salmo

The stealing isn’t unique for sure. But most of the vocabulary in our language is borrowed words. Mostly just the “sight words” kids learn in early school is what remains of Old English. And many English words are the rougher equivalent of a borrowed, nicer words.

Most languages were pretty calcified by Old or Middle English, and English doesn’t seem to be letting up. But no language is static.

But with tech and mass communication, English is squeezing into many languages.

Pinyin is kind of weird. It’s not borrowing concepts, but lending itself to translation in and out. Based off prior western attempts and observation of Japanese success. Typesetting is more practical, and then computers really push it… the latter I feel awkward about. 1/2 is the typesetting benefit, 1/2 is eurocentrism. I dunno. Maybe I’m overthinking.

The vocabulary is more interesting to me because it’s importing ideas or nuances around ideas. It’s primarily nouns, though.

Learning other languages is great to see the world differently. Even in just French, which is fairly close: eg faire doesn’t have a real English equivalent, but makes total sense. It’s like how I learn programming languages I’ll never use for work, just to see things from their perspective.

I don’t know enough about Asian languages. Working on fleshing out my history knowledge now from Asian perspectives vs what I got in school. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to address a language.

Totally agree. I love that it’s the gumbo of languages. Throw whatever you want in there. I’m down.

And as an American I reject the British pronunciation of “herb” and “lieutenant.”

I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a lot of botched Spanish). That constant borrowing is partly why our spelling is insane.

Oh and add to the insanity that we’ll borrow the same French word twice, frozen in each time.

It’s fascinating to see the language evolve through eg India. It’s a secondary language that fills a gap to provide a commonly understood language in a region with massive linguistic diversity. But then it’s developed it’s own regionalisms that are bleeding back into regions where it is the primary language.

It’s kind of like shell scripting to me. It started simple, got random useful things tacked on over time. You can’t formally define it, but it’s pragmatically powerful. And there aren’t real rules despite people trying so hard over the years, just conventions that shift and change. And often the “rule makers” just make things more complicated in the end with only some of it sticking.

I highly recommend the English History Podcast for anyone interested.

Even the GNU commands on Solaris were so old, and from a time where so many were changing and flakey. I could reliably make the Solaris and early Linux bash and gsed segfault. Options weren’t consistent with Linux distros or coreutils from eg ports on FreeBSD. I still have a bias against GNU from those battle scars.

I had to stick to (most of) POSIX across Unixes with ksh88/mksh/pdksh back in the day when my work had to be portable across Linux, BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. I could rely on process substitution, etc. but stay vanilla outside the shell itself.

Honestly the only really annoying thing to me was that sed -i didn’t mean in place, but even then it wasn’t reliably atomic IIRC.

Handling the actual OS commands was much harder. Separate commands instead of getent (maybe getpw was one?) on HP-UX pops into my head.

IIRC almost all Unixes followed the /src model you really only see in BSD today. Sometimes it was a separate license or only given to Universities and 3rd party developers. But before Linux it was assumed you could build the kernel and base userspace from there like you could with Bell Labs/AT&T.

The University/3rd party part was true even for Microsoft with NT and CE in the late 90s/early 00s. My little CS department got a CE dev kit with software, a device, and the source. I goofed around with it and was pretty quickly frustrated.

This also wanders into my memories of hating Sun version numbering and naming. SunOS grew SysV and became Solaris, but it was still SunOS. But it wasn’t. And then they preceded the Java-ism of the minor version being generally accepted as the major and conflictingly published materials both ways.

I feel bad for the devs where what they did made sense to them and then marketing took over. Naming and versioning are hard enough problems alone.

I am the older folks. My Twitter friends are the older folks. And my mute word list grows every election or scandal to cover the copy/paste rhetoric from “both” sides. Maybe 1/3 of my follows hit that.

It’s not a statement that all or even most older people do it. I anecdotally see it more from older demographics. I might be wrong. I probably am tiptoeing the line of “ist” there. Definitely don’t mean to say all or most older people, but I am generalizing on a demographic. I’ll have to think about that more.

I don’t think statements like that should be “disallowed” anywhere except places like employment, etc. And it’s never OK to say that a generalization applies to an individual because they are within a demographic.

I think if Musk pulls off what he’s trying to, it’ll be better than now. I block and mute Trump, Biden, etc. anyway. When I want to get politics I reach out for it in a format >280 characters.

I don’t idolize or demonize Musk. He’s just another person with talents and flaws like the rest of us. He does some smart stuff. He does some head scratching things. He likes attention, can be hilarious, clever, or, as my kids say, “cringey.” But I don’t want him to be anything other than he wants to. We need all of that in the world.

This is more a statement that Musk isn’t going to ruin Twitter. I think it will follow the same historical curve as all social media and it has 0 to do with him. And pre social media things as well, since at least WWII. “The kids” set trends. By the time the majority latches on, they’ve moved on. Heck, you can probably see that in slang’s impact on “proper” language much longer.

I’ll be happy if/when “epic” leaves slang. For some reason that one irritates my pedantry more than any other.

Not far off.

But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason.

The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point.

It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is.

There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few.

If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird.

Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense.

I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.

Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.

Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…

The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.

It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.

For everything there is a season.

I love this idea. So many failures follow the “first is not best”, then many failed business tales.

But most of these are the expected and the analysis is shallow. Snark added is unnecessary.

Many are fad products or acknowledged R&D experiments that I wouldn’t necessarily call “failures.”

I expected more when having to give my email. A categorized page of bullets with Wikipedia links would be more useful. The details and references would be higher quality.

Cool idea, just needs more development and research to provide real value.

India has booming film industries, but I haven't looked into historical film. I'm normally there for the escapism. The fact that it's considered A place or A heritage is another problem. It's more diverse than Europe. Heck, often languages are closer to European languages than they are to the neighboring region. I wish I knew a lot more about that than I do.

China has some pretty serious issues with the government's projection on their own history and their ability to dictate what is or is not made. Minor example: a Tang period film required a change to not period-accurate clothing because it was too immodest. Sorry, I can't remember the name.

I have a thing for filling in gaps in my knowledge. Eventually one will bother me and I'll have to learn. Just before COVID started, it was non-Eurocentric history. I realized I knew the world as seeing the Persians as the decadent outsiders and didn't know anything "east" of there.

I've spent a lot of time learning about China, the Mongols, Persia, and actual Ancient Egypt. I've dabbled in general Islamic history. I have so much more to cover, but it's what I could find thorough work on easily. I like to start with pre-history and go forward where I can.

It's crazy to me. There are so many compelling stories. And what we have in our media is so insanely off-base.

Side request: Any recommendations for podcasts and resources for some of the various Indian cultures and Russia would be much appreciated. I prefer a bias of "from their eyes" to "from a Western perspective."

A “root server” was a pre-cloud term for a rented server you had root on vs a mortal user account. The latter was typically for hosting a canned LAMP. Basically your own VM or physical instead of a user on a shared machine or a limited-use VM.

There’s a bunch of these comments. What would a disposable root DNS server mean? Stand up a DNS server and just claim authority for .?

You could do that here fine I imagine. You have root. Until you log out, of course.

If you can install stuff and listen on 53, you could make your own private DNS tree anywhere.

Now, managing delegations will get weird if you want to delegate outside of what you manage. I’m seeing a spiderweb of stub zones.

It saves bytes! (joking!)

In a lot of ways neovim can be a TUI VSCode. It supports the language server spec and all that. It does require (kinda complicated) config. But you can steal examples from the internet. There's also the ecosystem of plugins to do fancier stuff like code snippets, menus, status bars, etc.

But I don't do things like jumping to declarations with it. That's likely a thing with some plugin, I just don't know. I generally try to avoid traditional OO languages when I can. I used to use IntelliJ for those, but I have actually switched to VSCode for them and some of the things I've always used vim/neovim for, like larger Go projects.

I make any IDE act like vim because my hands want to do modal editing. That's a thing where my habits impact my perceived ergonomics. If it doesn't support that, I won't use it. It's just too frustrating.

I don't use Javascript except when I have to. If that's part of a TUI VSCode for you, then this may not be helpful.

I do that, but have a "location" for home and work. I flip them when I get on/off my company network (VPN or on-prem).

I haven't had an issue with Firefox with that.

Are you doing something nicer than manually flipping location or going into the network settings and turning the proxy on/off?

Come to think of it, I don’t break them. It’s when I let my kids borrow/take them. Except micro, those connectors just wear out in a year or two.

My kids keep their tablets plugged in while using a lot of the time. I think it’s the stress on the joint from having the cable taut or yanking it around or something.

I did change to making them pay for replacements. That definitely slowed the rate :).

No, she does general practice. That includes family law, but not dedicated.

It would be an equitable portion of our collective stuff, not 1/2 of mine. There is no “yours” when you’re married. That’s a big part of what marriage means. Even pre-modern and across many cultures, marriage has been viewed as a contract.

Money (or lack thereof) is one of the primary motivators in her experience. A lot of “rich people” get divorces when they’re in debt up to their eyeballs and the consequences hit.

We’re not struggling, not wealthy, and are pretty equally valued. Also, there’s more than stuff. The burden of children, a household, and even our own lives would be much greater solo. We’re a pretty great support system for each other.

There is no perfect marriage. Part of my point. I think mine’s great. We’ll see when we’re dead or divorced.

Thanks!

My dream world is to run the “same thing” in a public cloud, datacenter, and (limited resource) remote facility.

The latter wouldn’t need to be failure tolerant, just quickly recoverable as a service (not necessarily the data).

If I could provide 1 app usage pattern and 1-3 operational patterns that would solve so much.

This is hard for every data service, partly because of technical debt/entrenchment and data has gravity. But cache is the most flexible.

The joys of having a portfolio of 1000s of apps ranging from COBOL to “cloud native.”

Not a demand, just sharing the “needs” of my big traditional company for perspective. I feel that often times IT as an enabler vs IT as the product gets lost in the shuffle.

And so much assumes more Human Resources can be dedicated than a company that sees IT as overhead can dedicate.

All that said, constraints + scale can be a fun problem to solve. Making “right” easiest is always better than rules.

I’m always more curious about the operational story, but new projects tend to focus on the low-level implementation.

I love Redis, but managing HA is a pain and requires a good bit of engineering on its own. I think this is how RedisLabs stays in business.

This seems to separate backend and front end, maybe so you could use a more appropriate storage for your use case?

But what would a production-ready deployment look like? How would you handle failover for patching or… failure?

Adding a front end can sometimes double the problem needing to have 1 failure setup for it and 1 for the backend. If I were to use the slab storage (looks really ideal for most of our workloads), how would that work?

Too much to answer here, but stuff I’d like to see as it matures. It’s the unsexy stuff, I know. Way more fun to get into the bits.

I got a Google Home as a raffle prize and didn’t see the point.

But my house was built in the 70s and has almost 0 ceiling lights in the room. So I started buying smart outlets for the lamps so I could just turn the room off by yelling at it.

My wife switched us to Alexa because she had an app that would let her do her billing through voice (start working on John Doe’s case, stop).

I’ve expanded the lights through the house, I use routines to do stuff like turn off my bedroom light, turn on the fan, and turn on a “rain on a tent” sleep noise thing.

We use it as an intercom for the kids and to make announcements like “dinner time.”

I got an Amazon TV on prime day because it was cheap. It’s kinda handy to be able to yell at the TV when the kids lose the remote. Not super useful.

We all use the things to listen to music. I have mine paired with nice speakers in my office.

I gave up on being spied on. Everything I own is feeding back to Google, Amazon, and Apple. Probably China too with my cheap outlets.

I stick smart devices on a separate 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network that also can’t route to my main one, but that’s just to keep inevitable compromises contained and not fill my network with a bunch of chattering nonsense.

I wish Alexa would let me name it whatever I want vs the choose 1 of 3 names. There are more satisfying names to yell.

The 1 in 100 is what keeps my wife busy with family law. The odds of ending up marrying someone vs having a healthy relationship are 2 very different things.

My wife and I dated through undergrad, broke up at "get married or break up." And ended coming back together as adults with more life and relationship experience. Based on plans, we never should have been back in the same city. And when we started hanging out again, neither expected a relationship, just a friendship still being sick of each others' sh. But we had both grown up. We're 24 years into our relationship now. I think it's going well.

That's all purely anecdotal, though.

I don't think real math could be done with this. Success isn't measurable. People often split due to $ or tragedy. People stick it out, miserable the entire time. It walks into Aristotle's eudaimonia. You can't know until it's over. Even then, quantifying quality is folly.

I think that’s what weirds me out. In cases like rail, it’s necessary for interoperability and prevents anti competitive practices. There’s a clear state interest there.

But swapping a plug doesn’t buy us that. This is evidenced by the fact that no company is forced to use lightning to compete.

Almost everything uses USB-A at the outlet and choose your other end. We’re starting to see USB-C at the outlet, but same thing.

I also don’t see the e-waste argument. I haven’t had a cable outlive a device. My kids go through them every other month. No plug fixes that, it’s almost always where the cable joins the plug. (Except micro-USB, we shall never speak of that again).

My other biggest practical problem is that, despite appearances, USB-C != USB-C, and the off-the-shelf cables are awful, especially for normal humans.

In my dream world, I’d love to see clearly labeled device and cord capabilities, and USB-C all the things, and a reigned in USB-C spec.

I just think that government is a bad place to do it, and don’t see a necessary state interest case for their intervention.

This is odd to me as well. The value of PaaS scales with developers. But Heroku et al target small shops.

If you have 100 dev teams, infra experience is a lot of “overhead.” If you have 5, you just make sure some of the devs know how to strace and tcpdump and can collab in an incident. Frankly, building infrastructure is easy. Maintaining it is the hard part. Preventative maintenance, security, recovering from incidents are all much harder than figuring out enough for it to run.

It was a brilliant idea. Let devs be devs. But the price has always been so high that, at scale, it wasn’t far off the HR cost.

We’ve gone 180 on that with k8s. Now you have to understand a datacenter with different vocabulary to effectively leverage it. You see low adoption at “I have an app” because it’s more complicated than it’s worth. Higher adoption above that. But almost 0 adoption at I need 100+ clusters. And 90% of what I see assumes to exist in a single cluster as if etcd never hangs itself.

We’ve built all of these abstractions, but ultimately you have to understand the thing below them (ie Linux and VMs) when performance sucks or something goes boom.

I don’t know how someone walks in and learns it all at once vs my life of learning with the growing system from Unix on physicals to now.

It’s like my life with Java. Most devs don’t understand where to start troubleshooting performance or the JVM, despite rich tooling (magical APM, JFRs, etc).

I was just thinking the same thing. Curious if anyone else is using it with Okta, Auth0, etc.

One trouble I have with OAuth2 is that so much assumes social media providers or UI-based flows.

I’ve done it, but don’t really grok it. Part of the problem is that I crib it from another project or let someone else handle that but and focus on the “business logic.”

I have a Go project now and feel like that’d be a good way to force me over the hump.

That’s awesome and the references are great. Thank you for that. I’ve really been working on learning early history the past few years, especially from “the East”, where I had no real formal education.

The straw part is brilliant. I image that kind of like traditional Yerba Mate.

It’s kind of interesting that the fruit peel as a yeast source and aromatics are used in different Belgian brewing today. Modern beer only uses a few strains but these open vat brewing facilities can end up developing their own.

But it was interesting to me that all the earliest writing about trading and inventory of beer was not so much about cultures that prioritized getting smashed, but that beer was a utilitarian dietary staple.

And I guess for the most part, all alcoholic beverages have been “acquired tastes.” I’ve tried some meads with honey. I wouldn’t pick them out of today’s selection, but they’re not bad.

I really would be curious to try this. I also wonder if it’s the same as Egyptian beer. More hesitant on the Mongolian airag, but I’d probably give that a shot out of adventurism. The more commoner ones fascinate me more than the fancy elite beverages.

In my amateur learning about Egypt, “beer” seems misleading. It’s definitely a fermented grain beverage thing, but more like bread + liquid that doesn’t make you sick.

Reproductions are kinda nasty and very low ABV from what I’ve heard and read. But a ton of calories and no amoebas. Perfect for a hard day’s pyramid building.

I keep looking at similar devices. What I really want is a small lap top machine (but not necessarily a clamshell laptop) that I can keep by my couch.

My goal is to be able to write software when an idea pops in my head or ssh into my home gear. I just want an xterm w/ vim and a browser to look up docs.

I have a old 2012 HP Elite (?) laptop with a permanent powercord (battery died long ago) for this now, but it’s massive and overkill. Out of my nerdiness, I’d like non-intel, but not required. Just something that can run Debian or Arch. I’d love FreeBSD, but never had a good portable experience with it.

Has anyone used a device this way and enjoyed it? I guess I’m weird that I want small and ergonomic, but not really “portable” in the traditional sense.

Same. I still break out my Radio Shack desoldering iron from time to time, but only for things that can take the abuse.

A few years back I bought a Chinese hot air rework station for <$200. Maybe like “Ayoye” or something with a lot of vowels. It has a soldering iron with a vacuum pump as well.

I never really use the hot air part but am in love with the iron. I can dial in the temp and avoid breathing fumes directly. It is so much nicer to use than my old Weller with a temp dial.

IIRC, you can't have a nil value, just a nil pointer. I like that because it makes you avoid using nil/null/none as a magic value as a habit (not completely, because yeah, pointers).

But it's definitely no Rust. It's a very small language by comparison. That's a positive for me, but you can't have all the Rust things and that at the same time.

I'm not a "1 language for everything" guy. I tend to choose for the task if given the choice or choose for the team so I'm not stuck being the only one that can maintain it. And for anything more than a toy for myself, I always pick something mainstream.

If I'm slapping something together as a 1-off, I tend to go with Python. If I'm writing a CLI, I tend to use Go and I'm using it more for backend stuff. I'll use Java if I have to, because of the team thing. But I won't like it. For toy stuff, I'll pick a language out of a hat just to learn something new. Every few years I'll use a LISP/Scheme.