Notices by Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca), page 2

(the above happened because i realized at some point that even though diffie hellman key exchange _uses_ things like "elliptic curves" or "modular arithmetic" to work, you do not need to actually _understand_ those things to understand the basic idea, and I thought that was cool!)

anyway this is what your computer is doing every time you make a HTTPS connection, to figure out what secret key to use to encrypt the connection

@mjd yeah this happened because someone asked me how DH works and I started explaining modular arithmetic and I realized, wait, that's not important, I don't understand that much about elliptic curve addition or whatever either but I still get the basic idea behind ECDH

so happy that ghostty implemented terminal scrollback search! https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-3-0#scrollback-search

i was already using it and that fixes the only real issue I had

i just realized we never reprinted this DNS sticker sheet https://wizardzines.com/zines/dns/

trying to decide if we should bring it back or if it's just a special one-time-only item for folks who bought one of the first 1000 print copies of How DNS Works :)

worked with the tcpdump folks on an updated set of examples for the tcpdump man page https://www.tcpdump.org/manpages/tcpdump.1.html#lbAF

the idea is that if you've forgotten how tcpdump's basic flags work, you can find a quick reference in the man page!

@evan this is making me realize i don't know how those buttons work, I should look into them

I'm back to thinking about CSRF: why is it useful for sites to be able to embed resources (like <img src="othersite.com/whatever.jpg">) and for the browser to send the user's cookies to the third-party site?

There's "ads" and "tracking" obviously but I feel like there's another actually-useful-to-users reason I'm not thinking of

really nice profile of Wizard Zines from the Cambridge Centre for Computing History! https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/76804/Julia-Evans/

@botvolution here you go https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/116165903411035566

i’m at https://fedimtl.ca today and really enjoying the talks so far

(continued from ^)

Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?

it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.

(2/?)

@cwebber aw thank you! definitely when I think "what am I doing about AI" it's "idk keep writing stuff"

like i added some examples to the dig man page recently, and that is a small thing but not nothing

i do not want to get into the business of posting LLM takes but very briefly:

It feels clear to me that some people* are getting value out of using LLMs for programming. Basically see https://simonwillison.net/'s whole blog. If I think about it purely on the basis of "in a vacuum, can this help me write programs", it seems like an exciting technology.

BUT...

(1/?)

(* it also feels clear that some people are NOT getting value out of LLMs, hoping to avoid flamewars about that please)

i often ask people to only reply to my posts in certain ways (like “please only reply if you find man hard to use”)

It’s because sometimes I get hundreds of replies a day and if folks don’t stay on topic then the replies get so repetitive that it’s hard for me to learn new information.

Really appreciate when people follow the prompts (which most of you do!). I’m posting a reminder because it’s been going a little less well recently than usual

i think part of the reason I'm feeling interested in man pages right now even though I rarely use them is that search has gotten so much worse, it's frustrating, and it makes it feel more appealing to have trustworthy sources with clear explanations

also it just occurred to me that the one time I wrote a command line tool (https://rbspy.github.io/) I didn't write a man page for it, I made a documentation website instead. I don't remember even considering writing a man page, probably because I rarely use man pages

(not looking to argue about whether command line tools "should" have man pages or not, just reflecting about how maybe I personally would prefer a good docs website over a man page. Also please no "webpages require internet")

a different version of the same question: if you find man pages difficult or impossible to use, what makes them so hard? do you feel like it's something that could be fixed?

(other than "the lack of examples", which is possibly the #1 issue, also please don't tell me about tldr.sh)

i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details

i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?

(not emacs or vim)

i haven't read hacker news yet this year and it feels great

i guess spending time in spaces where people are speaking in a normal human way to each other is good actually