PaX

PaX, 7 months ago

I’ll believe it when we dismantle the nukes, class society, and fossil fuel industry. A better world is possible but only if we fight for it.

PaX, 7 months ago

It’s really pretty

Thanks for posting

PaX, 7 months ago

C is very reliable. It works almost everywhere with very little resources or overhead and many of the most fundamental parts of our systems (that have to work reliably) are written in C. Many of the languages in that image are even implemented in C.

If you want to write portable, fast, and simple code C can help you with that if you use it in the right way.

PaX, 7 months ago

Programmers can trust language security features too much…

Of course, they’re nice to have and really can make things easier to implement securely but it’s still very easy to introduce security problems or bugs into any code. This is just an unsolvable problem of writing imperative code. All imperative code will reliably have memory leaks (even in Java!) and security holes because no compiler can check to see if you thought of everything.

And large and complex compilers/interpreters with these security features can end up introducing their own security problems or bugs in the process of implementing them.

I’m just tired of people entirely dismissing languages like C because they don’t have these features. Especially when the operating systems their code runs on and their languages may even be implemented in C!

PaX, 8 months ago

I’ve struggled with many of the same tools. What we need is real distributed operating systems, like Plan 9, not increasingly complicated hacks and kludges to keep old-world operating systems relevant in a networked world.

PaX, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.

The difference is grep is a simple tool that can take in text, transform it, and output it to a console. It operates in a powerful and easy to understand way by default (take in text and print lines in the text containing the search parameters). This vmalert tool is just an interface to another, even more complicated piece of software.

Claims to have a Unix background, doesn’t RTFM.

Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…

Translation: Author does not understand APIs.

The point is that these abstractions do not mesh with the rest of the system. HTTP and REST are very strange ways to accomplish IPC or networked communication on Unix when someone would normally accomplish the same thing with signals, POSIX IPC, a simpler protocol over TCP with BSD sockets, or any other thing already in the base system. It does make sense to develop things this way, though, if you’re a corpo web company trying to manage ad-hoc grids of Linux systems for your own profit rather than trying to further the development of the base system.

Ok. Now give me high availability

I would hope the filesystems you use are “high availability” lol

atomic writes to sets of keys

You’re right, that would be nice. Someone should put together a Plan 9 fileserver that can do that or something.

caching, access control

Plan 9 is capable of handling distributed access controls and caching (even of remote fileservers!). There’s probably some Linux filesystems that can do that too.

In the end, it’s not so much about specific tools that can accomplish this but that there are alternatives to the dominant way of doing things and that the humble file metaphor can still represent these concepts in a simpler and more robust way.

This reads as “I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There’s nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken”.

This is the maybe the worst way of interpreting what they said. They can come and correct me if I’m wrong but I read that as: they have a particular ideological objection to this “cloud” ecosystem and the way it does things. It’s not a lack of skill as your comment implies but rather a rejection of this way of doing things.

PaX, 8 months ago

You just said that this software was much more complex than Unix tools.

That’s the problem. The reason Unix became so popular is because it has a highly integrated design and a few very reused abstractions. A lot of simple parts build up in predictable ways to accomplish big things. The complexity is spread out and minimized. The traditional Unix way of doing things is definitely very outdated though. A modern Unix system is like a 100 story skyscraper with the bottom 20 floors nearly abandoned.

Kubernetes and its users would probably be happier if it was used to manage a completely different operating system. In the end, Kubernetes is trying to impose a semi-distributed model of computation on a very NOT distributed operating system to the detriment of system complexity, maintainability, and security.

Until you need authentication, out of the box libraries, observability instrumentation, interoperability… which can be done much more easily with a mature communication protocol like HTTP.

I agree that universal protocols capable of handling these things are definitely useful. This is why the authors of Unix moved away from communication and protocols that only function on a single system when they were developing Plan 9 and developed the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol as the universal system “bus” protocol capable of working over networks and on the same physical system. I don’t bring this up to be an evangelist. I just want to emphasize that there are alternative ways of doing things. 9P is much simpler and more elegant than HTTP. Also, many of the people who worked on Plan 9 ended up working for Google and having some influence over the design of things there.

They’re not, and I’m disappointed that you think they are. Any individual filesystem is a single point of failure. High availability lets me take down an entire system with zero service disruption because there’s redundancy, load balancing, disaster recovery…

A filesystem does not exclusively mean an on-disk representation of a tree of files with a single physical point of origin. A filesystem can be just as “highly available” and distributed as any other way of representing resources of a system if not more so because of its abstractness. Also, you’re “disappointed” in me? Lmao

They can, and they still do… Inside the container.

And how do you manage containers? With bespoke tools and infrastructure removed from the file abstraction. Which is another way Kubernetes is removed from the Unix way of doing things. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s been a long time since I touched Kubernetes.

because rejecting a way of doing things based on preconception is a lack of flexibility

It’s not a preconception. They engaged with your way of doing things and didn’t like it.

in cloud ecosystems that translates to a lack of skill.

By what standard? The standard of you and your employer? In general, you seem to be under the impression that the conventional hegemonic corporate “cloud” way of doing things is the only correct way and that everyone else is unskilled and not flexible.

I’m not saying that this approach doesn’t have merits, just that you should be more open-minded and not judge everyone else seeking a different path to the conventional model of cloud/distributed computing as naive, unskilled people making “bad-faith arguments”.

PaX, 8 months ago

True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool’s built-in usage information.

PaX, 8 months ago

I’m glad I at least got closer to understanding your criticism than they did.

Don’t let anyone tell you you’re old or naive or “stuck in the past” for thinking these things! There is a real crisis in the operating systems world that your criticism is reflecting. It takes an army of software engineers and billions of dollars to keep this ecosystem and these systems going and they still struggle with reliability and security. The reason it’s like this is an issue of economic organization.

We can’t go back to the old way of doing things but we can’t keep maintaining these fundamentally flawed systems either. You may find something inspiring in this brief presentation by Rob Pike: doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

PaX, 8 months ago

Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.

PaX, 8 months ago

That’s a great way of putting it, thanks. I’m actually only 30 years old (lol).

Yeahh, and I saw someone compare you to the “old man yelling at cloud” lol. Even though there are good reasons to yell at the cloud hehe

Sometimes I feel there’s so few people who’ve ever used or written software at this level in the part of the industry I find myself in. It seems more common to throw money at Amazon, Microsoft, and more staff.

I’ve replaced big Java systems with small Go programs and rescued stalled projects trying to adopt Kubernetes. My fave was a failed attempt to adopt k8s for fault tolerance when all that was going on was an inability to code around TCP resets (concurrent programming helped here). That team wasn’t “unskilled”; they were just normal people being crushed by complexity. I could help because they just weren’t familiar with the kind of problem solving I was, nor what tooling is available without installing extra stuff and dependencies.

I haven’t had the “privilege” of working for a wage in the industry (and I still don’t know if I want to) but I think I know what you mean. I’ve seen this kind of tendency even in my friends who do work in it. There is less and less of a focus on a whole-system kind of understanding of this technology in favor of an increased division of labor to make workers more interchangeable. Capitalists don’t want people with particular approaches capable of complex problem-solving and elegant solutions to problems; they want easily-replaceable code monkeys who can churn out products. Perhaps there is a parallel here with what happened to small-scale artisan producers of commodities in early capitalism as they were wiped out and absorbed into manufactories and forced to do ever-increasingly small and repetitive tasks as part of the manufacture of something they once produced from scratch to final product in a whole process. Especially concerning is the increasing use of AI by employed programmers. Well, usually their companies forcing them to use AI to try to automate their work.

And like you gave an example of, this has real bad effects on the quality of the product and the team that develops it. From the universities to the workplace, workers in this industry are educated in the virtues of object-oriented programming, encapsulation, tooling provided by the big tech monopolies, etc. All methods of trying to separate programmers from each other’s work and the systems they work on as a whole and make them dependent on frameworks sold or open-sourced™ by tech monopolies at the expense of creative and free problem-solving.

Glad at least you were able to unstall some of the projects you’ve been involved in!

Thanks for your understanding :)

Glad we could share ideas :3

You and other people in the thread gave me a lot to think about. Hope this comment made some sense lol.

PaX, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

This has always felt untrue to me. The command line has always been simple parts. However we cannot argue that this applies to all Unix-like systems: The monolithic Linux kernel, Kerberos, httpd, SAMBA, X windowing, heck even OpenSSL. There’s many examples of tooling built on top of Unix systems that don’t follow that philosophy.

I can see why you would come to think that if all you’ve been exposed to is Linux and its orbiting ecosystem. I agree with you that modern Unix has failed to live up to its ideals. Even its creators began to see its limitations in the late 80s and began to develop a whole new system from scratch.

Depends on what you mean. “Everything is a file”? Sure, that metaphor can be put to rest.

That was never true in the first place. Very few things under Unix are actually represented as files (though credit to Linux for pursuing this idea in kernel-space more than most). But Plan 9 shows us this metaphor is worth expanding and exploring in how it can accomplish being a reliable, performant distributed operating system with a fraction of the code required by other systems.

Kubernetes is more complex than a single Unix system. It is less complex than manually configuring multiple systems to give the same benefits of Kubernetes in terms of automatic reconciliation, failure recovery, and declarative configuration. This is because those three are first class citizens in Kubernetes, whereas they’re just afterthoughts in traditional systems. This also makes Kubernetes much more maintainable and secure. Every workload is containerized, every workload has predeclared conditions under which it should run. If it drifts out of those parameters Kubernetes automatically corrects that (when it comes to reconciliation) and/or blocks the undesirable behaviour (security). And Kubernetes keeps an audit trail for its actions, something that again in Unix land is an optional feature.

My point is Kubernetes is a hack (a useful hack!) to synchronize multiple separate, different systems in certain ways. It cannot provide anything close to something like a single system image and it can’t bridge the discrete model of computation that Unix assumes.

This also makes Kubernetes much more maintainable and secure. Every workload is containerized, every workload has predeclared conditions under which it should run. If it drifts out of those parameters Kubernetes automatically corrects that (when it comes to reconciliation) and/or blocks the undesirable behaviour (security). And Kubernetes keeps an audit trail for its actions, something that again in Unix land is an optional feature.

All these features require a lot of code and complexity to maintain (latest info I can find is almost 2 million as of 2018). Ideally, Kubernetes is capable of what you said, in the same way that ideally programs can’t violate Unix filesystem DAC or other user permissions but in practice every line of code is another opportunity for something to go wrong…

Just because something has more security features doesn’t mean it’s actually secure. Or that it’s maintainable without a company with thousands of engineers and tons of money maintaining for you. Keeping you in a dependent relationship.

It also has negligible adoption compared to HTTP. And unless it provides an order of magnitude advantage over HTTP, then it’s going to be unlikely that developers will use it. Consider git vs mercurial. Is the latter better than git? Almost certainly. Is it 10x better? No, and that’s why it finds it hard to gain traction against git.

So? I don’t expect many of these ideas will be adopted in the mainstream under the monopoly-capitalist market system. It’s way more profitable to keep selling support to manage sprawling and complex systems that require armies of software engineers to upkeep. I think if state investment or public research in general becomes relevant again maybe these ideas will be investigated and adopted for their technical merit.

Even an online filesystem does not guarantee high availability. If I want highly available data I still need to have replication, leader election, load balancing, failure detection, traffic routing, and geographic distribution. You don’t do those in the filesystem layer, you do them in the application layer.

“Highly available” is carrying a lot of weight there lol. If we can move some of these qualities into a filesystem layer (which is a userspace application on some systems) and get these benefits for free for all data, why shouldn’t we? The filesystem layer and application layer are not 2 fundamentally separate unrelated parts of a whole.

Nice ad hominem. I guess it’s rules for thee, but not for me.

Lol, stop being condescending and I won’t respond in kind.

So what’s the problem? Didn’t you just say that the Unix way of doing things is outdated?

I think the reason the Unix way of doing things is outdated is cuz it didn’t go far enough!

Dismissal based on flawed anecdote is preconception.

What? lol

It’s not a flawed anecdote or a preconception. They had their own personal experience with a cloud tool and didn’t like it.

You can’t smuglord someone into liking something.

I’d rather hire an open-mined junior than a gray-bearded Unix wizard that dismisses anything unfamilar.

I’m not a gray-bearded Unix wizard and I’m not dismissing these tools because they’re unfamiliar. I have technical criticism of them and their approach. I think the OP feels the same way.

The assumption among certain computer touchers is that you can’t use Kubernetes or “cloud” tools and not come away loving them. So if someone doesn’t like them they must not really understand them!

It’s hard to not take that as bad faith.

They probably could’ve said it nicer. It’s still no excuse to dismiss criticism because you didn’t like the tone.

I think Kubernetes has its uses, for now. But it’s still a fundamentally limited and harmful (because of its monopolistic maintainers/creators) way to do a kind of distributed computing. I don’t think anyone is coming for you to take your Kubernetes though…

PaX, 8 months ago

NTFS file locking is pain

PaX, 8 months ago

Cygwin is great too! You can have a fully POSIX-compliant environment on Windows, no virtualization or anything needed. You can even distribute programs to other Windows users linked to their POSIX compatibility layer library.

PaX, 8 months ago

Really? I love that lol

I wish I had one of those SGI MIPS machines…

PaX, 9 months ago

Hey, I’m a Hexbear user and I really think you have the wrong impression of what our site is. Idk if you’re open to reconsidering or if you’re just trying to get a few antagonistic words in but I’ll tell you my experience as a long time user:

Being pro Russia

Our site isn’t pro-russia. We just want the war to come to a swift end without any further bloodshed. Some people take offense to that because we don’t think the best way to do that is to send more guns, tanks, planes, dollars, etc into the warzone. That benefits no one except the arms manufacturers and the money lenders. Not regular people on either side.

genocide denialism

The only thing I can think of that you would be referring to is the “holodomor” or something similar that happened in the USSR. It’s not that we deny that many people did die in these horrible tragedies or that there wasn’t Soviet government involvement in some of them but that these very real events are being distorted for political reasons by people who want to paint the USSR in a certain, wholly bad, light. As communists (or anarchists), we try to be very open to criticism and new ways of thinking about or doing things but not when the intent is to do historical revisionism to make the people who liberated the concentration camps and ended the crimes of Nazism seem like Nazis under a different name.

Authoritarianism

Well, I guess this is true in a way. As revolutionists, we do seek to change the system by establishing a new authority with the capability to make this change. But have you ever noticed how the current system maintains and perpetuates itself? Sure, you can vote (and we don’t seek to abolish that!), but when that fails and working-class people take to the streets seeking change, why is it that people with guns and tear gas and riot shields try to stop them and maybe even imprison them? It’s not that leftists are uniquely “authoritarian” but that we want to use that authority for representing regular, working-class people and to bring about a better world where that authority isn’t necessary anymore. Our anarchist users probably have a somewhat different take on this but one of them will have to talk about it lol

being hateful of ideas that don’t conform to their worldview

Sure, there are a lot of ideas that we hate. But isn’t that everyone? I hope we could all agree on hating things like fascism, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc etc. Our users probably feel more strongly about that than most people lol but that’s just cuz a lot of us have been targets of those kinds of ideas. Other than stuff like that though… this site has been one of the most accepting places on the Internet in my experience. Sure, we argue a lot (sometimes too zealously lol), but just cuz we care a lot about getting things right. On our site, we don’t have downvotes to encourage users to actually challenge bad ideas and voice their opinion instead of just feeling satisfied having slightly influenced an algorithm.

racism (just not towards the same people)

This just hasn’t been my experience and I know most of our users would agree. Racism gets swiftly removed on Hexbear and lots of people replying challenging it. Do you have any examples? This has just been so contrary to my time on the site. Unless you mean jokes about white people but I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s not a problem lol

Anyway, I just want our instances and our users to exist together in peace. I know we have very “different” ideas from what is considered the mainstream in the west and on most of the English-speaking internet but I know our presence on the “fediverse” can be a positive thing and that we can get along. I hope this helps you to understand our site a bit better.

PaX, 9 months ago

Is that an inside joke?

Answering genuinely, yeah it is lol

That being said, what is considered the “political center” varies a lot from place to place, a lot more than just 1930s Catalonia.

PaX, 9 months ago

Do you think “anti-white racism” is even remotely as bad as other forms of racism? Or even a problem at all? White people already have all the privileges bestowed upon them by a fundamentally white-supremacist society. Making fun of this concept on our tiny social media website isn’t hurting anyone.

PaX, 9 months ago

It’s 100% a problem, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it’s racist, so it’s already inherently a problem for that reason alone.

Nothing is “inherently” anything. What makes, for example, anti-black (as contrary to anti-white) racism bad in spaces like this? It furthers the psychological harm caused by the racist material conditions of white-supremacist society and normalizes these conditions. Racist rhetoric is part of the superstructural justification for these conditions that makes the oppressor feel superior and the oppressed feel inferior and like they deserve it. This contradiction does not exist for white people and that is why anti-white racism effectively does not exist, except maybe beyond a limited level in inter-personal relationships. It might make individual white people feel a little bad but it has no material backing.

But it’s also a problem because your [hexbear’s] moralistic self-righteousness

I’m not the one pearl-clutching over anti-white racism.

combined with your [hexbear’s] obvious hypocrisy gives people opposed to your ideals that much more ammunition (and of course you don’t care about that, but that itself is also part of the hexbear problem).

This issue doesn’t really give anyone “more ammunition” against us. Part of the reason we do keep these kinds of jokes around (besides being funny) is because it tends to out reactionaries (like how you are being right now).

And the worst part is that, as with so many of hexbear’s problems, there’s no reason for it. It’s such an easy problem to fix, and would give an instance like hexbear that supposedly prides itself on its inclusivity such a huge boost in credibility.

I’m pretty sure most of the people making “cracker” jokes on here are white themselves. I don’t think Hexbear is known as the “anti-white” instance lol

And sure, I get the importance of having a place where you can feel comfortable and meme hyperbolically about problems you feel are important, and about the people who don’t agree with you. That seems to be the direction that most hexbears seem to want to go.

Yeah, I mean that’s pretty much what Hexbear is. I don’t think anyone here would want to be “morally-unimpeachable leaders” or even to what end that would be.

PaX, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

What? No one on Hexbear is on it because we think we’re going to “effect real change” on here lol

Maybe you forget how isolated lemmy is in general. Even if we wanted to do that it’s not even possible. This is just our comfortable space in an ocean of online liberalism. We’re happy to discuss politics with people in good faith and it’s great if we can help educate people but pretty much everything important happens in real life, offline. So don’t act surprised when you’re met with mockery because you’ve accused us of betraying communism for not letting the bigots, transphobes, reactionaries, and libs talk down to us and insult us on the Internet in some naive attempt to “convert” them.

Also, we get along fine with most of the fediverse! I’m glad we’re still connected to lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, sdf, etc even though there can be a few bad actors. I’m not sure federating with your instance was a good idea though…

PaX, 9 months ago

Sorry, posting is primarily not praxis lol

Sure, the revolution will have a “digital component” but I don’t really see the point in being conciliatory to smug closed-minded assholes on one of the most niche social media platforms on the internet. It’s obvious you don’t know anything about Marxism or about how social change is made so you can keep your advice to yourself. We try to keep details about our efforts in the real world vague because we don’t want to be doxxed.

Good luck with that, you’re really making a difference 👏

Yes, I’m sure letting people call us slurs, red fascists, pretending-to-be-LGBT-people, and Chinese/Russian bots on lemmy (the most important social platform, the social platform of the revolution) without any pushback will exert enough social control on them to make them do communism. Our posts will make Marx proud!

PaX, 9 months ago

Another thing to keep in mind is that imperialism also has the effect of driving down wages in the imperial core since the capitalist can pay their workers less if the price of basic, essential commodities can be decreased by super-exploitation in the imperial periphery. This is a major reason why real wages in the US have been stagnant for a while, for example. So this would have a counterbalancing effect on how much a first-world worker would need to pay proportionally to their income for a case of soda if the process of imperialism were ended.