wolletd

Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.

Yet he is spending his time maintaining it, only to be attacked for his efforts.

Which, in general, is totally legit. Doing something voluntarily doesn't relieve you from criticism if what you are doing isn't good.

I don't agree with that, I can very well still discuss that. He clearly sounds like someone who doesn't want to do this work anymore and should have searched for a successor.

That's my impression from that sentence, at least. Don't you agree?

So, why didn't he do it? Because just firing up Claude and let it rip is way easier than finding real people and building up trust?

Did Claude increase bugs in rsync? Or did Claude just gave some basically retired programmer, who doesn't even want to work on his project anymore, the impression that he can replace finding a successor with just handing it to AI?

“I’d rather be out sailing than working on rsync security issues, so I have reached for several AI tools to help with what needs to be done,”

Well, then maybe it's already overdue to find a new maintainer for the project and let someone else continue it? The tool will not get better from someone working on it who doesn't want to.

Also the amount of commits is suspicious. In the last two months, rsync had about as much commits as in the last two years before that. Most of them written with claude. And then stuff like this is in there.

That's exactly what I'd expect when someone is excited about AI usage and becomes... well, sloppy.

Legacy, I guess. Every product consists of six cameras and they get IPv4 192.168.223.(1-6).

And that is what everybody knows and everybody uses to interact with them. The serial numbers of devices are rarely used.

However, now that I think of it, IPv6 addresses that are constructed from the serial number of the whole device and the position of each camera would be useful. I'll check it out, thanks.

I wonder why IPv6 didn't catch on! It's just unergonomic and ugly!

At work, I have a rare case of a useful application of IPv6: setting IPv4 addresses. We have multiple embedded devices in one product which all got the same default IPv4. But their serials map to their MACs which map to their link-local IPv6.

So workers scan the serial and I connect to all devices at once via their IPv6 address. Then, I set their individual IPv4 address and that's all I do via IPv6.

110 releases in 6 months

Like I said: I think I write like this on some occasions.

I wouldn't know how I would search for examples. I guess you'd have to search old reddit comment threads or something. But yeah, I have no motivation to do that, tbh. It could be that it's hard to find examples because they are scattered about in countless comment threads and single posts on countless platforms. Things I rarely keep links to, things nobody indexed on a large scale before LLMs.

It may be that it wasn't a very popular style of writing, because most people don't like writing a lot and keep their texts on the internet short. LLMs exaggerate this style because they generate exaggerative amounts of text in general. The style wasn't particularly annoying in the past because it wasn't that popular. It's annoying now because LLMs flood the internet with it.

The quoted example in particular didn't appear uncanny to me. And it still doesn't. I can see myself writing like that. I'm sorry I have no example for you. But I'm genuinely unsure whether I'm oblivious to the patterns others see, or whether others see patterns because they want to see them.

I don't know...

The part you'd like to remove ("Not managing code...") may be not required to convey the objective meaning of the sentence, but humans have emotions, too. I could have written stuff like that. To build up a bigger emotional picture.

The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended.

This sentence may not be relevant for whatever you experience to be the relevant message of the text. But it still says something the remaining paragraph does not. And also something I can relate to.

Also, as LLMs are statistical models, one has to assume that they write like this because their training data tells them to. Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble. Not all blogs are written by professionals. I'd say most aren't. LLM training data consists mostly of humans rambling.

I also sometimes write long comments on the internet. And while I have no example to check, I feel like I do write such sentences, expanding on details to express more emotional context. Because I'm not a robot and I like writing a lot. I think it's a perfectly human thing to do. I find it sad that "writing more than absolutely needed" is now regarded as a sign of AI writing.

Then again, I have a rough idea on how I could implement this check with some (language-dependent) accuracy in a linter. With LLM's I... just hope and pray?

I haven't checked out starship yet, but if I understand what you are using, that is Zle functionality. It's part of OMZs configuration (here: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/master/lib/key-bindi...) but doesn't use other OMZ features.

I don't know if starship is still using Zle. If so, this should be possible to configure without OMZ.

It's JSON with some simple idea of RPC added to it. With the main idea apparently being that it is human-readable.

We've been using Varlink for one project, but I've never found myself in a situation where I had any benefit from the data being JSON. You rarely read the raw data. But compared to gRPC or CapnProto, you lost compile-time type checking and now you need 10mins of testing a vending machine before you get a "key not found"-error because you missed one spot on renaming.

Also, I've written varlink-cpp building on asio and nl-json at some point: https://github.com/wolletd/varlink-cpp. But as our varlink usage declined, it never found much usage and isn't maintained.

This information about `getaddrinfo_a` should probably also be in the Github issue?

Using yet another LLM to generate the project code!

You make it sound like that's generally a negative thing, implying that the information being promoted by other countries is made equal and has some implicit right to be spread. But it's not, it's geopolitic information warfare.

Agreed. What kind of data would one want to store encrypted in a git repo besides unencrypted files in the same repo? And why?

If only there was some technology that would allow every peer to have its globally unique address, making direct connections only a matter of firewalls.

I don't know, something like IPv4, but with more addresses...

Our products are hardware, I use docker to build and manage bootable images.

I still haven't found time to work with Nix or NixOS, but I like it's concept.

At work, I'm maintaining a bunch of custom configured Linux images for our products. While building those images through Dockerfiles is pretty declarative, my pain starts with keeping the configuration of systems in the field up to date: half of the build instructions is duplicated in Ansible playbooks.

Conceptually, with Nix(OS), I could maintain a single, declarative configuration that I would use to create new images and simply push to existing machines an re-configure them.

But I don't see getting something like that production-ready in the near future. I'm currently thinking of only building base images with docker and doing all product-specific configuration through ansible.

Bitwarden (and Lastpass, iirc) support passkeys a little longer than KeePassXC. I'm glad to hear they achieved full integration.

As a keepass database is used by various open source clients from different vendors, it just takes a little longer to get all this done. But I'm sure we'll get there eventually.

Historically, the spec was written for hardware security tokens. Keys on those tokens can't be moved around by design.

The whole "platform authenticator" thing enabling passkeys came later. Extending the spec that way was easy: a platform authenticator works just like a hardware authenticator, it just uses a different channel for communication.

The spec the providers built upon just wasn't designed for software authenticators that allow moving around credentials. The original spec assumed credentials are stored in a non-extractable manner in HSMs.

Edit: thinking about it, platform authenticators may have been in there pretty early, but under the assumption of also using an HSM and not allowing extraction of credentials. Providers compromised security for usability, removed the HSM and made passkeys synchronizable – the spec had to adapt.

KeepassXC actually supports passkeys and can be a passkey provider in a desktop browser.

And Android 14 seems to allow changing the passkey provider in the android system as well. With that, the only thing left would be a KeepassXC-compatible app that can serve as provider on android, using the same database as the desktop.

With that setup, I'd be willing to use passkeys exclusively (my phone is still Android 13 and I don't know about app support). I already can't login anywhere (important) without access to my password manager.

I wonder how hard it would be to just convert old C code to C++?

I mean, most of C just compiles as C++ and does the right thing. There may be some caveats with UB (but less if you don't switch compiler vendor) and minor syntactic differences, but I guess most of them could be statically checked.

Or is there any other (performance/size) reason to not do this?

Depends on the CI used, I guess. Gitlab CI and Github Actions show colors and I use them deliberately in a format check job to show a colored diff in the output.

How? Shouldn't it just all be UTF-8? Or do you use a different encoding on your system?

try explaining how to use sed to a fresh graduate who's never seen it

Well, for starters, you just `s/<regex>/<replacement>/` and try to use that in your everyday work. Just forget about the syntax. It's a search-and-replace tool.

That's the only way I used sed for years. I've learned more since then, but it's still the command I use the most. And that's also what `sd` focuses on.

Also, if you want to replace newlines, just use `tr`, to hook onto the examples of sd. It may seem annoying to use a different tool, but there are two major advantages: 1. you're learning about the existence, capabilities and limitations of more tools 2. both `sed` and `tr` are probably available in your next shitty embedded busybox-driven device, while `sd` probably is not

As you said, the value comes from being around for a long time and, probably more importantly, still being present on nearly any Unix-like system.

I propose infinite timezones, you simply calculate the true noon from your latitude. Smartphones can do that for us. The time at your workplace would be some minutes off the time at your home. And when your phone is off, you are screwed.

It's like in the old days before railroads when every town had it's own time, but even worse.

Name resolution problems are the most bizarre.

And they happen at every level and can combine beautifully. I had a DNS server flooded with Format Error messages, because NTP Pool DNS sent an invalid response for a specific query and two (yet to be identified) clients sent (and still send) that query every second or so, because the response never reaches them. And as the upstream query failed, the DNS server would send the same query every second again to a bunch of other DNS servers, every single response generating another Format Error. Dozens of log lines per second.

Those two generate about 1GB of waste traffic per month. And that's the two buggy machines talking to a small DNS server I manage. I wonder how many junk traffic public DNS servers generate.

When you say it like that, nothing really is serverless. Everything is running on some computer.

Serverless architectures are provided by servers.