Notices by Dave Anderson (danderson@hachyderm.io)

My aspirations for computers are modest: I would like to minimize the number of times I say "what's it doing now??"

Empirically, so far, the single most effective way to achieve this has been to touch the cloud less.

From reading about Bluespec's history, TIL there was an object-oriented flavor of Haskell called O'Haskell. I find this very funny and am now picturing Haskell but with an Irish surface syntax. No, I have no idea what that means either, it's the absurdity I find entertaining to some degree.

"Electronics isn't magic"

"Also, here is the protective sigil to cast when working with DRAM"

@petrillic a variation of this I read somewhere re: community moderation: the culture of your community is defined entirely by the shittiest person you don't ban. Set that bar accordingly.

@ryanc @q yeah :(

On the related revocation delay bug, there's a timeline that includes the restraining order: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1910805

If I'm reading this correctly, they are currently saying that "regardless of circumstances", all delayed certs are getting revoked on Saturday at the 5-day deadline. 🍿

Speaking of language, sometimes I remember how incredibly weird it is that a software feature designed to help you achieve something is canonically called a "wizard".

Oh I need help configuring this, lemme light the beacon and call for the aid of Digital Gandalf

Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them.

Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub to run some cronjobs, wanna come along?

Also implies that the default state of software is, I dunno, an orc or a barbarian or something. Something that you need a wizard to help you with, certainly.

Or you know, if we're just using the Unix philosophy to mean whatever we feel like to win an argument, I'm going to argue against it on the basis that this small javascript helper library is not designed to run on a mid-range PDP-11 in the late 1970s, nor is it intended to be a self-supporting operating system optimized for rapid prototyping. Therefore, your entire design is premised on a nonsensical set of constraints, and is hereby rejected.

Alternatively, if you insist on taking Unix's name in vain to win arguments, I am going to start taking you literally, and require you to show your work.

Please explain how your design for commit hooks embodies "salvation through suffering", as described in Ritchie and Thompson (1974).

Please describe, precisely, how your protocol buffer based microservice cloud works with text streams, the universal interface.

Where is the filter in your design, which as we know every program must be?

You claim that you want your rust program to embody the unix philosophy, and yet you refuse to implement half your logic in shell scripts to increase leverage and portability. Please explain.

Your design doc uses "and" in its description of the program. Please explain how you reconcile this with doing one thing only.

Justify your choice to make this SIMD library compute things fast at the expense of VAX VMS support, in direct violation of the commandment of portability over efficiency.

New rule for software design discussions: if your argument for a design includes the words "the unix philosophy", your design is automatically rejected, with no appeal available.

If you mean a specific design goal, say what you mean. "The unix philosophy" has half a dozen definitions, unix never followed any of them religiously at all times, and has become shorthand for "I like this and don't feel like unpacking why".

Also, quick note for crowdstrike execs: everyone can see you looking over at that bus, considering your options, limbering up your throwing arm... Just a note that the people you probably want to hire are watching reeeally closely how you're going to handle this, and are taking notes. The shareholders may be into human sacrifices, but the people you need to run your business aren't. Choose wisely.

Okay so you know, bunch of shitposting and all that, but a serious interlude:

Someone pushed the button to start this rollout. They are probably having a _really_ bad time right now.

If someone at Crowdstrike knows who that is, please go and check on them, give them a hug, tell them it's not their fault, that it's going to be okay. No matter what the company line is on blameless culture whatever, the lizard brain is in charge right now and needs reassurance.

> Among the different applications that use this tube, the most important are fishing and dentists.

Just another day browsing a completely normal part of the internet

@ryanc I thought I'd overbuilt with 64G, given I have a separate hypervisor box for VMs... And yet here we are.

Having a completely normal one apparently, somehow consuming 57/64G ram without buffer cache, how on earth

*looks at 4 screens full of multiple browser windows with many dozen tabs each*

oh.

Finally, I have defeated my own website and successfully posted something.

For your amusement, I humbly present: what the hell is PID 0?

https://blog.dave.tf/post/linux-pid0/

@evana Knowing nothing about how garmin build firmware, my suspicion is it's something like: this is a list of all OSS present in their Yocto source tree, or similar. Rather than track what OSS makes it into which firmware builds for which SKUs, they just make a list of all OSS that gets too close to their build system, and put that one list in all products. But I dunno 🤷

Boring joke deflator: afaict it's just Garmin's standard wording so that they can splat in all licenses to everything involved in any of their products, rather than have to generate license compliance text specific to individual firmware builds. But also, lol