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LukeShuon Interactive GCC (igcc) is a read-eval-print loop (REPL) for C/C++

This should perhaps have "(2009)" in the title; it is a fork of http://www.artificialworlds.net/wiki/IGCC/IGCC . Andy Balaam worked on the original IGCC 2009, 2012. Alexandru Dina worked on this fork 2018-2021. The fork seems to be mostly minor modernization, and adding color.

It works by compiling and re-running the whole session each time and assuming that it only printed `n` bytes last time but printed `n+m` bytes this time, that it should only show the user the newest `m` bytes.

LukeShuon XML is better than YAML – Hear me out

For a full year it stood for "Yet Another Markup Language".

First draft: https://yaml.org/spec/history/2001-03-30.html

Last draft calling it that: https://yaml.org/spec/history/2001-12-10.html

First draft with the new acronym: https://yaml.org/spec/history/2002-04-07.html

LukeShuon Linux network performance parameters

1. While your context about auto-tuning is accurate and valuable, it doesn't really address the fundamental strangeness that the parent post is commenting about: It's still strange that it can auto-tune to a higher value than you can manually tune it to.

2. It's always valuable to provide further references, but I'd guess that down-voters found the "It's pretty clearly documented" phrasing a little condescending? Perhaps "See the docs at [] for more information."?

3. "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

LukeShuon Bad Apple Font

Font layout engines are only Turing-complete if the stack is unbounded (to be fair: that's true actual computers too: they're not Turing-complete because they don't have infinite RAM), and AFAIK the major font engines all impose a quite strict limit on the stack size.

LukeShuon $HOME, not so sweet $HOME

That's correct.

LukeShuon $HOME, not so sweet $HOME

IMO, it's terrible enough that that stuff breaking would be a good thing.

LukeShuon $HOME, not so sweet $HOME

Since Emacs 27.1, if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/ exists and neither ~/.emacs nor ~/.emacs.d/ exist, then it will set user-emacs-directory to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/ instead of ~/.emacs.d/.

LukeShuon $HOME, not so sweet $HOME

I mean, Emacs respects the convention, developed ~40 years after Emacs was first released.

LukeShuon Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)

He also wrote the (now finished) webcomic Casey and Andy. I don't think I've ever shown it to an engineer who didn't instantly love it.

LukeShuon Git files hidden in plain sight

By default, most things assume that tags are immutable and won't check for updates to a tag. So tags aren't great for things that can expire or otherwise need to be changed.

LukeShuon Philosophy of Science 101: What is the problem of induction?

The concept of falsification was introduced by Karl Popper in 1934... not 200 years ago. Popper is a historically important philosopher of science, but under scrutiny much of his thinking doesn't actually match up with how science is done (now or historically), and his philosophy hasn't been the dominant philosophy of science since the 1960s (enter Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos). Nonetheless, the idea that "science = falsification" permeates popular culture, and is even repeated by many scientists who think about their work, but don't as often think about how they think about their work.

LukeShuon Git files hidden in plain sight

Nope, that's how it works with Git.

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

My apologies. Denis contributed 2 documentation patches in 2019. That said, he is a Coreboot contributor, so it's not like he's a total outsider.

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

Leah created Libreboot, and nobody other than Leah has ever done a release of Libreboot or a Libreboot derivative.

Then, Denis and Adrien come along and decide+announce that because they don't like a change that Leah made to Libreboot, that Leah no longer gets to be the one to use the Libreboot name.

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

Leah created Libreboot in 2014.

Leah stepped away from Libreboot in 2016, after some drama between her and the FSF. Two Libreboot community members, Andrew and Sebastian, became the Libreboot maintainers.

In 2021, after Andrew and Sebastian managed to go 5 years without doing a release, Leah forcefully took the project back over in order to get releases going again.

Leah also started a "sister project" to Libreboot, Osboot, which had a different (non-FSF-friendly) firmware/microcode policy in order to support more hardware. It is my understanding that on all hardware that can be supported without binary blobs that Osboot still did not include any and was equivalent to Libreboot.

In November 2022, Leah merged Osboot into Libreboot, adopting Osboot's firmware/microcode policy for Libreboot.

In response to this policy change, two other community members, Denis and Adrien, forked libreboot.org as libreboot.at, and claim to be the "genuine" Libreboot. Neither Denis nor Adrien were Libreboot contributors before that (edit: Denis contributed 2 documentation patches in 2019). libreboot.at is a snapshot of pre-osboot-merge Libreboot; there are not any new releases there.

In June 2023, Denis and Adrien decided to start work toward doing new releases under the name "GNU Boot". They have not yet done a release of GNU Boot.

In July 2023, Leah posted an "Unofficial GNU Boot 20230717 release" to libreboot.org. Adrien sent Leah the "C&D" about using the "GNU Boot" name. Leah removed the release from libreboot.org, and instead put up https://notgnuboot.vimuser.org/ .

Adrien sending that message is ironic, given that Adrien and Denis are trying to steal the Libreboot name from Leah.

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

I mean, yes, but it was brought to a crest then. It went from a bunch of folks in the community separately saying "yeah, he's kinda problematic..." to a bunch of folks standing together and saying "he's problematic!"

So of course it had been going on a while if more than 3000 people were "suddenly" willing to sign the open letter against him.

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

With links:

RYF: Respects Your Freedom certification requirements: https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria

FSDG: Free Software Distribution Guidelines: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...

An argument from Leah/Libreboot about why the RYF/FSDG's policies about firmware and microcode are bad: https://libreboot.org/news/policy.html

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

> Isn't Leah the person that sold ThinkPads on behalf of Libreboot

No: She sold librebooted laptops under the brand "gluglug" and later "minifree". This was never "on behalf of Libreboot"; it was always separate.

> didn't send it, then put the blame on her mental issues?

Yes, mostly: in 2020 minifree accumulated a backlog of orders that she wasn't able to fulfill. However, AFAIK, she did eventually ship all those orders, and minifree is in a good place today.

> Then she abandoned the project and let the contributors take over

Sorta: She had removed herself as a Libreboot maintainer after the 2016 drama between her and the FSF. She had already long not been a Libreboot maintainer by the time she encountered trouble in 2020.

> after some time she booted them with fake accusations, banned them from their IRC channel and took over the project. The contributors complained that she didn't even have the decency of contacting them

Yes: She did forcefully take Libreboot back over in 2021. But, in the 5 years of SwiftGeek et al. being the Libreboot maintainers, they never shipped a release. At the the time she took it back over, the last release was more than 5 years old, shipped by Leah before she stepped away in 2016. So IMO her taking it back over was the right thing, even if how she did it was shitty.

> but she was adamant of taking the Libreboot name for her again to sell used Laptops.

No: Again, her controlling the "libreboot" name has nothing to do with her selling laptops under the brand "minifree". She was adamant that libreboot start doing releases again, instead of withering away.

> This was also the moment that she began to add binary blobs to Libreboot.

No: That didn't happen until November 2022 when she merged with osboot.

When she did that, several folks (I believe with no overlap of the folks who were maintainers 2016-2021), forked libreboot.org as libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. This libreboot.at is a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot, and doesn't have any new releases.

Then, in June 2023, the libreboot.at folks decided to start working toward doing new releases under the "GNU Boot" name. At this time, there has not been a GNU Boot release.

> she, not satisfied, created another "GNU Boot" just to say that their project is "inferior" and now she complains about a "cease and desist" of a person that rightfully don't like her.

No: She published some GNU Boot "releases" that were clearly marked as "unofficial" incorporating work from libreboot that she thought would be useful to the GNU Boot folks. https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot... She did not create "another" GNU Boot. She did call GNU Boot "inferior", but not because her unofficial release was better, but because of the FSF's RYF and FSDG policies force it to be inferior; her unofficial GNU Boot releases are also inferior to Libreboot in the same way.

As a reminder, the GNU Boot folks are trying to take the Libreboot name from her.

LukeShuon GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

There was the spat of drama in 2016, and the view of "always in the middle of drama" is IMO confirmation bias since then (the financial trouble in 2020, then Leah's return to libreboot in 2021.)

Today's drama is part of larger culture wars going on in the community:

- The pro-RMS vs anti-RMS thing going on since RMS's removal from the FSF in 2019, much amplified by his reinstatement in 2021 (the latter of which lead to most of the FSF staff walking out). Is RMS still fit to lead the FSF? Has the FSF lost its way?

- The thing about whether or not "the FSF's/RMS's RYF and FSDG policies regarding firmware and microcode are misguided and harmful".

libreboot got pulled in to that when in November 2022 it merged osboot, adopting osboot's firmware/microcode policies, which are at odds with the FSF's policies. So then some folks "forked" https://libreboot.org as https://libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. I put "forked" in quotes because there wasn't any new libreboot development going on there; it was just a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot releases. Then, more recently, the libreboot.at folks decided to resume development of an FSF-friendly coreboot distribution as "GNU Boot".

So yeah, I guess you can say this drama is Leah's fault in that she has taken a clear stance against the FSF's firmware/microcode polices, but so have a lot of other folks in the community.

LukeShuon Cap'n Proto 1.0

Christine Lemmer-Webber (https://dustycloud.org/contact/) may be able to put you in touch with Ian's surviving partner.

LukeShuon Cap'n Proto 1.0

I would have sworn that HN is where I saw https://staticfree.info/ian/ but at the time I didn't realize why it was timely.

The best link I know is Christine Lemmer-Webber's post:https://octodon.social/@cwebber/110712988569475393

LukeShuon Tarsnap outage postmortem

> There are services like rsync.net that support borg at a lower price.

And rsync.net is even one of them!

"Special "borg accounts" are available at a very deep discount for technically proficient users." -- https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

...hrm, it seems they didn't update that page with last year's price drop. https://web.archive.org/web/20220319135035/https://www.rsync... It used to be a deep discount, now it's the same for <100TB. I wonder if they did drop the Borg prices too and just forgot to update that page?

LukeShuon Tarsnap outage postmortem

How's the saying in every HN thread go? "Don't set your prices based on your costs, set your prices based on the value you deliver." or something like that.

Tarsnap is a wonderful piece of software. You're paying for that.

That said, is the value of "Tarsnap" worth the price difference from "Borg+rsync.net"? (Or Restic, I've been meaning to look into Restic). I'm not so sure. These days I'm a customer of rsync.net, not of Tarsnap.

But I still firmly disagree with the "Colin's just exploiting the uninformed" angle.

LukeShuon Tarsnap outage postmortem

It's off-the-shelf MHonArc[1]. If implementing a decent mailing list archive were a prerequisite to launching a business, no business would ever be launched.

[1]: https://www.mhonarc.org/

LukeShuon JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default

Yes, but also no.

You are correct that there are lots of things that you can't do without grouping codepoints into grapheme clusters. And it is unfortunate that the Go standard library doesn't have utilities for grouping codepoints into grapheme clusters; the Go team's response to that is largely "don't do those things; even if we had utilities for grouping codepoints into grapheme clusters, those things would be hard to do and you are likely to get it wrong; human-level text is complicated, so treat it as opaque as much as you can."

But also, there are still lots of things you can do with just codepoints. You can tokenize. You can trim whitespace. You can do case-conversions and comparisons. You can transcode to a different encoding (whether that be a different Unicode encoding, or something like a JSON where some codepoints will need to be \uXXXX-encoded).

So yeah, codepoints aren't always what you want, but they're what you want more often than Java's "usually codepoints, but sometimes surrogate pairs". Especially because I suspect that very few Java programmers bother to test their code with surrogate pairs.

LukeShuon JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default

Right. But this thread is about "OK, but what if we forked Java and could make breaking changes like that."

Plus, I'd bet that most (but of course, not all) code that iterates over a Java String using UTF-16 chars is broken; failing to properly handle surrogate pairs, and should instead use those iterate-over-them-as-codepoints/UTF-32 methods.

LukeShuon JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default

In my forked Java, a char would be UTF-32, like in Go. (And String would be UTF-8 encoded bytes, as you say.)

LukeShuon I don't know how I feel about email

FYI, they prefer to be called "Xe" now, not "Christine".

LukeShuon Open Letter to Tim O’Reilly to Free the Perl Camel

A little more context: In the Perl 4 days, the book Programming Perl was the official Perl manual; it wasn't until Perl 5 that there was a complete freely distributable digital manual that came with Perl. (This situation was the impetus for Stallman's "Why Free Software Needs Free Documentation" essay)

LukeShuon Jessica Livingston (2015)

That oft-cited statistic about divorce is misleading. Most marriages end in divorce, but most people who get married don't get divorced. It's that if you get divorced once, you're more likely to get divorced again; serial-divorcees produce a disproportionate number of marriages.