Notices by Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social), page 6

Great moments in dry (Go) commit comments[1]:

runtime: remove note about goid reuse

Goids are designed to be big enough that they will never be reused: a uint64 is enough to generate a new goroutine every nanosecond for 500+ years before wrapping around, and after 500 years you should probably stop and pick up some security updates.

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1: https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/8f71c7633fd70fffc5fa65e7865e763238fa6f46

This is my face when people think it is a good idea to make your computer make bubble-popping noises when you change the sound volume. I AM LISTENING TO MUSIC YOU GOONS, IT IS NOT IMPROVED BY RANDOM BUBBLE POPS.

@GeePawHill For example, one (human) person in a manga I am very fond of has a special supernatural status. The Japanese for it transliterates to 'surei bega' and the term was expected to be some English language term that had been transliterated into Japanese by the manga creator. It took a rather long time (and in the end the word of the creator) to work out exactly what English term it was.

@GeePawHill I was going to think it weird but then I remembered that it originated from Japan.

(I have a lot of casual exposure to Japanese phoneme rules through anime (and manga), since sooner or later one winds up trying to understand how non-Japanese words wind up being pronounced the way they are in the Japanese dialog. Sometimes this leads to comedy with translating into/back to English, as people try to work out the correct English/Latin-alphabet version of some non-Japanese name.)

Another day, another site devoted to listing and 'shaming' public web servers that don't have IPv6 yet. Sometimes I think that people who want IPv6 everywhere are their own worst enemy.

People have been yelling at other people to get IPv6 for decades. Maybe some year those people will stop to ask why people aren't using IPv6 already and what could help change that.

My standard attitude on digital signatures for anything, Git commits included, is that you should not sign anything unless you understand what you're committing to when you do so. This usually includes "what people expect from you when you sign things". Signing things creates social and/or legal liability. Do not blindly assume that liability without thought, especially if people want you to.

In re: https://fosstodon.org/@vbatts/112185576755787518

My hot take: if corporations are going to insist that OSS software they use have things like mandatory two-person code reviews, SLAs, written succession plans, and so on, then the end result is going to be that corporations don't use anywhere near as much as OSS code as they do today.

Since that would be unpalatably expensive to corporations (that's why they're using this OSS today), this is corporate hot air plus yet another attempt to lean on OSS for even more unpaid labour.

@irenes Part of my tradeoff calculation in using release binaries for eg Prometheus or Grafana (Loki) is that their build systems are sufficiently complicated that I can't confidently run them either, plus I have no idea how many generated (source code) artifacts are checked into the repository and used in the build. Building from the ground up is a lot of work (that's part of why Linux distros are a lot of work).

@lanodan @snowcrashmike If everything was completely wiped and had to be restored from utter scratch, we might find that we had missed some things, but we could probably put them back together again from general first principles about how our environment operates.

(And the offsite backups. Those would be very important.)

@lanodan @snowcrashmike Fortunately for us, we have (copies of) all of that sort of configuration and settings information stored on our fileservers (and included in backups), along with machine configurations and so on. This is less virtuousness and more sheer survival; we have enough machines (and keep them long enough) that we have to keep track of all of that somehow or things will inevitably blow up in our faces.

@snowcrashmike I keep wondering when the first time will be that we use ZFS filesystem rollbacks.

(The real answer is probably that our load metrics would all go red from the ransomware trying to encrypt <bignum> gigabytes of data over CIFS+NFS, and then we'd get to do selective restores.)

@jschauma GNU sort will do this with -V 'version' number sorting, which can be used on any field AFAIK. I think FreeBSD sort also has a -V option that behaves enough like this to work for IPv4 addresses.

@aeva @mhoye The open source rspamd[1] spam filtering system (currently) uses Redis as a purely local cache. I have the impression it was the simplest k/v local store they could use (it certainly didn't need any special configuration when we set the whole system up here). Now that Redis has changed license, future rspamd versions may switch to something else (memcached? I dunno).

1: https://rspamd.com/ and then https://rspamd.com/doc/configuration/redis.html

@lanodan @fink I get a single result from getent (although the name in the result can be random).

This is my face when Python's socket.gethostbyaddr() appears not to be able to return multiple names for a single IP address. Or at least it doesn't on Fedora and Ubuntu with their versions of Python 3.

(If you want to test it yourself, try 72.136.172.146, which right now returns 17 DNS PTR results for me. I would be interested if this works for you.)

I wish I could entirely trust my current heart rate monitor, but it's been a bit erratic about registering readings since my last bike ride with it in December. If I trusted it, my 'just sitting around' heart rate would probably make me feel pretty good. Although I suppose 57-58 isn't too far off from possible and reasonable.

(I normally only wear my HRM while biking so I don't get much data on my resting HR.)

It has been '0' days since I discovered a Fedora package update purged all my 'ip rule' rules. This broke approximately everything, a number of things in subtle ways (because of infrequent use plus IPv4 vs IPv6).

Blog post: A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XWindowsAllTheWayDown
tl;dr: the original idea of how you would program X apps is that most UI widgets and elements would be protocol-level '(X) Window' objects, in a whole tree of them. This was likely designed to allow various clever tricks to reduce client/server traffic, but it pretty much required server side rendering (of basic X graphic elements). It's now fallen by the wayside.

@quodvideo I suspect that one part of client side rendering is that general rendering iterated faster than X protocol extensions were able to as CPU and memory improved. If you render client side and ship bitmaps, you can do whatever alpha blending and complex shapes and so on you want, without waiting for an X protocol extension. (And you can render with uniform code for things that partially involve server-unsupported bits, like SVGs.)

@quodvideo Hardware acceleration of drawing primitives (2D and 3D) was another area where the X server lagged (and was slow). Everyone wanted direct to hardware OpenGL if they were doing OpenGL at all.

Another driver was fonts and proper text rendering, which basically has to be client side and shipped as bitmaps.

Once you're doing client side rendering, the tree of subwindows approach is relatively terrible (or basically off the table).