Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Nerd, nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrd. Tech discussion. Also fine to talk about the tech world more generally.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

I'm still not over the fucking CEO of Microsoft smugly announcing that he'd partnered with the dudely CEO of L'Oreal to make women 'camera ready' via virtual makeup on Teams.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

https://gizmodo.com/iphones-false-911-calls-bonnaroo-android-uk-999-1850576151

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Can't concentrate; am reading:

https://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html

My brain keeps flipping between a literal reading and a metaphorical one in which the nodes are people.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Just finished chapter 2. It's an odd read so far; explains some things that go without saying, while leaving out examples that would help with following the more confusing parts. I've already done some work with High Availability stuff so I think I'm following it okay, but am glad this isn't the *first* text I've read on the topic.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Probably didn't help that I got distracted switching out "keeping data consistent, available and distributed between nodes" for "keeping political theory consistent, available and distributed between people" and trying to fit different stumbling blocks encountered by feminists into the different combinations under the CAP theorem. PA? Third wave. PC? Second wave. CA? Not sure we've even managed that. XD But maybe others would disagree with my characterisations. It's a silly activity, anyway, and I should go back to reading. :P

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

What a sentence:

"Zookeeper is basically the open source community's version of Chubby."

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

"Most standard logical frameworks are monotonic: any inferences made within a framework such as first-order logic, once deductively valid, cannot be invalidated by new information. A non-monotonic logic is a system in which that property does not hold - in other words, if some conclusions can be invalidated by learning new knowledge."


Aha, we've solved the mystery of TRA logic. We say "men are dangerous". They say, "but I have new information; this one has Inner Feelings". At this point, our logics diverge. We say "men are dangerous; this is man (with Inner Feelings); this man is dangerous". They say "men are dangerous; this is man with Inner Feelings, ???? STDERROR, Inner Feelings Inner Feelings Inner Feelings, OVERWRITE ALL KNOWN CONCLUSIONS, MEN NOT DANGEROUS."

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

And hence we get:

"It is important to realize the connection between non-monotonicity and operations that are expensive to perform in a distributed system."

:P

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Back on topic, I snickered at the guy in the comments who made it all the way to chapter 5 thinking "partition" referred to "disk partition".

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Missed this at the time!
https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20211117

From what I've seen, pocock seems like he's on the right side of this. Wonder if anyone anywhere has been organising an alternative distro to the captured ones.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

( https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2018/12/msg00006.html )

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

This makes me feel smug about not getting round to reporting a bug I found in debian, or sending the fix I wrote.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

(those archives are a great window into what utter dramallamas devs are.)

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Paper from '79, The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System (Dennis M. Ritchie):

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

To read: https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf (The structure and interpretation of computer programs)

I've been tempted to look at lisp just because it seems like all the people I personally find smartest are into it. xDD

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

*people whom I find smartest *among those who code*. All the smartest people I know don't know how to code. But whenever I hear about some code thing that I find really impressive, Lisp shows up sooner or later.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Tried learning some Lisp for an hour.

You put everything in brackets. Roughly, the first thing in your brackets says what you're going to do. The second thing in your brackets says what you're going to do it to. You can put brackets in brackets, and put things in THOSE brackets. You can use newlines and indentation so that it's easier to see which brackets are in which brackets.

(pprint "hello world")

(pprint (string-upcase "hello world"))

etc.

Apparently people joke that LISP means "Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses".

When I started the common lisp (clisp) interpreter, I was surprised to get a huge ascii pic saying "CLISP" with a menorah. I searched it; the authors have an faq where they say they're not Jewish, but are really into Judaism. I like those kinds of odd quirks in older programming stuff.

So there we go. im now a lisp developer. Before I learn the builtins, is this one of the languages that pays?

Re: Coding - RHEL drama

[(Anonymous)]

Okay don't judge me for my fandoms. Anyone keeping up with this?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/

Re: Coding - RHEL drama

[(Anonymous)]

I am curious if the RH people are watching the clusterfuck like "hahahaha, fuck you, big blue" or if they're pissed at the rest of the industry making hay from it.

Re: Coding - RHEL drama

[(Anonymous)]

(short, questionable summary for nontech dans: red hat funds loads of developers to write code. They make products from it and sell them, and share the code with the world. Other companies take red hat's code and make products from it. These products compete with red hat's. IBM bought red hat, changed the culture, and tried to hide the code so that nobody else could use it. Everyone in the industry is now pissed. "Hiding the code? That's not sporting!" "Well, stop stealing our shit!" "It's not stealing if there's a textfile in it that says anyone can do what they like with it!" "Make your own, our devs need money!" "You've got loads of money!" etc. Also it's a tangled web; most companies write SOME code that some other company uses. But red hat had the best reputation for funding the most shared code.)

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Since we have a few nerds here, thought this might be of interest:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/substack/jobs/4190286005

(I looked to see if they were hiring, outta curiosity, because seems like my dream job, but idk if I have the energy to go for it. But maybe of interest to other dans.)

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

Saw an MK Fain post from a while back; I like her but I have Thoughts on it. xD

Post:

https://soapbox.pub/blog/take-down-big-tech-with-great-ux/

Post it references:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2640786/why-foss-is-still-so-unusable.html

I found it odd that MK took this article seriously, because this man is an idiot. Evidence:

> "it’s hard to see how the FOSS movement will ever deliver anything of lasting value to the larger IT community.”

Straight away, this is a guy who has no idea how much of the world's infrastructure depends on FOSS.

But anyway. Yeah, everyone knows that the reason foss projects have less uptake is because they're less usable. That's not news to anyone who works on them. The issue really does just come back to the idea that for work to be done, someone actually needs to do it. This man spends a whole article whinging that nobody else is doing work he wants done...

> another reason many FOSS projects fail on usability: arrogance. “many FOSS developers don’t try to make their products more usable or accessible because, frankly, they don’t care if anyone ever uses them,”

I wouldn't describe it as arrogance to not want to tailor things to this guy's tastes for free. If he doesn't want to write code himself, his dude is free to start a company, or several companies, financing whatever FOSS projects he wants. But looks like he doesn't want to:

> Others resist change, or worse still, pass the buck by inviting those making the suggestions to "patch it themselves" (the classic FOSS "source code shuffle")

> In fact, if you don't have something to contribute to the project, they'd rather you simply disappeared and left them alone to continue on their endless quest to write even more pointless code.

wah wah wah nobody will work for me for free

("they tell me to actually help when i drive by to complain; the CHEEK of it!")

Back to the MK Fain article:

> In a recent debate over the direction of Fediverse software, one regular contributor admitted that he was uninterested in improving usability or supporting the growth of the network, stating, “the way I build software is mostly for myself and friends. Normies mostly aren’t in that demographic.”

> This brazen statement finally confirmed long-held suspicions within the community: many FOSS contributors are intentionally creating generally bad and unusable software with the specific goal of keeping the masses away. These sorts of contributors prefer being a big fish in a small pond, and any growth to the community is perceived as a risk to their limited status.

This was the point I realised this was just a project-squabble turned into a blogpost. But, lol, what's wrong with using your free time to make a project that suits YOU? :P

As for barriers to entry, idk about in software dev communities, but in discussion communities, yeah, I absolutely put some in on purpose. Not as a status thing, but just because I want one corner of the internet where I can have a decent fucking conversation. Most of the net is terrible. "Normies" (lol) can already go anywhere and be happy about it. I can totally see why a dev would leave out handholding from their project, if they only wanted contributors with experience and didn't have the time or energy to help anyone new get started.

I find it weird to moralise about it, anyway.

All in all, good luck, but projects differ and growth of a project isn't necessarily success.

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

(also at the start I should have said: less usable for the majority. They're often MORE usable, but tailored to minority tastes that aren't visible to most people. So you'll get eg: software that works much better than the mainstream offering on the commandline, but looks like shit in the browser.)

Re: Coding

[(Anonymous)]

(ALSO the dude's article is like 10+ years old, so FOSS had less visibility and status back then, but MK's article is from 2022. And there was still plenty of infrastructure around in 2010 anyway...)

(WE DON'T CHOOSE OUR FANDOMS OUR FANDOMS CHOOSE US)