


No, I worded it badly. See below.


Stability of ecosystem. No systemd. Native ZFS. Jails over Docker. Been using it for 20+ years and it’s my preferred server OS.


No, I mean do you run FreeBSD boxes where users who should not ever assume root access actually login to do tasks?

My point is that if you do, you probably shouldn't run, for e.g applications which need production db credential, or hold sensitive data on these boxes, or .. whatever.

Edit: I use FreeBSD extensively, for various things -- but shell access to them is restricted to the sysadmins..


No. And hosting providers I have used usually use VM isolation (QEMU/etc) for the VPS type instances they allocate to users. The VM is vulnerable if it happens to have a kernel compiled such that allows this vuln.


Also statements like this one - TBH -- I don't have any of these kinds of boxes anymore. Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?

Does not convey what your clarification attemps to state.


I mean, where I work we offer machines to external users where they have shell access to be able to do their science, but I don't want them to have root access. Other institutes we work with (like supercomputer networks, etc) give us/users non-root access.

When things like CVE-2026-31431 or the bug that this thread is about affect our systems it causes a big headache. Yeah, we firewall off what we _can_ by having different machines doing critical things versus the ones where science users have code execution, but we don't have the resources to give every user their own machine.


Hard to tell about FreeBSD, it's basically extincted, but think of webhosting servers, wordpress, cPanel/Plesk and alike.

often it's ssh'able with things like rbash and other restrictions and almost always you, well, can run something there (as you can edit php/other files right from web management ui).

Hordes of this (in Linux world).


Extinct? Far from, just doesn’t draw the crowd/press Linux does. An OS used as a stable server OS workhorse with exceptional ZFS support and doesn’t have to push for the desktop market doesn’t mean it’s extinct.

I’ve run FreeBSD on stinkpads back in the early 2000s fine. I prefer MacOS these days as a daily driver - hardware quality.

But server OS is FreeBSD. Void when I need Cuda/docker/etc. (Yes, FreeBSD has docker support, but just use Linux if needing that.


Yep

Try to search vacancies for FreeBSD or candidates with FreeBSD knowledge/background, you will be surprised, its desert.

Even TrueNAS realized it's a dead end for reaching wide audience needs and migrated to Linux (as you mentioned zfs, your probably heard a thing or two on TrueNAS).

I have not tried in the last 10 years, so don't have numbers, my ballpark figure about having small infra team say of 5 persons and try to hire for FreeBSD would be longer and more expensive.

I see somewhat tolerable Linux Corp fleet of laptops (still meh, but somewhat works), what you will reply to your users when they complain on WiFi or Zoom not working and how will procurement work for you interesting questions for me.

Red Book for FreeBSD animal, can meet somewhere deep in tundra, but not a widespread species- extinction form my POV.


Same. I've been using it since 1996. Initially, we used it at an early ISP for DNS, SMTP, and POP3 for roughly 8K users, and it stuck with me.


Free root for anyone for over 20 years too.


Nope.

The bug appears to have been introduced in some FreeBSD 13 version.

I run FreeBSD servers that do not have this bug. In my "kern_exec.c" there is no "consume" anywhere. There is also no "memmove" at all.

That file was last patched in 2024, but whatever changes had introduced that bug, they were not back-ported to older FreeBSD versions, so those are not affected.


Not sure why the snark but if people are running FreeBSD then they should be...basket weaving instead of using it? Yes, the correct solution is to patch and reboot but not everyone is in a place to jump and do that which is why a temp workaround, if possible, would be welcome


I think good system should be prepared to do a reboot in a short notice. Even some long running jobs can have a pause mechanism.


There was no snark. If you have something of importance running and the inevitable discovery of an LPE is something you don’t have defense for or can quickly mitigate you’re doing a bad job as a sysadmin. For all general purpose OS in common use today that usually means patch and reboot should be an NBD workaround.


...as opposed to what, exactly? Linux is a 34 y.o. monolithic kernel in C, the BSDs are all forked from the same base (386BSD) of around the same age, XNU is 29 years old (and also heavily based on BSD code while also throwing in mach code) in C and other languages,...


The 33 year old Windows NT kernel, duh.


Well good for you. Us poors in the US like them for what they’re worth.


Like what? That banks will make you instantly whole on card fraud to debit cards, and are legally required to do so? I like that too.


In addition to nominal fraud prevention (and how is any debit card better) there’s nothing better to claw back transaction fees, so what the fuck am I supposed to do?


I'm not saying debit cards are better at fraud prevention and response; I'm saying they're roughly equivalent. The downsides of credit cards are self-evident.


The downsides aren’t really self-evident to me. I’ve been using credit cards for everything I can for 35 years and I can’t think of any downsides. Even the cards I’ve had that had annual fees I chose to pay that fee because the benefits were worth more than the fee to me.

I can think of plenty of times where the upsides of having a credit card were realized though.


You don't know anybody in 5-figure+ credit card debt? I know several. I don't know anybody in debit card debt.


No, I don’t know of anybody who has a big credit card debt. I don’t think I’ve ever carried a credit card balance past my payment date.

I did have a six-figure debt to a bank and if didn’t make my payments they would take the house from my family! Much higher stakes than any credit card debt I’ve ever had.

I do have a debit card though and it’s actually not that different from a credit card. If I spend money not in my account I would get charged a $25 overdraft fee plus interest.


I think that's weird, because I can count off 6 or 7 just off the top of my head, people I know reasonably well, all of them well-educated, and smarter & better organized than I am. I don't really understand the argument we'd be having here: obviously, empirically, credit card debt is an enormous problem in the United States.


I haven’t really talked about that kind of stuff with people I know. I could be surrounded by people who have big debt and just don’t know.

A quick googling says that about half of all credit card holders carry some kind of balance each month, so clearly there must be some people in my orbit not paying it off.


I'd be one of them, but I can't be, because I don't use credit cards.


I’m too much of a cheapskate to carry a balance and pay interest. And it’s my cheapskate tendencies that makes me use the credit card for everything for the benefits.


I 100% get it. I have minmaxer friends who do the same thing, are very good at it, and will never get into trouble. My thing is, revolving credit is a default in the US, and it's not a sensible default for most people.


So maybe I’m wrong but the belief is that debit card protections are worse than a credit card in the US. I really don’t have the personal time to test this, but I do know that when I dispute on a credit card it is initially removed until proven valid.

Again maybe I’m wrong but I don’t agree they are equivalent. It sure fucking feels that way, the money isn’t threatened from my account.


Not sure how any of these except maybe the Dreamcast (and then not by that much - it was almost literally a contemporary arcade board clone) were examples of “ahead of its time”.



I bought a DC on launch week, it's one of my favourite consoles of all time. I still own one. But what has bleemcast got to do with what the parent said?


To demonstrate how powerful and far ahead it was.


The Dreamcast charm is partly how simple it is, a jellybean CPU. The PowerVR is competent but it’s not outside the norm for 3D accelerators of the period (and there was a mass produced PCI card available of it). Nothing about the Dreamcast is exotic. Though the pack in modem and VMU are neat (did say “maybe” for the DC). GD-ROM vs DVD was obviously a dumb move. Perhaps Sega didn’t have the war chest to loss leader a DVD Dreamcast (they didn’t have the vision either at that point).

A technical demo like Bleemcast doesn’t demonstrate how far ahead something is, it has to be seen relative to the hardware of a similar generation. Having said that the PS2 which had some early programming hiccups would go on to eat DC’s lunch.


...and PS2 eating the DC's lunch has more to do with Sega and their terrible decisions made in prior generations that burnt retailers and consumers alike than anything else. The things the PS2 had going for it at launch was a cheap DVD player(yes Sega didn't have the money for this. They were very close to bankruptcy at the time) and Sony's hype.


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