mtrower

He mentions in the thread that he had to delete posts offensive to the developers. Maybe that's why?

Maybe. As those posts have (allegedly) been deleted, it is now impossible to say. It seems probable though. I do find it interesting that he didn't delete the post, spewing actual verbal abuse at the people who dared to propose possible solutions in good faith.

It is interesting that nobody in the thread went to check in the code of mpv, smplayer, etc. to see how it's done there. Surely this would be the best response to his request for technical suggestions

He has flatly ignored and refused to address, that these other players can do this at all. He makes only mention of "video editors". Well, and YouTube -- cherry picking the easiest case to attack (on grounds of single file format).

At the end of the day, what he needs is an algorithm, which can then be applied against the VLC codebase. For example:

* track timestamp of latest keyframe

* track nframes since latest keyframe

* optionally, keep some sort of unique id to positively identify this keyframe

- now, scrub back to last keyframe (if time accounting is sloppy for this format, overscrub by some amount, the run forward to the keyframe. If overscrubbing is significant, this is where you could compare the keyframe against the reference, to ensure you aren't way far back and needing to run forward further)

- okay, you've found your keyframe; advance (nframes - 1)

- profit

If he comes back and says "that's not fully general", that's true --- but the people asking for this don't care if it's fully general; it's suitable for common use cases and that's what they want. Let it work where it will work. Give up where it won't.

If he comes back and says "sure, that could work, but I don't have time, send a patch", well, okay, that's understandable.

What's actually happening is he's coming back and saying that won't work at all, that it won't support the majority of cases, will take too much compute, etc. and that's just flat out not true. You can do it selectively for the common cases. He might not want to, but that's different from can't.

Like, consider a scenario where you're playing back realtime video over a network connection. You won't necessarily be able to seek forward in that scenario -- you might not have enough video buffered, or hell, the connection could be plain interrupted. Imagine if they just didn't implement forward seek because the solution could not be fully generalized...

And who is going to spend time coding such a thing up, knowing that it is likely to be rejected as "not fully general"?

It's of course work to do, and I'm not super motivated to send them that patch, and there's the question of it it would be merged

That's my issue; he calls for people to send patches, but anyone capable of writing such a patch is also probably going to see that he's not positive on the matter, and that his "patches welcome" is really pretty passive aggressive in this instance. At least, that's how it comes off to me. I would expect that, should I submit such a patch, it would simply be rejected on the basis that "it is not a general solution".

Have a go at it in the wilderness and you’ll realize really rather quickly how disconnected modern … durations have become.

But yeah, for some it’s definitely an escape. Particularly at work.

My first programming forays were with the assembler feature of DEBUG.EXE, on an 8088. Extraordinarily cumbersome in retrospect, but it was existing at the time. Definitely a gateway experience.

socially badgering

pressure is not real.

real consequences that I'm aware of (as in legal, regulatory, etc)

So if I understand correctly, the argument is that social pressure isn't real pressure and can be dismissed as inconsequential? If that's the case, then yeah, I think this is played out and we can call it here.

(Not because I strongly agree or disagree with such a notion, I just kind of think it would be getting off into the weeds a bit much to continue at that point.)

..."pop off"?

I get the impression that you're inferring things about me that aren't actually real. Such as a lack of respect for the fallen.

I would guess that having it drilled in from childhood probably has something to do with it. By taking issue with it, you're going against the flow and people in general seem to be uncomfortable with that sort of thing. It also seems to me, that people tend to associate it with something other than the actual words that are being spoken.

So in other words, you disagree with the post I'm replying to?

I don't believe there is any pressure whatsoever.

You've clearly not been to some of the events that I have. Also, there's the whole matter of various public school systems. Regardless, if there hasn't been any pressure for you, then this is sort of a non-sequitur, as my comment is talking about situations where there is pressure to begin with. Non-pressure situations are out of scope.

In fact, I generally don't. On the other hand, that is not because I am bothered (or not) by such practices.

I'm really not sure what this has to do with the opinions being expressed by myself, parent, and GP here. I can avoid a behaviour and simultaneously have an opinion on the behaviour, which I am expressing here in response to others' opinions on said behaviour.

It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed.

I'd wager that a lot of people never even knew these existed. To a lot of people, the browser became (or simply always was) the only real interface to everything internet related (or for some people, just about everything period).

Probably, they are like me, meaning we seem not to be on the same page as you regarding the term 'podcast'. To me, a podcast is just an audio talk session, mastered and distributed as a digital audio file. That's it. Distribution can take many forms, but the podcast is the file. 10 or so minutes of google-based research seems to offer support to this notion.

universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company

What is this protocol that you speak of? Searching "podcast protocol" leads to absolutely no useful links on the subject. Podcasts in my experience are distributed in one of three ways:

* Download links on a web page

* Embedded streaming links on a web page

* An RSS feed

That last (RSS) could be considered a "protocol" of sorts, I suppose. At the very least it's what I would expect a podcast app to support. But you then go on to refer to RSS as a separate entity from your "podcast protocol", so I'm back to being confused as to what you might be talking about. What is this open protocol that is intrinsic to your definition of 'podcast'?

Honestly I struggle to think of a more complicated program than a modern browser that expects to fully support the existing web.

That may be true, and it may be of personal value to pursue this for yourself. That's different from socially badgering others into it at group events.

This is the exact reason* I bought a 4090 for my recent rebuild instead of the rDNA card I actually wanted. I really wanted to go with AMD for the driver integration with the Linux graphics stack —- I’m so, so tired of shenanigans when it comes to decades old features of X not working or working poorly due to some nvidia bug/non-integration.

But being able to leverage my graphics card for GPGPU was a top priority for me, and like you, I was appalled with the ROCm situation. Not necessarily the tech itself (though I did not enjoy the docker approach), but more the developer situation surrounding it.

* well, that and some vague notions about RTX

The letter or the intent though? Because if it’s the letter, we’d better throw in wheel chairs, surfboards etc. as well. The law does not specify motor vehicles, even though I would believe that to be the intent.

Improvements to property often bring little to no return at time of sale —- especially if those improvements have worn in a few years. More than a few years? Forget it. Improvements are generally made to improve immediate rental value (similarly maintenance repairs are made to retain existing value). Gains realized on sale are mostly from natural appreciation of real estate over time (on which capital gains will be paid). This is why house flipping is not a more popular enterprise.

going to charge more for rent

You mean, be able to charge anything at all.. it’s not like we’re taking about buying turn-key properties and updating the cabinetry or something.

not really doing any labor

Properties require upkeep. (N) properties require N times the upkeep. In addition to normal expenses, there are also risks; for example a tenant may damage your property, and then you need to fix it. You may think your security deposit covers that; in reality that amount of money can usually only cover minor repairs / cleaning. Landlords need to recoup that sort of thing over time, so it ends up getting rolled into your rent.

I really don’t think you understand how expenses for these things work. The way you’ve been talking, it sounds like you think your rent check goes directly into the landlord’s bank account as profit. Maybe you should try home ownership, and see what the actual ledger (expenses + time) looks like over time. Compare that plus your mortgage to rent. You may need to do this for the long haul to see the real picture though, not just a couple of years.

Better yet, acquire some properties and try your hand at rental yourself —- either you’ll end up filthy rich for nothing like you seem to think it works, or you’ll learn a valuable lesson about the true cost of services…

Because, while you assert that landlords offer no value, the fact remains that there are people in this world who want to rent, not own. Without landlords, how is that supposed to happen?

End of the day, landlords don’t deserve more money and I don’t know why anyone here argues for it. It’s like you want bezos to have even more money - it’s super weird.

See, to me, this vitriol is what seems super weird. It seems like you must be talking about some sort of property shark that owns 8+ figures in property and extracts the maximum possible from the poor peons that dare to want a roof over their heads. Maybe with some large company thrown in the mix for good measure.

My father and grandfather are both in rental (well, they did whatever they could to make their way, primarily carpentry; rental is only part of the picture). Both of them started with nothing and managed to bootstrap their way into some properties, fixing them up as they went. They do all the work on their respective properties themselves. There isn’t a management company involved. They aren’t some evil men trying to extort the populace, the goal is just to live, provide for family, etc. Yet by definition, they are landlords - that thing that so many here despise unilaterally with such passion.

Probably there is considerable diversity (or at least two classes of landlords). But laws are going to apply to both groups.

If an engineer spends an hour writing a commit message that no one reads, that's an unproductive engineer, compared to where they should be.

Okay, maybe don't spend an hour. It would take a special kind of commit to need more than a few minutes writing a decent commit message.

And I would argue we shouldn't cater to developers who make documentation difficult to access for everyone else by hiding it where only crappy tools can reach it.

Yeah. Like web browsers. And PDF viewers.

The non-caustic point here is that clearly different people have different ideas about what is accessible.

I think it's optimized for discussions before integration, which is largely what PR descriptions and comments are largely used for now.

This isn't even a git concept though; it's something that was tacked on top of it. What you seem to be saying here is that a third-party tool building on top of git spawned a social movement that moved this layer up a level. Not every project uses github or a github workflow.

I think it's optimized for discussions before integration

It's optimized for discussion of the purpose of the code unit in question. That discussion can be useful before integration; but pre-integration discussion can happen any way you like. PR discussions work, e-mails on mailing lists work. Face-to-face discussion works.

The real value (for me, I guess; apparently you just don't see it that way) is explaining the purpose (and possibly circumstances) of the commit, after the fact, when I'm looking at it for some reason or other. Not finding the commit, but explaining it once I'm there. A well-written commit message can be absolutely priceless.

Maybe this last point should go in a top-level response to your original comment, but I'm already here, so I'll just say it here. Saying that commit messages are terrible because only short-messages (the "subject line") are shown by default, seems to me about the same as saying e-mail bodies are useless for the same reason, or that file contents are terrible because `find` only lists file names by default. You 'have' to collapse by default, or you'd drown in a sea of commit messages anytime you tried to list anything.

Like say you are trying to determine why a 10 line function is the way that it is. You blame it. Not even with the stupid-simple GitHub UI that _I_ originally wrote, but with the more expensive CLI interface that follows renames and ignores whitespace changes, etc. Now you get a list of SHAs of commits and the first 50 chars of commit messages for each line for the last modifications, etc. How do you even stitch those messages into a useful story (in order) to tell you how that function evolved to what it is now and why?

Okay, I hear you, this is not the most ergonomic procedure to one-off. But seriously, you have the SHA commits. If you need to do this often, write a tool that takes those SHA commits, orders them based on log order (or chronological order, w/e, pick an ordering mechanism), and prints out whatever information is interesting to you. A simple display that can expand/collapse full messages, diffs, etc. would probably do nicely. It can be a GUI tool, a CLI tool (menu-driven, maybe); whatever works for you. This should not be a big deal to write for the common case, and if you think it's that critical to the community, publish it.

I mean clearly he’s a menace. Something needs to be done about him. That can be true, and it can simultaneously be true that he is not 100% “evil” or anything else.

A few incidents (or even many incidents) can paint a bleak picture, but they can’t really prove an absolute.

You know, I'd actually like to add to my earlier comment.

Yeah, it’s not quite the same.

I actually don't know quite why I wrote what I did, because the concession really isn't true. I can only imagine we were discussing some romanticized view of the subject. My own experience, however, shows that reality is otherwise.

Cheap tools usually don't work well or last; you end up constantly complaining about them and constantly replacing them. This is true whether you're talking about power tools or simple hand tools. (How much do you pay for most of the software and libraries that you use?)

For the hand tools --- some things like hammers basically work, but other things, unexpectedly, do not. Handsaws and handplanes are two good examples of simple tools that are fundamentally broken from the manufacturer, and in many cases simply cannot be fixed due to design. Other tools can be salvaged, but don't work out of the box. You can shell out inordinate amounts of money to a company like Lie Nielson, or hope to get lucky on the purchase of an antique, but the typical products you might expect to work, don't.

For power tools, the cheaper tools might technically do a job, but they often function in ways which are detrimental to the work or to personal safety, and don't last long.

You might think the solution is to spend more money for quality tools, but this doesn't always work out either. I'm thinking of a DeWalt biscuit joiner and a Makita pin-nailer; both are well-respected brands for "real contractors" who rely on their tools and expect them to work. The Makita pin-nailer doesn't load its nails right, so I have to futz with it after every nail --- which kind of defeats the purpose of the tool (it didn't do this originally, but it didn't take much use before the problem developed). The biscuit joiner, despite being a well respected model, cuts slots that have so much slop in them that there's no point in using the tool at all.

Now lets talk about machines briefly. My radial arm saw (no longer a common tool, but once quite common both in homes and on jobsites) cannot be calibrated to proper specifications. One of the adjustments cannot be made to spec and it throws off several of the others. The result is a tool that, while useful, is only half-functional. I have theories, but don't know exactly what is causing the issue (I got it second-hand); I would need to completely tear it down and grok the entire design, then rebuild it, to properly fix the issue. By the way, the calibrations it does have need to be periodically checked and corrected (the RAS takes a lot of flak for this, but I find this is true of any machine with adjustments).

This is usually about the time where the internet gets up in arms and tells you to throw away the RAS and use a table saw, so lets talk about my table saw --- the fence can't be calibrated to lock parallel to the miter slots. I don't think the fence is broken by design, but I don't know exactly what's wrong. The calibration process is logical, it just inexplicably doesn't work. I suspect one of the fence rails may be slightly out of alignment. I could fix this by building my own high-quality fence system --- I have the skills --- but this is analogous to throwing out your third party library or tool and writing your own.

In all of the above cases concerning power tools, the answer is maintenance/repair, but in all cases (aside from building a new fence), it is not the work I want to be doing, nor is it work in which I am experienced, nor is the necessary work obvious through casual investigation.

Of course, I have plenty of tools that work great and never give me trouble, other than periodic maintenance, but it's the problem tools that stand out. Software is the same for me; most of it works fine, some of it breaks down due to bit rot (maintenance required), some of it is broken from the manufacturer (out-of-box repairs required), and some of it is just piss-poor in design (see hand tools above).

I still hate the treadmill just as much as you appear to, but romanticizing the life of a tradesman is probably a mistake. Entropy is everywhere, poor design and unfortunate occurrences are everywhere. I don't know if you have any personal insight into the life of a tradesman, but they deal with all kinds of BS, from all angles, that just isn't commonly discussed outside the field in question.

=== Addendum:

I keep mentioning software libraries, but those really aren't tools. They're more analogous to prefab construction components, so in that case we could talk about items such as pre-hung doors and prefab cabinetry that is supposed to save time and require less skill to install. That's great, until you discover that the item was assembled out of alignment at the factory, defeating the entire purpose. I could go on ad nauseam, but I imagine you probably get the point by now...

God, it's all just miserable and depressing when you really start digging into it, isn't it?

Yeah, it’s not quite the same.

On the other hand the tools are mostly very simple and highly standardized. The simple tools are applied to the problem through a combination of applied experience and constructed jigs. I guess the equivalent in the software world would be classic non-fat Unix as your base tools, and building your own libraries and toolkits as your jigs (no or very limited third party deps), while aggressively avoiding complexity. You’ll get reliability this way; of course, there are serious tradeoffs.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. I agree that the modern software treadmill is horrible and needs to be tamed.

At least in woodworking, tool setup and maintenance is a significant portion of the craft.

He started out with an unpopular but semi-interesting viewpoint, then immediately went down the rabbit hole to somewhere terrifying.

Notice how he deleted a bunch of comments (perhaps justifiably, but who can say now...) and then closed comments. How dare anyone disagree with him...

It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two.

I don't think that follows. Or rather, it might be true, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. I'm a pretty peaceable individual, generally wish good things for others, consider people as individuals, etc. I stay away from political activism. I would still be pretty upset if someone called me a Nazi.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, offensive terms tend to be offensive regardless of the underlying reason. When someone gets upset about it, you can't infer that it's because you struck close to home --- it could be utter indignation about the injustice of the situation, or something else entirely.

I’d be interested to hear how you reached that conclusion, and what that conclusion is meant to imply.

In some sense, you might consider it to be a crude one. If you configure your computer to boot directly into full screen emacs, never leave it, and do your damndest to interact only with in-process elisp, you might get some feel for what such a machine could be like.

It will also be a frustrating experience, since emacs was never really intended to be used in such a way. There’s going to be a lot of friction and limitations. Still, it’s a fun exercise for the right sort of person :)

Well, in my opinion, inertia is a dominant factor. There is an enormous amount of inertia present in the current systems and thought patterns. Redesigning the world from scratch while applying different principles is hard, especially when you need to catch up with 30 years of evolution and situational developments.

The point of the article, I believe, is that the current set of principles underlying modern systems are not necessarily sacred and immutable. It does not follow that applying differing principles to today’s ecosystems, where current principles have metastasized, would be easy or even necessarily achievable.

I think you may be misunderstanding here. They aren’t trying to keep the kennel GNU exclusive —— they merely want the option for a pre GNU toolchain.

A goodly number of people appear to want just that.

I don’t agree, mind you, but someone reading your comment with this mindset will probably be reinforced rather than swayed.