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commandlinefan

18,824 karma · joined January 17, 2018

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commandlinefan··on EFF is leaving X
> the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views

That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).

commandlinefan··on Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
My father passed away last year from complications due to Alzheimer's, but for years before he died, he struggled to work streaming services and modern "smart" TVs. We got him one of the few models of DVD players that we could actually still find and a lot of used DVDs because he _could_ use those.

OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.

commandlinefan··on Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept
vs stock grants.
commandlinefan··on The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
Amazing what you can accomplish when you have more than "a sprint" to deliver something and no project manager asking "are you done yet?"
commandlinefan··on More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class
I'm worried about my kids, but don't forget to worry about yourself, too! I've got just enough saved up for retirement by current retirement calculator standards (if I keep working and contributing until I'm 67), but inflation could easily end up negating all of it long before I can use any of it.
commandlinefan··on More Americans Are Breaking into the Upper Middle Class
My son graduates college next month. Although he has an ok job lined up, he and most of his cohorts are incredibly pessimistic about the future and I'm not sure I can say that I blame them.
commandlinefan··on Usenet Archives
A good NNTP server is one of the few services I'd be willing to pay for on the modern internet, though. (Emphasis on good)
commandlinefan··on Usenet Archives
comp.lang.java seems to go all the way back to 1995. Maybe depends on the group?
commandlinefan··on Usenet Archives
> it seems greatly improved

With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.

commandlinefan··on Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)
> stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation

Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.

commandlinefan··on MiniStack (replacement for LocalStack)
I still think it's useful - you can do your base case testing against ministack and only start incurring AWS charges to finalize your load testing.
commandlinefan··on The Finest Swiss Quality Quaternions
Thanks - I was thinking, "this is cute, but I'm not sure I get it". Now it makes sense.
commandlinefan··on We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How
The core problem is the quixotic quest for efficiency. Right now I'll blame JIRA because that's the latest incarnation of this beast, but it's the mindset behind thinking that's a good idea in the first place. As long as I've been working I've been under artificial, meaningless time constraints that seem to only exist to catch cheaters, but that actually serve to make experimentation impossible.
commandlinefan··on The Document Foundation ejects its core developers
As somebody else pointed out, I read the entire article and still can't figure out what the author is actually talking about. That said, this sounds an awful lot like the reddit moderator problem: when you rely on unpaid volunteers, they become activist crusaders.
commandlinefan··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
> "standards" needed in x509

That's actually not really crypto, though - that's writing a parser (for a container that includes a lot of crypto-related data). And again... if you import a 3rd-party x.509 parser and you only need DER but not BER, you've got unnecessary bloat yet again.

commandlinefan··on Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only
Are you not entertained?!
commandlinefan··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
> the "roll your own crypto vibe", which I disagree with

Again, you run into the attack surface area here. Think about the Heartbleed vulnerability. It was a vulnerability in the DTLS implementation of OpenSSL, but it affected every single user, including the 99% that weren't using DTLS.

Experienced developers can, and should, be able to elide things like side-channel attacks and the other gotchas that scare folks off of rolling their own crypto. The right solution here is better-defined, well understood acceptance criteria and test cases, not blindly trusting something you downloaded from the internet.

commandlinefan··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
> "Batteries included" ecosystems are the only persistent solution

Or write your own stuff. Yes, that's right, I said it. Even HTTP. Even cryptography. Just because somebody else messed it up once doesn't mean nobody should ever do it. Professional quality software _should_ be customized. Professional developers absolutely can and should do this and get it right. When you use a third-party HTTP implementation (for example), you're invariably importing more functionality than you need anyway. If you're just querying a REST service, you don't need MIME encoding, but it's part of the HTTP library anyway because some clients do need it. That library (that imports all of its own libraries) is just unnecessary bloat, and this stuff really isn't that hard to get right.

commandlinefan··on Gzip decompression in 250 lines of Rust
I wrote a standalone gzip decompressor in about 500 lines of code (including comments, with braces on the next line), with no dependencies at all: https://commandlinefanatic.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.cgi?artic...
commandlinefan··on Hold on to Your Hardware
When I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when personal computing became a reality, programming exploded - anybody could learn it with a modest investment.

I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.

commandlinefan··on Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
I've never understood why emacs mode became the default. "set -o vi" is the _first_ command I type in a new shell.
commandlinefan··on Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
It's always been this way - the people that rise to the top are the people who never had to deeply understand something, so they can't even comprehend what that would look like or why it should be important. They're trying to automate the "understanding" part, with predictably disastrous consequences that those of us who aren't the "rise to the top" type could see coming. Agentic AI is just another symptom.
commandlinefan··on US expected to send thousands more soldiers to Middle East, sources say
IIRC, the US debt is at 39 trillion right now, with no plan to pay it back. Which is logical, because it's unpayable. There's no way in the world that will ever be paid back. I still haven't seen anybody properly analyze how high the debt can go before it actually can't go any higher, but we're going to find out.
commandlinefan··on Young Graduates Face the Grimmest Job Market in Years
I didn't read the article (paywalled), but did the headline is "young graduates face the grimmest job market in years". Did they address how many years? I've seen now compared to 2000 & 2008, which were bad, but that we bounced back from. Is it the grimmest job market in years or the grimmest in centuries?
commandlinefan··on The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"

Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.

commandlinefan··on The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
Well, it's a _controversial_ claim, anyway.
commandlinefan··on A 6502 disassembler with a TUI: A modern take on Regenerator
I grew up in the 80's programming my C64, assuming that this would be more or less the sort of thing I'd be doing for a living. The reality is actually pretty disappointing. I _wish_ anybody still did this stuff.
commandlinefan··on Side-Effectful Expressions in C (2023)
Maybe I'm just Stockholm syndrome-d into the C programming language, but none of the examples here are terribly compelling to me - I love articles about C's weirdness, but I don't really think his before and after comparisons make a case for a replacement for C.
commandlinefan··on “Collaboration” is bullshit
What I see - and have seen since I started doing this 30+ years ago - is that the date is _always_ more important than the actual deliverable. Always. Meeting "the date" is the only thing that's tracked (but it also never happens). It's even justified through vague analogies like Joel Spolsky's admonition that "you wouldn't buy a pair of jeans without knowing how much they cost" without ever doing a slightly deeper dive into how developing software is different than selling a pair of jeans.

All of the collaboration artifice that the author is referring to seems to me to always be a futile attempt to meet "the date". That software development might itself be _inherently_ unpredictable is never even considered, even though there are a lot of reasons to suggest that it is: by definition, the software you're developing has never been developed before, or else you could just use the thing that already exists.

I had a glimmer of hope in the late 90's when the agile manifesto was published - everything about it seemed to me to read "software development activities can't be coordinated like a wedding banquet can, but you can at least make sure that everything is tracking toward a shared understanding". I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when "Agile" became "tell me exactly what you're going to do and how long each step will take" almost the instant of its inception.

commandlinefan··on Migrating to the EU
> avoid giving money

You're paying for any of these?

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