otl

@otl@lemmy.sdf.org

About me

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otl,

I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn’t so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.

otl,

Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: lemmy.world/post/11020167I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo

otl,

Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

otl,

Good question! Sorry if this answer is weird :)

For me, I don’t actually interact from Mastodon per se. I wrote a couple of read-only Lemmy & Mastodon clients. One for a weird text editing environment I use (lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382) and via email (gts.olowe.co/). To reply to or create posts, I use a write-only Mastodon client I wrote.

My idea is to exercise the fediverse. In principal I don’t think I should need separate accounts for Lemmy, PeerTube, Mastodon, Kbin, Akkoma, etc.

Right now I’m replying from an account on lemmy.sdf.org as I can’t reply from GoToSocial (Lemmy and GoToSocial don’t work well together right now) and my Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) has a post limit of 500 characters.

otl, to programming

Why We Can't Have Nice Software

https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

From Andrew R. Kelley, he's the author of the Zig language

@programming

otl,

Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.

God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.

I think it’s alluded to in the article:

They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.

Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernityinteresting).

otl,

Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.

otl,

This made me realise that the article is not about the quote or any sociology; it’s about politics and John Howard. I dislike articles like this just like the ones about Elon Musk. Political nonsense to get people riled up.

otl,

Zig is what I thought Rust would be like when I first heard of Rust. I’d love to try Zig for some hobby things but can’t get it running on OpenBSD (yet!).

otl,

Agreed. I didn’t know about these features - I’ve never written any Perl before - and I do find them kinda interesting and cool. But not really surprising.

A less clickbaity title might be “Exploring Raku’s built-in shortcuts for CLIs” or something. Still 6 words. And I still would have clicked and enjoyed the article! Really appreciated its positive tone and clear examples!

What got you into coding ? (aside from money)

To give some context, I’m a developer myself and once I had a conversation with someone who has not “tasted” programming, but was wondering about passion and career. I was asked what I like about programming. My answer was that my interest in it came from writing small scripts when I was young to automate things....

otl,

Now I do convoluted shit by hand and not knowing I’m gonna fuck it up ;)

otl,

Maybe there’s some IP address ranges to try block?

It’s difficult because, for example, blocking the addresses OpenAI’s crawlers use may inadvertently block addresses from Azure used by Bing or whatever.

otl,

[…] and this is a huge project.

This makes me skeptical too. I’d be interested to hear about smaller projects to replace some creaky system relying on the output of some long-gone contractor’s overengineered software being faxed around.

Those projects have no cool name and are probably really hard to get funding for. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that might be more effective than these “big bang” projects.

otl,

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

Probably need to keep in mind incidental versus essential complexity here.

So with all those configuration options, why is the standalone binary expected to have defaults that may sound same on one system but insane in a different one?

Because this is how much of what we use already is implemented. Significant effort goes in to portability, interoperability and balancing compromises. When I’m doing software development e.g. writing HTTP APIs (of which I apparently know nothing about ;) ) - I feel like I’ve got a responsibility to carefully balance what I expose as some user-configurable thing versus something managed internally by the application. Sometimes, thankfully, the application doesn’t even have to think about it al all - like what TCP flags to set when I dial some service.

You bring up containers which is a great example of some cool features provided by the Linux kernel to solve interesting problems. If you’re interested, have a look at FreeBSD’s Jails, Plan 9 and LXC. Compare the interface to all these systems, both at the library level and userspace, and compare the applications developed using those systems. How easy is it to get going? How much do I need to keep in my head when using these features? Docker, Kubernetes, and the rest all have made different tradeoffs and compromises.

Another one I think about is SQLite. Some seriously clever smarts. Huge numbers of people don’t know anything about for-loops, C, or B-Trees but can read & write SQL. That’s technology at its best.

Consider how difficult it could be to, say, start a car in all the different operating conditions it is expected to be used in. But we never think about it.

We as tech people pride ourselves on familiarity with esoteric detail, but it doesn’t need to be like this. Nor does memorising it all have anything to do with “skill”.

What I’m struggling with are thoughts of significant vested commercial interest in exposing this kind of detail, fuelling multi-billion dollar service industries. Feelings of being an outsider despite understanding how it all fits together.

It is a pluggable service that connects to one or more TSDBs, performs periodic queries, and notifies another service when certain thresholds are exceeded.

Have you ever written this kind of software before?

It sounds like you are comfortable with the status quo of this part of the software industry, and I’m truly jealous! If you’ve got any tips on dealing with this kind of stuff you can find my email at www.olowe.co/about.htmlThanks :)

Apple blames iOS 17 bugs and apps like Instagram for making iPhone 15s run hot (www.theverge.com)

Apple has acknowledged user complaints that iPhone 15 and 15 Pro phones are overheating, reports Forbes, but said that contrary to speculation, it has nothing to do with the phone’s hardware design. Forbes noted an update to Instagram has already rolled out with version 302, released September 27th, to address some of the...

otl,

I can imagine it’s a collection of bugs where it’s sorta the OS’ problem but sorta the application’s problem. It probably reached a stalemate. Nobody really wanted to spend the extra engineering effort; maybe it would all have to be undone then rewritten again to get something out in time.

otl,

Not that simple, unfortunately :( The problem is that one particular vendor (Meta) controls the client - the app - to the service (Whatsapp). Right now we can only hope that Signal doesn’t add this kind of feature. There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.

otl,

My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really work. That’s as far as ActivityPub is concerned - one of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.

Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes; any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable publicidentity (via WebFinger). Here are some example identities:

When some “activity” is performed by that identity, a message is delivered to many (many!) servers. They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy, Meta’s Threads (soon?).

Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:

  1. I posted this photo from a Mastodon instance (via @otl)
  2. The Mastodon server also delivered a message to !motorcycles.
  3. The Lemmy server at lemmy.world stored it in a big database so subscribers can read it.
  4. @ganksy replied “Wild and chilling landscape”.
  5. Lemmy stored the reply and also delivered the reply to @otl.
  6. Mastodon stored the reply in its own big database so I can read it.

Coming back to the OP:

That was a long winded way of saying we should have (optionally) private profiles in lemmy.

Here is some service’s idea of what @otl is:

There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with. What we really have is just the activity received from @otl. The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites when you get down to the nuts and bolts.

Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author. e.g. Richard Miller

otl,

Some interesting thoughts on this from the Signal creator: signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

otl,

is it even lower demanding than i3?

Probably not. XFCE provides more than just a window manager; it’s a whole desktop environment. That said, it would be interesting to see quantitatively what the difference in system resource usage actually is.

otl,

Maybe some relevant discussions here: github.com/orgs/cutefishos/discussions

otl,

I don’t know whether I watch these for the footage or for the hilarious audio of people’s reactions.

otl,

6 months seems like a long time. When my friend’s family moved from the UK to Australia back in ~2005 their dog was in quarantine for 1 month. I wonder what the differences are and/or what changes have occurred since then.

otl,

I wonder what the UN’s track-record is with cybercrime and surveillance historically. Anyone have any links to share?

otl,

You know what’s funny? I would never use something like this (my own Lemmy client is absolutely terrible in comparison!). But I’m so happy that Alexandrite exists: it’s proof that programming and web development can still be experimental and loads of fun. Congrats to the developers!

otl,

A real gold mine for a person like me who lives in a developing country with restricted access to old hardware.

Does that mean it’s harder to find old hardware in developing countries? Interesting. Maybe because there wasn’t much hardware in circulation in the country at the time?

otl,

I avoid software which requires a relational database altogether. For me that’s part of the fun of self hosting: what’s the simplest possible system I can get away with at my tiny scale?

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