bradfitz

This post inspired me to have Claude port my 30 year old high school German Java applet game to Javascript, complete with a faked git history:

https://github.com/bradfitz/koffer#der-verloren-koffe

Play online at https://bradfitz.github.io/koffer/js/

So neat seeing ~30 year old code come back alive.

Yeah, I remember writing epoll libraries for Perl (https://metacpan.org/pod/Sys::Syscall, first out 2005-08-01) doing raw system calls because libc on the distros of the time (at least Debian) didn't have epoll support yet.

So in 2005 I didn't expect Postgres to do super well here, but it's 21 years later and we're still pgbouncin'. It's just kinda sad.

In other words, it's still super heavy if it's forking a process per connection.

I find it ridiculous that PgBouncer even needs to exist. Postgres should be doing this.

I'm 46 now. I remember being shocked at Postgres's heavy connection model when I was 23.

I gather things haven't improved since?

We found it at Tailscale and bought an enterprise support contract from SQLite to debug it for us. Worth every penny.

We should probably blog about it.

2008? I had the Roku HD1000 [1]. :)

My email search:

"Welcome to the "Roku-tech" mailing list" ... "Tue, Dec 2, 2003, 10:48 AM"

Not sure how I ended up on the mailing list a month before their product was released. There must've been buzz about it for a few months before release.

[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/bMGBqm4mTmfUNJG39

I wrote that library originally for dl.google.com: https://go.dev/talks/2013/oscon-dl.slide#1

I then open sourced it in Jan 2013 in what was then named Camlistore (now Perkeep) in https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/commit/6f9f0bdda9c9c1f147... d

And later I put it in https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/golang/groupcache/singleflight (groupcache was written for dl.google.com)

And a private copy in Go's net package in Jun 2013: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/61d3b2db6292581fc07a3767...

It later moved to golang.org/x/net, and later to the Go standard library (well, internal: https://pkg.go.dev/internal/singleflight)

We now even have a copy with generics in Tailscale's tree at https://pkg.go.dev/tailscale.com/util/singleflight

So many variants of that code :)

IIRC, that's only for Linux guests that can nest. macOS can only one level deep. That is: you can't have a macOS guest (running on the Apple hardware host) make its own macOS guest.

Oh no.

I can’t tell you how relieving it is to hear somebody else complain about this. This has been my pet peeve for ages.

Well, this has sucked up a couple days of my free time so far... :)

I find myself using OpenSCAD regularly to 3D print little things for the house. (Most recently: hooks to attach Christmas lights to our roof deck's glass walls)

And when something gets too trick, ChatGPT is amazing at writing in it. Often it nails the whole design in the first try, like https://bsky.app/profile/bradfitz.com/post/3maelwomyw22n to mask off certain Raspberry Pi pins to make reassembly of projects easier later.

I seem to recall reading that as a kid too, but I can't find it now. I keep finding references to "Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective" about a Civil War sword being fake (instead of a Great War one), but with the same plot I'd remembered.

I've been idly following this stuff on & off for years, but I never saw proving a point "instead of using Rust" as one of the motivations of the project. Was that ever stated anywhere?

Until they start using Sidewalk/LPWAN type things automatically instead of your home WiFi.

I had to go look that up! I assume that's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power ? (Not a janitor, but "a low grade Technician"?)

Related, I gave a 6 minute lightning talk about writing tests in Go that use the test binary itself as the PID 1 under an emulated Linux in QEMU:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rAAyOTCsB8GLbMgI0CAb...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Zy77O-BUM

How many of those additional 1,643 were a result of your 2014 blog post? :)

I assume it's intentional, playing on "libre" (as in libre software, not just gratis software)

I'm a co-author of tsidp, btw. You don't need tsidp with a Tailscale-native app: you already know the identity of the peer. tsidp is useful for bridging from Tailscale auth to something that's unaware of Tailscale.

Primarily using Tailscale for authentication as well, replacing perkeep's other auth methods.

Tailscale employee here.

I kinda doubt we'll end up charging for it (as it costs us ~nothing except support costs, which are real), but it's easier to make it free later when it's GA rather than rug pull on people and start charging for it in the future if we start it out free+unlimited.

It doesn't. But judging from forum posts, it seems like it was a common failure mode and it might've been fixed in later hardware revs.

I ordered three and they all worked and then one died. Fortunately they replaced it, though.

Go does. And it supports timeouts and cancelation.

Go strings are just bytes. There is no Unicode or encodings.

Golang use UTF-8 for in-memory string.

Nope. It’s just bytes with no encoding.

https://go.dev/blog/strings

There's no WebRTC in Tailscale.

I haven't. I have 5K and 6K monitors. That's indeed privileged, but only for a bit until that's soon commonplace and cheap. So this all sounds like a very temporary problem at this point for something so subjective. Every time this topic comes up it's the same "but I like the look of $OS rendering the best" comments.

I haven't used displays with under ~215ppi in over 10 years. I find these subpixel opinion discussions still ongoing very... quaint. :)