Lolwut: A piece of art inside a database command (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Lolwut: A piece of art inside a database command (2018)

antirez.com

96 pointsaebtebeten16 comments

I really like this. Insofar as art is an expression of one's self, without consideration for practicality, this is pure art. I'm really glad to see art inside a mainstream program, props to antirez. This is the same feeling I had when creating https://imgz.org, though I guess that does do something practical.

Wow, I like this. I have been looking for something similar to be able to share my desktop screenshots through text.

I have to applaud you on the hilarious $999,999.98 tier. I was laughing then really started laughing when I saw "Still no support" at the bottom.

Haha, thank you! The pricing is my favorite bit as well. Also, with the cli utility, imgz works really well for sharing screenshots, I use it for that a lot.

The imgz blog has just become my favourite technical blog ever

Thanks! It didn't catch on much when I posted it, so I didn't really continue. Maybe there's more innovation to be had in serving images, though.

I admire the dedication to the theme. It even extends to the code: https://gitlab.com/stavros/imgz/-/blob/master/main/views.py?...

It's definitely a mood.

> at this point, we are very far from the first hackers in the 60s. As I get older I find that it is harder and harder to talk about technology with an hacking perspective, where there are no walls or pre-cooked ideas, and the limit is the exploration. For everything you say there is a best practice. For every idea there is a taboo. To this new setup I say LOLWUT, since I don’t feel represented by it, nor it represents hacking, at least in my vision.

Well said.

> LOLWUT is also going to be a tradition starting from Redis 5. At each new major version of Redis what the command does will change completely.

FYI, here is LOLWUT for Redis 6: https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1207712536147251202

Discussed at the time:

LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17969843 - Sept 2018 (118 comments)

Note: Most of that discussion is related to the "replacing or not the words used in Redis replication". ( i.e. Removing Master / Slave terminology )

It's an interesting look into the culture war(s) of that time, and how attitudes have changed even since 2018.

While it was a heated argument at the time, I doubt such a change would even register now. It's not clear whether that's changing attitudes to the issue or resignation on the part of those who were previously indignant to such a change being made.

After reading some of those dire predictions now I am imagining Musk arriving on Mars and, finally free of the mind virus zombie hordes infesting his home planet, firing up his IDE, changing the linker and stdlib, then recompiling the world so he can finally use, as default entry point, 'int master(argc, argv, envp)'

"LOLWUT should remember ourselves that the work we do, programming, did not start just in order to produce something useful. Initially it was mainly a matter of exploring possibilities."

This really resonates with me. It's why I got into hacking and eventually programming and then architecture now product management. Each step farther from the ethos of the OP.

I was gonna say the artist has a typo, but looks like it was already fixed:

https://github.com/redis/redis/commit/d23cae5f062ee41e7c866d...

Why does it print only the version in 7.2.3? I'm using the Docker image FWIW.

Nobody has implemented anything for 7 yet:

https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src%2Flolwut.c#...

So it defaults to this function which just shows the version:

https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src%2Flolwut.c#...

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