e-dant

Is gitea any good?

Are security vulnerabilities good marketing?

Rarely do I think "that would make great poem"

Microsoft is a strategic risk for the US, too

The market is perfectly efficient, value is well attributed, lobbying is a social good, being rich means you’re smart and should have special privileges, optimizing for returns on investment is equivalent to optimizing for a better society

Obviously I’m kidding, and something is rotten

Since there are comments below asking about benchmarks, others noting or expressing interest in other projects, I'll drop the one I made: https://github.com/e-dant/watcher (and also an ebpf experiment https://github.com/e-dant/bpf-fs-events)

There are benchmarks in there, and comparisons with all the other watchers out there I could find at the time I made it (see "Comparison with Similar Projects" at the very bottom of the readme).

It's a pretty long list. Tons of watchers out there with different design philosophies and shapes of problems they solve.

There are a lot of caveats to the filesystem monitoring APIs provided by kernels. Some projects (like facebook's watchman) take that as a kind of antagonism, and decide to fight back with layers and layers of fallbacks and distrust and rescans. That projects basically only makes sense as a daemon.

Other programs and libraries try to take that complexity and tame it by being super-focused on one platform or providing a lot of configuration options.

Some provide debouncing logic. This particular feature comes up from time to time, I believe, both for practical reasons and because over-reported events from the kernel subsystems, especially for some arcane events like moving a file across mount points can trigger a flurry of hard-to-associate events for the same path.

If you want to avoid dealing with under-documented filesystem event subsystems, you can also just make your own with ebpf. Especially for security-oriented systems, you'll find that the only (nearly) perfectly accurate filesystem event subsystem you can make, is the one you make from the ground up.

This is cool stuff, but a nitpick: It’s not undefined behavior in the language sense in C to do socket ops on a bad file descriptor. It’s just an error from the kernel’s point of view, and the kernel will throw -errno at you.

Think the world would be a better place if 70-80% uptime were more tolerated. We really don’t need everything available all the time. More time to talk to each other, to think, more “slow time”.

Just don’t like the slop that’s getting us there.

A fascinating en dash, used as an em dash, followed by two em dashes.

Hmmm.

I have no mouth and I must scream

Some of these I’ve been told are taboos in the opposite way. For example, the one about serving or taking food from the opposite end of the chopsticks, I was told, is polite. But here they say it is taboo. Maybe they meant it’s taboo not to do that?

Linux does not have a marketing team. Microsoft, Apple, Google do. The market is not efficient, it is gullible.

I think, if I’m reading correctly, that PFAS are the thing that PFXX stuff gradually breaks down into? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12028640/

Edit: Nevermind, Wikipedia makes it pretty clear that even the non-broken-down PFAS are totally unsafe, evil things which we knew were dangerous since the 70s and did nothing about until recently

Good fucking riddance. Time to start actually talking to each other again.

The issue this paper is grappling with (to what extent humans have a place in the middlespace between them asking an ai to do something, and the ai doing it) is interesting (although I disagree with how the paper tries to solve it).

I’m empathetic to a non-native English speaker using ai to help communicate. I mean, seriously, I would do the same thing if the lingua franca was Japanese.

The author is here saying, well yeah, there’s this weird thing that happens when I use ai by which the ideas that come out the other end are a bit different from what the author intended.

I think the sentiment “well you shouldn’t have used ai” is incomplete.

The paper is not great, but it’s an interesting question.

Thought it was obfuscated C code, then I realized it’s a tree or something

It is an accomplishment in a healthy, pro-social environment.

This life is needlessly absurd.

Why does this even exist?

And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.

I have more of a problem with poor governance than strong automation. The economy should provide us all food and shelter, beyond that, do what you love.

You never had a voice to lose

A masterclass in debugging

It disappoints me to see hardware compensate for the failures of software. We should have done better.

ARM and lots of non-x86 architectures often use a series of bootloaders to kick up ram, wake up parts of the hardware, blah blah, and read devicetree blobs to know what the hardware looks like

I don’t understand the fs url hyperlink to a child nutrition website.

If there are as many typos in some code as are in the article, there would be a whole lot of segfaults, too

The comments here about you needing money or time to exercise are wrong, and missing the point:

It’s hard, and that’s why you do it. It’s also fun.

Get the fuck out there and run, climb, swim.

I like github

The author does point out that these problems come up when implementing various data structures.

It might be surprising to some folks, but there is a lot of unsafe code in Rust, and a lot of that is in the standard’s data structure implementations.

Also —

Common in network programming, the pain of lifetimes, is in async.

The model sort of keels over and becomes obtuse when every task requires ownership of its data with static lifetimes.

What's all this controversy with GNOME? I must be missing something. Isn't it perfectly reasonable to say that some security issue in a dependency (which is maintained and open and funded, like WebKit or Linux) is not the fault of someone down the line to fix?

I can't imagine someone reporting a bug to one of my repos about some race condition in the kernel. Why the hell are you bothering me with that? Tell the LKML.

That's not to say I'm not sympathetic, it's just, like, what do you expect me to do?

Let the language die, hope it goes quicker than cobol.