Notices by Tim Chase (gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe)

I learned today that POSIX specifies a tool designed to assist you in reviewing & modifying LLM-generated code. In typical Unix fashion, they shortened "reviewing & modifying" to just two letters:

$ rm code.rs

It even has command-line options to [r]ecursively [f]ix whole directories of LLM-generated code:

$ rm -rf project/

Happy RS-232 day to all who celebrate!

$ date +%j
232

@evan

provided more detail in my other reply here:

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/117106624159507186

@evan

a "Yes but…don't be a jerk" vote here

@evan

I'm a bit torn. ATProto has experienced multiple "we're decentralized, but one main server goes down and pretty much everybody falls over" issues. So I put it at the bottom of the list.

ActivityPub has weathered spot outages much better results. The rest of the AP world keeps on ticking while the outage gets resolved and everything syncs back up. However the underlying protocol/documents specs (ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, JSON-LD, the .well-known/ schemes, etc) are a poorly-/under-defined Gordian Knot¹. And it still seems to require online'ness and HTTP/S.

So that leaves me voting for something Git-like (though not necessarily Git-proper) which synchronizes via the simple Merkle Tree data structure, can transport over HTTP, SSH, bundles on USB drives, rsync, or whatever. One can suffer from semi-centralization of popular end-points (see GitHub), but that's more in the usage/implementation rather than the protocol. And it certainly has code-first benefits over trying to wedge code-changes into encoded JSON blobs 😛

⸻
¹ my ActivityPub/ActivityStream exploration notes here: https://blog.thechases.com/posts/activitypub-activitystreams/ (incomplete because I petered out before completing it)

@jschauma

Drives me a bit bonkers to see folks with their "I built this lightweight¹ CLI application in Rust using $LLM" when the core functionality can be performed by a shell one-liner.

I mean, sure, a tiny piece of me is glad they're getting into software-tool development, but that's such a horrible way to do it. 😑

⸻
¹ lightweight = "only has 150 Cargo module dependencies and takes an hour to `cargo build` the thing"

Okay, whoever authored this deserves a raise

@jpmens something about this saddens me. I remember Turbo Pascal running blazingly fast on my parents' 286 with 640KB of memory and a slow 30MB spinning-rust HDD. A quick web search says it needed less than 512KB for the full IDE+compiler, and about 256KB for just the command-line compiler.

That Rust would die with an out-of-memory error in a world where computers have GBs of RAM and mindbogglingly faster CPUs/disks…the soul weeps.

@rootwyrm @david_chisnall

Add to that the delight of

Are you over 18 today? No
[next day] Are you over 18 today? yes

Surprise, they have your DOB. 😑

@vasilis asks¹, so here:

I want a web that is accessible.

I want the web that works without issue in a terminal browser like lynx(1) or a light-weight browser like @dillo, a web that doesn't require 1GB (or even 1MB) of RAM just to display 25KB of actual content.

I want a web that doesn't run random, untrusted code on my machine.

I want a web that doesn't try and track my every movement and click across every site.

I want a web that doesn't require cookie banners on every site.

I want a web that doesn't have popups.

I want a web that doesn't beg for me to sign up for mailing lists.

I want a web that I can mark up semantically and instruct my browser how to style in my own fonts/colors that *I* find most readable.

I want a web that I can deploy on a low-end hosting box for $1/month² that doesn't require cloud-fronting services, CDNs, complex deployments, dozens of frameworks, and a complex build process.

I want a web that doesn't try to shove AI down my throat—whether useless slop content, or pounding on my poor server to scrape what I've created.

I want a web that is simple enough that a single developer could write a new/novel browser.

I want a web that connects people instead of companies inserting themselves between people to extract profit.

I want a web that is passionately crafted with love, not for capitalist motives.

Instead we somehow have [gestures around vaguely]

⸻
¹ https://social.vasilis.nl/@vasilis/116096206093641328

² https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

@cedx @hi

FreeBSD's fetch is definitely the tiniest of the HTTP clients on my systems:

gunnos@freebsd$ ls -sh1 `which wget fetch curl`
21 /usr/bin/fetch
217 /usr/local/bin/curl
373 /usr/local/bin/wget

gumnos@openbsd$ ls -sh1 `which wget ftp curl`
292 /usr/bin/ftp
704 /usr/local/bin/curl
1216 /usr/local/bin/wget

So 157KB is smaller than the other non-fetch HTTP tools, but the omit the 7.384 GB of disk-space required by Node.js+modules 😆

I learned recently that Didier Spaier, maintainer of the blind-friendly Slint distribution based on Slackware, passed away. May he rest in peace, and may his loved ones find comfort in the memory of all the good he did for the B/VI community.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1056384/

@mwl

Bond: "Do you expect me to awk?"

Goldfinger: "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to vi. There is nothing you can awk to me about that I don't already know."

@soatok @drscriptt

Boring? Tell us more!

@xenotar

Hah, my first computer (rather than my parents' computers I'd used up to that point) was a 486DX/100 that ran (at various junctures) DOS+Win31, Win95 (borrowed), OS/2 (borrowed), Slackware, and RedHat. Good hardware for its time in '95, but I can see how cryptography might burden such a machine 😆

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's the venerable ssh(1)/sshd(8)

While I grew up in an age where telnet(1) was my only option, the ssh folks made it a pretty drop-in replacement for the sorts of things I did with telnet, so switching was easy.

With the exception of when I'm rebooting or our ISP is having issues, I almost always have at least one SSH connection open and likely more than one connection to other hosts. Even in the "security" of our LAN in the house, I still SSH between machines rather than use unencrypted connections for transfer.

I love being able to run things remotely and use them locally, such as

$ ssh me@remote dmesg | xsel -ib

to put the remote machine's dmesg output on my system clipboard or

$ tar czvf - /path/to/data | ssh me@remote 'cd /destination/path ; tar xzf -'

to transfer a directory tree to a remote machine.

It generally has sensible defaults, allows me to force key-based authentication rather than username+password auth.

It allows me to limit $DAYJOB customers to SFTP-only access within their designated chroot directories, insulating them from each other.

I use it to tunnel into work and forward my RDP VM's screen so I can access it locally with rdesktop(1)

So many delightful little uses.

Definitely worth reading @mwl's SSH book to learn more: https://mwl.io/archives/3126

Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.

A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:

• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit

• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering

• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly

• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆

⸻
¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/

Parents, please check your kids' candy this Hallowe'en. I just found systemd inside one of their chocolates.

My beloved brought home an aloe plant a while back and its care has fallen to me. So I decided to name it "Guvnah". That way I can say "Aloe Guvnah" in a horrible British accent and get a quality eye-roll from my sweetheart every time I water it. 😆

Dumb #Vim trick: I knew that I wanted to jump about ¾ of the way into my file, but didn't want to page down a whole lot from the top of the document, nor did I want to jump to the bottom and page up a bunch.

Vim lets you type a number and the "%" to jump to a particular percentage line of the file. So to jump to my target, I typed

75%

and bang, landed within a couple lines of my desired destination. To learn more:

:help N%