jclulow

Surely you can put your own dotfiles into your own account on that machine, though, without impacting other people?

This isn't an inherent property of ZFS at all. I have made heavy use of SQLite for years (on illumos systems) without ever hitting this, and I would never counsel anybody to disable sync writes: it absolutely can lead to data loss under some conditions and is not safe to do unless you understand what it means.

What you're describing sounds like a bug specific to whichever OS you're using that has a port of ZFS.

I wouldn't expect ethics to emerge as a feature any time soon. If anything, it will be easier to have the machine do the wrong thing as the machine does not get squeamish.

I don't use either Go or LLMs, but isn't the point of LLMs that they write the tedious boilerplate for you? What's the value in a small syntactic improvement if the computer is generating it all anyway?

Yeah I agree with the positive part of the thesis; i.e., that it's alright to like things, and it's alright to pick things in part because you are a feeling sentient person and you should have nice things.

I think the corollary that people, when looking also at the data or at constraints, are acting irrationally or its sophistry or whatever is bunk, though. Plenty of people do actually engage in some amount of evaluation, and it's intellectually lazy to disregard that because they may have also made an aesthetic or otherwise personal decision on some level as well.

I use a bunch of niche software, and it's difficult or impossible to completely separate my aesthetic preferences from the concrete reasons I also have for doing so -- my aesthetic preferences and my joy in using certain things actually stem from those concrete benefits in some cases!

tar streams don't have an index at all, actually, they're just a series of header blocks and data blocks. Some backup software built on top may include a catalog of some kind inside the tar stream itself, of course, and may choose to do so as the last entry.

Yes, LLM-era scrapers are frequently making use of large numbers of IP addresses from all over the place. Some of them seem to be bot nets, but based on IP subnet ownership it seems also pretty frequently to be cloud companies, many of them outside the US. In addition to fanning out to different IPs, many of the scrapers appear to use User Agent strings that are randomised, or perhaps in some cases themselves generated by the slop factory. It's pretty fucking bleak out there, to be honest.

Right, this is the bedrock upon which injunctive relief is made available; viz., when money after the fact would not cancel out the damages caused by a party doing the wrong thing. Unfortunately you can't get that relief without having an expensive lawyer, generally, so it doesn't end up being terribly equitable for low income folks.

I think in many respects these problems are actually _under_-engineering. It's possible to treat software as an artefact with a measurable level of quality, and to use frankly not especially ambitious tools (programming languages with memory safety and rich type systems, unit and integration tests, etc) to build them. It's also possible to have a strong sense of user experience and taste as far as what makes a product, not just a pile of parts.

But you have to take software seriously as something that can improve a system, not just a cost centre to be minimised where possible, and an embarrassing source of problems that will ultimately end up in the newspaper or worse.

Generally it creates comparatively few of those new jobs, and they are concentrated in a different geographic location, than the substantially more vast economic violence of destroying an industry.

Depends on which manual you read; e.g., it's documented in https://illumos.org/man/1/head

They are a large and wealthy corporation, with a lot of proprietary software and service products. It may appear, at times, that their interests align with the interests of end users or open source contributors, but that is at best a fleeting illusion; the moment they figure out how to make more money by screwing people, that's exactly what they'll do. That's why Recall is coming back to Windows, despite a huge backlash some five minutes prior. It's why the code to Windows and Office will never be open source. It's why the SSH remote plugin for Visual Studio Code is, for some reason, a proprietary binary that MSFT refuses to build for platforms that are not economically relevant to the Azure business unit (e.g., BSD or illumos systems).

Isn't this the same person who literally pays kids not to go to University?

> Canada does the opposite of America even if it hurts Canada - it’s a part of its identity.

As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.

While it's true that your cartoonish portrayal of freedom is one possible interpretation, there are most certainly others, many of which present citizens with actual measurable freedoms that they would not enjoy in the US.

For instance, Australians have, since the late 1990s, been relatively free of mass shootings, especially in schools or other public areas. Because the police are allowed to force you to take a random breathalyser test without probable cause, we are generally substantially freer of drunk driving. Because we have a social safety net, people are free from the need to opt out of life saving surgery because they fear the abject economic violence that the US visits upon the "uninsured".

On the other hand, the US has substantially more sensible libel laws than most Commonwealth countries. These things can cut both ways, but it would be a mistake to interpret other countries as attempting a childish breath holding exercise just to differentiate themselves from the hip and cool nation.

> But such behaviour is still unacceptable from a library perspective: a library should never, ever call abort or otherwise terminate the program.

It's true that libraries should not abort for a regular, foreseeable error. I fundamentally disagree that they should never abort.

If an invariant (something we believe absolutely must be true) is violated, the only sensible thing to do is abort the process. For example, if you set a pointer to NULL and then half an hour later it's time to store a value in that pointer but somehow it's not NULL anymore: clearly something has gone terribly wrong, either in your logic, or potentially in totally unrelated code in some other library which has scribbled on the heap. If execution is allowed to continue, the resultant behaviour is totally undefined: you might corrupt data, or you might allow a permissions check to pass that should have failed, etc. We can't always detect when something has gone wrong, but when we do, it's irresponsible to drive on or try to return an error.

"When I was a child, researching a new topic meant walking to the local library with a list of subjects, an effort that could consume half a day. Back then, knowledge wasn’t cheap or easily accessible."

It was literally a free library, open to every member of the public.

Yeah, you don't have to put up with all the shade cast on someone who "just needs a technical co-founder". So negative. Just keep "re-rolling" long enough, and you can hire a lowly first employee instead and have them deal with the mess!

The point is generally to recover cents on the dollar from money you can't otherwise use. Imagine you have a network of people moving illegal drugs. They collect money from their customers, and they need to pay it to you, the supplier. Arrange for them to eat a lot of food at your restaurant. Maybe they shout their friends. The money goes into the restaurant, and is mingled with other money. That money is used to pay costs for the business, but some of it is still profit. That profit, while less than the illegal input money, is _clean_ money, which is much more valuable because you can spend it without fear generally.

It's really just about making it harder for law enforcement folks to draw associations by looking directly at the bank accounts of several people they suspect are in cahoots. Or, in some cases, about making it harder to trace specific cash serial numbers or other instruments like cheques.

I recall reading of a crime outfit in Australia that would have the elders in their family take their illicit cash and use it to place an endless stream of bets on poker machines. By law they're required to return some high percentage, say, 75%, of the money put into them (the house keeps the rest). If you gamble tens of thousands in those machines, and you don't care about the losses, you get a reasonable expectation value back out as laundered winnings. In that case you don't even have to own the pub with the pokies, that's just how they work.

The thing is, dynamic linking doesn't mean using LD_LIBRARY_PATH or building full blown OS packages as the only way to find the correct libraries. There's a first class facility for locating shared libraries, using the -R flag to provide a RUNPATH/RPATH in the binary. The runtime link editor will use that path to locate shared libraries. You can make your binaries relocatable as well, by using $ORIGIN in the RPATH: this gets expanded at runtime to the path of the executable, so, e.g., $ORIGIN/../lib would go up one from bin/ where the executable is and down alongside into the lib directory for your software.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH is a debugging and software engineering tool, and shouldn't ever be part of shipped software.

I would think there'd be a lot of utility in not blocking smoke alarm sounds, for example. The screeching from distressed infants can similarly be both very loud and very high pitched.

I have to say, as an Australian, your reaction is making me want to use the spelling more often. We're generally culturally averse to people taking themselves too seriously!

Geeze, Louise! Did a Koala mercilessly bully you while you were there, mate?

Since at least the introduction of the DeWitt clause, if not earlier!

They're an absolutely staggeringly immense company and they fight tooth and nail to preserve their rent seeking and premium margins. Nobody owes them a positive interpretation of apparently poor behaviour, especially not when discoverable materials often show the principals are absolutely doing the wrong thing (e.g., Jobs and the anti-labour wage fixing racket).

If the company wants people to have positive thoughts, they should do positive things! If indeed there are positive reasons for an apparently negative thing, they should explain them.

If they can't or won't explain them, then people absolutely should assume if they feel like they're getting screwed, that they probably are.

As an aside: Solaris is something you can buy from Oracle, which they forked from OpenSolaris 15 years ago. SmartOS is a distribution of illumos, which also forked from the same code 15 years ago. They have since diverged, in some areas dramatically, so we (the illumos community) don't bill ourselves as being Solaris based.

NB: the author's pronouns are they/she, not he.

You should try other things that force the brain to begin interpreting something again as new input; e.g., I have found success with changing the font, or the colour scheme, or looking at a diff rendition of a change, or looking at the file with less(1), or even reading the thing in reverse order, provoking a similarly new context where I see stuff I won't have seen staring at the editor for an hour previously. Another thing printing usually induces is that you simply stop looking at it for at least a few minutes before looking again, and a break often helps too!

Printing is obviously fine if you like doing that, but I've found there are lots of ways to shake yourself loose and more thoroughly review your own writing.

If the system was willing to link to the sources from which it obtained particular information, it would be too easy to hold them accountable for having stolen a bunch of content from people who didn't opt in!

I feel like it's actually alright for people to like what they like and care about what they care about, and that it is entirely separate from the struggle between art and commerce and the perils of capitalism and corporate malfeasance?

Care should always be taken when using an SSH client to connect to untrusted hosts. Make sure you’re not actually forwarding your SSH agent to the remote host, or they’ll be able to hijack your keys. Consider also that any output is processed by your terminal, and there have been a number of serious security bugs in terminal escape sequence handling in a variety of terminal emulators in the past.