salmo

I think this is just the nature of English. It's not a static defined thing. Words shift over time and concurrently mean different things within different contexts.

One of my favorite examples is "Lord." I'll probably mess up details, since this is from memory, and I'm just going to write the modern English equivalents.

It starts with "loaf warden" meaning the person that protects the food for a clan/group/whatever, then associated with the leader of a group, providing protection. Then it's abbreviated to "lord." Then it gets associated with a land owner. That associates it with authority and eventually God. You end up with phrases like "lord over X" being negative and "our Lord and savior" being positive at the same time.

Heck, "reside" has different meanings in different sections of some laws, some of which you have to go to precedent to determine.

And there's always George Carlin's bit on the F word :).

In some contexts "a project" has the very technical meaning you ascribe to it. In others, it's "an effort" or "a body of work."

Definitions are derived from usage and not the other way around in this crazy language. Every once in a while rule makers get something to land. Double negatives became "bad" after the renaissance influence of Greek logic, but were frequently used in old and middle English for emphasis. There are examples of quadruple negatives in fancy literature (maybe Chaucer? I can't remember). Each was like negative++.

I can’t imagine a company wasting money on this. Distro facility space is money. Especially these days with all networks stressed. They may delay to optimize a route with more stops, or prioritize guaranteed shipping dates. But being punitive doesn’t make financial sense.

Unless it’s USPS. Then nothing makes sense.

My friend had an Newton and I was in awe. It made Palm look like a pocket calculator.

Got killed when Jobs left out of spite.

But that was back when Apple could make very simple hardware do amazing things.

NeXT was mind blowing when you look back. All of that just turned into OSX, iOS, etc. Don’t know that my computer is really any more empowering now. I still mostly just use a browser, mail client, and terminal.

I feel “useless hop in TCP connection chain” is treated as a virtue in “modern architecture.”

Somehow micro services and cloud native turned into that. So yeah, slow response times, wasted infrastructure and most work put into I/O and serialization/deserialization.

I think we forgot what actual monoliths look like and just kept decomposing… I guess that is an appropriate term.

Wow. I totally had blocked those out of my memory.

I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.

I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.

They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)

Thanks for preventing the frustration there. I’ll try to survey the landscape I guess.

I also haven’t taken on rust. But I’m really wanting to play with a smaller language that has enough to do something practical with. The C replacement languages like Nim are cool, but not appealing for me yet.

It’s been a while since I’ve used a LISP. I’ve always gotten things out of those forays that changed the way I looked at making software.

I agree with this so much. I loved Python for decades. Kinda loathe it now. All scripting languages have fallen into this, managing interpreter, test tools, and dependencies in a dev environment, CI/CD, and prod is more work than doing new stuff.

Java/Spring is obnoxious. Spring just enjoys breaking APIs or behavior on patch releases so much. Well, and I have a personal dislike of Java/C++/C# style OO. The temptation to over engineer is too great.

I’ve been enjoying Go more (I have Pascal and C roots). But I feel the pain coming as the ecosystem grows.

I haven’t LISPed in years. Maybe I’ll tinker in Clojure again. I don’t care for Emacs, and last time I checked, setting up a CL was a PITA. Sigh, even choosing a LISP/Scheme is a journey in itself.

Was interested in the size of these things:

MVP: 8.52K water: 31.61K tacit: 5.49K concrete (from child): 7.15K + 5.99K for normalize.css (13.14K total)

Tacit is most appealing to me to whip something together. Hits the best look/byte ratio for me and seems to be hardly an abuse of HTML at a glance.

I normally use actual semantic HTML with classes as styling hints and minimal CSS/JS. But I don't make anything "real", am definitely not a front-end guy, and my stuff is probably ugly to most.

> Mozilla seems to be inching closer and closer to just another Chromium.

Not sure I understand this. I mean Chrome drives the feature set and performance, but it's not like Mozilla's switching to Blink/v8 AFAIK. Competition is good. Even the proliferation of WebKit/Blink browsers is fine to me.

I run into the occasional site that does the block-by-user agent of ye olde IE days and an odd niche commercial product used by my company that only works in Chrome or Safari. And honestly, I hit more of the latter that only work in IE and I have to RDP to an old windows server host to use them.

I like the Firefox UI better, and it doesn't get as sluggish as fill-in-your-chrome on my Mac. Now, that's "feel" and not measurable. Safari's a lot snappier, but too sparse for me. To me, browsers and OSes are like shoes. Pick what's comfortable to you. There's not a "right" answer.

Addressing the thread more than you: This project never states it's trying to slay the giant. The whole argument is weird. I'll play with it once I can without compiling (I'm lazier than I used to be). It'll be fun. Probably not a daily driver, but interesting.

And who knows? KHTML was a broken (and oft neglected) toy and now dominates with world via Blink/WebKit. We may all bemoan Ladybird in 20 years.

I think it’s mostly semantics here. Companies didn’t care about it for security. They cared about it for productivity.

Enterprise development is always about delivering features first. Performance, security, reliability, etc. come after that.

Oh, you are totally right. I read that in the GitLab issue tracking their version of the problem and totally forgot that’s where they landed.

Oh, totally agree. It’s not a performance thing for me. I don’t have a fancy car, just enjoy the activity.

I mostly envy the nav on my wife’s Apple Car Play. Otherwise it’s just a running map and an album art display.

We use Waze for interstate travel and Google Maps for local. It’s nicer than a “nav package” or my phone holder. Otherwise, I’m happy with whatever let’s me listen to my tunes and podcasts.

But I don’t need it that much. My little car is mostly for in town. We always use the van for trips.

I do love a good minivan. I’m not ashamed :)

Well, I do understand that the actual version used there is ambiguous.

Probably the best would be to take the newest from go.sum. That’s what some scanners are doing now.

Filed bugs with 2 vendors over this though.

Oh my goodness I hate that so much. Every time I have to explain that go.sum lists every compatible version, not the version baked in.

But this is even an improvement over any other language I've seen. All just flag CVEs in dependent libraries when 99% of the time it's like "to be vulnerable you have to do [really stupid thing]".

Let's hope that vulnerability scanning vendors adopt using this. For my own stuff or minor work things, it's great. When I fall under the specter of officialness, I'll still get popped by the Enterprise Security Scanning Standard Tool.

There was no original design for Unix. It never was 1 thing, but a bunch of loose ideas wired (and rewired) together pragmatically over time by different people, usually scratching an itch. I highly recommend Khernigan’s UNIX: A History and a Memoir to get a glimpse of the dynamic.

All the “it’s all a file” idea was added as an ideal along the way because the interface was so dang convenient. But I’ve never read it in any documentation.

Even pipes were added as a “that’s a cool idea.” There was a conversation, a late night coding session and pipes came into existence.

Plan 9 was a response to the evolved (vs designed) Unix. Took “the best” from it and made those design principles. It was an “if we could do it all over again, knowing what we know now” project.

What’s interesting to me is that evolved systems seem to dominate design-first systems in adoption. Maybe it’s that they’re pragmatic. I don’t know. Or maybe my observation is just wrong.

It all depends on the clutch to me. My ADHD is so satisfied by a manual. I’m engaged in the machine. It’s fun and you don’t need a real sports car.

But paddle shifters do nothing for me. There’s no feel to it. It’s more like 3 on the tree.

If the clutch gives it feel and control, I’m in.

Sadly, finding a real manual is hard these days. Most cars don’t offer them. My Honda is stuck in 1 package with a mid-2000s style dash. Still fun to drive.

I should look and see if I could retrofit an Apple Car Play/ Android Auto system in it…

You’re not wrong, but it is funny how we got here from Gosling’s Oak addressing set top boxes.

The thing was built to address the burgeoning embedded w/ a little horsepower market with its variety of hardware and OSes.

Now it runs Enterprise server software… and Minecraft.

Distortion, overdrive, and the 808 are all examples off the top of my head of folk analog audio.

The former two tend to use the imperfection of diodes leaking to create varying degrees of fuzz (really clipping) based on placement. It fakes pushing an amp past it’s thresholds.

The latter abused chips that failed QA as the source of noise. They can’t make “real” ones anymore, since the chip is out of production. This one’s from my memory and the description may be flawed.

In both cases, abusing electronics’ imperfections is the goal.

Now with pedals, you get magical beliefs about “original” parts, but that’s another story.

So many guitar effects are based on accidents and replication/reduction of them. It’s both technically and historically fascinating to me. “This sucks, but sounds cool. How can I make a smaller box that does it?”

Bah! You're totally right and I'm wrong. I flipped them in my head. Thank you for the correction.

Definitely some are not great, I can name 3 within a mile of me I won't go to. And some are "sketchy" but delicious. But that also applies to barbecue, mexican, catfish, etc. around me. Just look where the locals go. If there's a line at an unexpected place, it's probably good. But if it's around a college campus, it may just be cheap :).

Agree. Politically a government is responsible for giving its citizens a sense of security… maybe more so than actual security. Ghana and the US were both doing that in this scenario. Whether the fear is 100% reasonable or not is ultimately irrelevant. “We fixed it, no worries, go back to being productive.”

Then of course there’s the reality of them abusing fear of security to steer the herd, but I don’t want to wander down that rabbit hole.

My guess is that really it’s an acquisition of engineers unless they already have some kind of market dominance in this space.

I don’t see any novel tech here, but I’m not the target audience.

There isn’t any fraud here. It’s all very normal corporate structure.

Yum! Brands owns both, and Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, etc. The restaurants themselves are owned by franchisees who license the trademarks (and all kind of complicated buy-in and standards).

Yum! Brands made ThighStop to address the wing shortage and keep the association/credibility. It’s actually weirdly transparent: just like WingStop, but thighs. I don’t know if WingStop franchisees got automatic rights to that brand or not. My guess is that it was just a way to keep them afloat.

Now, the fact that WingStop has any cred is gross. I can get better wings from a mom & pop or local chain at any strip mall, or heck, a gas station than wing chains like them, BWW, etc.

I guess America outside the South and Buffalo, NY doesn’t have access to wings that don’t taste like a salt lick. It’s a tragedy.

Funny enough, "electricity" and "hydro" were synonymous in Toronto when I lived there in the early 90's because of Ontario Hydro. It was named for the electricity coming from Niagara Falls, but then yeah... like you said.

One of my first gigs was replacing a VAX/terminal based software package with a Windows NT/PC thick client one.

17 year old me scoffed at the dumb terminals. When we converted users and they hated it, I learned SO MUCH. They could fly through the TUI. They’d have a form filled out before the screen could paint.

The thick client didn’t even have keyboard shortcuts for most things. But the company had bought a ton of PCs and was moving everyone to the first iteration of Exchange. So I got the VAX up on the LAN and set them up with telnet.

The users liked that. White text on a blue background became the most popular color combo. The internet was becoming a more popular thing, so they could begin the proud tradition of screwing off at work staring at a browser.

Eventually the original package was retired and keyboard navigation was added to the thick client. But you couldn’t go “ahead” of it. And flipping between the keyboard and mouse is just slow for “real” work. They adjusted but I learned a lot about how a computer can best augment someone’s abilities. It’s not always the cool or most intuitive way.

That exercise forced me to learn VMS, then I touched Solaris and fell in love. I couldn’t afford a pizza box as a college kid, so installed RedHat 4.1 from a CD in a book.

Now I get mad when I have to edit text without vi.

Same as it ever was.

After 40 years of wanting to sleep in as long as I can, I flipped and wake up early and go to bed early. It’s amazing.

My free time is now when I can think and play with hobbies. Those can be code, music, sewing, fishing, etc etc.

After work, I’m usually zonked. “Too tired for having fun” (Devo cover playing in my head).

I now just focus on kids after school, dinner, zone out, and sleep by 10pm. I listen to history podcasts and don’t watch much TV, except college football and Star Wars series.

But I don’t pressure myself to “finish” hobbies anymore. Work is work, hobbies are for pleasure. If hobbies are generating anxiety, I pivot. That took me a while to come to terms with, given my ADHD.

I have no dreams of making a passion project my job. I enjoy my work and “finish” there, but like having a separate life.

My dad owned a business, and I don’t want to live that “never off” lifestyle. I’m a very boring family man and love that.

Tesla is only targeting the “luxury car” market. They don’t stray from Lexus’s or BMW’s footprint and haven’t touched the others lucrative SUV business. That’s a very small niche in the grand scheme of vehicles.

And they’re dodging the largest vehicle market entirely: fleet vehicles. At least a few years ago F-150s outsold all cars. Sprinter vans can’t be produced fast enough to meet demands. These dwarf family vehicles.

Their accomplishment was seeing a market problem and then killing it. Manufacturers were only targeting “city” vehicles or crunchy granola people with hybrids and EVs. Tesla made EVs freaking cool.

Seeing that as evidence that they’re the primary source for all EV innovation, though, doesn’t line up. They have a market targeted and are focused on delivering there. There is work going on with EV fleet vehicles, semis, etc. and they’re not involved.

It’s been about 10 years now, and they’re only making what an “old car company” would consider 1 platform with no sign of expanding. I think they’ll continue to dominate that space, but there’s a lot of innovation required to get outside of that footprint.

I don’t think the other specs are necessarily backwards compatible. The NICs on each end negotiate the fastest commonly supported spec.

I’ve had 10G cards that would only negotiate down to 1G or only do 10G. But those were over Twinax. I’ve never use 10G on twisted pair.

Back in my day we were excited about 100Base-T and called it Fast Ethernet :).

Oooh! Now do 10Base2!

Reminds me of the bank of modems we hung off our VAX to let employees telnet and do work from home.

It was like maybe 32 28.8 modems. My memory is so vague, and it was just a pile of cables and boxes behind the VAX. I mostly just flipped the power on and off the ones that went totally sideways and tried not to step on things. It was really cable neglect more than management.

After hours, we’d let employees use it as an ISP. It was slow, just 2xISDN from there to our ISP, but it let some employees get internet access that couldn’t afford the bill.

I know at lease one warehouse worker’s kid ended up being a developer after having that mid-90s access. I hope it helped him and maybe others.

Crazy to think, they’re probably around 40 now.

It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic.

I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other.

From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either.

And rewriting software in a new language is always going to get back burnered by delivering new features. Until there’s a fundamental change they want that justifies a rewrite, a codebase is staying in its current language due to inertia.

Heck, companies will lie to themselves about these things. My favorite is this pattern

Execs: We’re all going to X!

Crowd: Yaaay. [Some project leads look at each other with a mix of sarcasm and fear.]

Initiative kicks off. Swag is distributed. Projects are identified.

Exec: [Looks at $] Well, except this one. And that one… Ok, we’ll replace all of these [waves arms] in 3-5 years.

Narrator: 3-5 years continues to be relative to the current date.

RedHat claims or at least claimed that for EL. I think it’s limited to within minor releases though, with majors being API.

That’s fine if you’re OK relying on their packages and 3rd party “enterprise” software that’s “certified” for the release. No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.

The most annoying to me was that RHEL6 was still under support and had an ancient kernel that excluded running Go, GRaalVM, etc. static binaries. No epoll() IIRC.

Often times you find yourself having to pull more and more libraries into a build. It all starts with wanting a current Python and before you know it you’re bringing in your own OpenSSL.

And they have no problem changing their system management software in patch releases. They’ve changed priority of config files too many times. But that’s another rant for another day.

This is a place where I wish some BSD won out. With all the chunks of the base userspace + kernel each moving in their own direction it’s impossible to get out of this place. Then add in every permutation of those pieces from the distros.

Multiple kernel versions * multiple libc implementations * multiple inits * …

I’d never try to make binary-only software for Linux. Dealing with packaging OSS is bad enough.