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johnsoft

436 karma · joined March 2, 2013

https://whatisaphone.com

john@whatisaphone.com

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johnsoft··on Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file
That's an interesting point. It's easy to mount an ISO in VirtualBox, but I don't see a way to mount any sort of "virtual USB flash drive". I wonder what's the easiest[1] way to install an OS in a VM if you don't have an ISO.

Even more interesting is EasyOS's official install instructions[2] seem to tell you to download a live CD ISO for an old version, and move from there to the latest version. I guess they're not completely free of needing ISOs just yet.

[1] Obviously excluding things like virt-install. I'm talking about live booting an interactive OS or installer.

[2] https://easyos.org/install/easy-frugal-installation.html, search for "Easy live-CD"

johnsoft··on No Easter Eggs in Curl
Open-source projects still have to sell themselves to get users (marketing/"devrel"). curl's author definitely makes money from curl: https://curl.se/support.html
johnsoft··on No Easter Eggs in Curl
Quoting the article,

>curl is installed in some ten billion installations to date and we are doing everything we can to be responsible and professional to make sure curl can and will be installed in many more places going forward.

If you want to sell ten billion cakes and beyond, you better do your market research and listen to customer feedback

johnsoft··on Zrythm: A highly automated and intuitive digital audio workstation
Once upon a time, Google copied the Java APIs. Oracle sued Google. Google won.

We now have precedent. What's stopping someone from copying the ASIO APIs and shipping a compatible SDK?

johnsoft··on CPython's main branch running in the browser with WebAssembly
I once had to squeeze CPython down for embedding into a mobile app. I ran our workload under strace so I could include only the needed parts of the stdlib, and ended up with just under 3MB zipped. That's probably about the theoretical size limit.
johnsoft··on Fun with Red Star OS
Real hardware is finicky and complex. It would be very slow to virtualize every hardware device in a system to a level not distinguishable to software. If you do shoot for complete accuracy (e.g. projects like 86Box), you take at least a ~100x performance hit, and also lose out on useful features like dragging files into/out of the VM.
johnsoft··on Hackerrank DMCA Notice
SHAttered is a collision attack. A collision attack is easier than a preimage attack. There are no known preimage attacks against SHA-1.
johnsoft··on Firefox 94 has No Visible Border on unfocused tabs
This is gold, thanks!
johnsoft··on Firefox 94 has No Visible Border on unfocused tabs
Speaking of Tree Style Tabs –

Does anyone have an up-to-date user CSS that hides the top tabs and moves the toolbar up into the dead space? I used to have a snippet that worked, but it broke a few dozen versions ago.

johnsoft··on If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter
I was a web developer in a previous life. You can write basic standard code and Firefox/Chrome/even old Edge works fine, but Safari has a million little things that are buggy or don't work, or break at random in new versions. I wasted so much time hacking random bits of code to support iPhone. In 2021 now that IE is finally dead, I'm sure Apple is singlehandedly keeping BrowserStack in business.

The first one that comes to mind is the <input> select method doesn't work[1], although MDN claims it does. It works _sometimes_, for reasons I couldn't discern. I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't call selecting text a fancy or bleeding edge feature.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3272089 Don't miss the comment about an infinite loop hanging the browser

johnsoft··on Notice of Stolen EVGA GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Cards
Naive question: did EVGA actually suffer any financial losses from this? If I was shipping millions of dollars of product, I wouldn't let it out of my sight without some sort of insurance.
johnsoft··on Python interpreter written in rust reaches 10000 commits
If you thought compile times were bad before…
johnsoft··on Backblaze IPO
Backblaze B2 is significantly cheaper than R2. I don't think Cloudflare will be stealing many of their customers.
johnsoft··on Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its service
I'm a happy Discord user. I'm sure now someone will list all the downsides of Discord (proprietary, target demographic, etc) but I'm just answering the question as asked.
johnsoft··on GitHub stale bot considered harmful
I'm just waiting for someone to create a "fresh bot" that replies automatically so issues don't get closed.
johnsoft··on NPM package ‘ua-parser-JS’ with more than 7M weekly download is compromised
You are probably not running the same OS/node/python version as you were 10 years ago. If you were to try this in real life, you'd get an error like this one. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68479416/upgrading-node-....

The error helpfully suggests you:

>Run `npm rebuild node-sass` to download the binding for your current environment.

Download bindings? Now you're right back where you started. https://cdn140.picsart.com/300640394082201.jpg

Of course if you keep a 10 year old laptop in a closet running Ubuntu 10.04 and Node 0.4, and never update it through the years, then your suggestion will work. But that workflow isn't for me.

johnsoft··on NPM package ‘ua-parser-JS’ with more than 7M weekly download is compromised
This problem does happen, but committing node_modules won't fix it. Assuming the npm registry doesn't dissapear, npm will download the exact same files you would have committed to your repo. Wherever those files came from, 4 years later you upgraded your OS, and now the install step will fail (in my experience usually because of node-gyp).

Unless you were talking about committing compiled binaries as well, in which case every contributor must be running the same arch/OS/C++ stdlib version/etc. M1 laptops didn't exist 4 years ago. If I'm using an M1 today, how can I stand up this 4 year old app?

The real problem is reproducible builds, and that's not something git can solve.

johnsoft··on Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations
Is it really that easy? Can anyone just sign up for Spotify as an artist and upload a Beyonce album?
johnsoft··on Cloudflare doesn’t have to cut off copyright-infringing websites, judge rules
Obviously nobody would confess a crime while returning a rental car. They'd return the car and leave. Then later the cops will stop by with a warrant and collect info/security footage.

If a bank manager went down to Hertz by themselves and demanded someone's information, they obviously wouldn't get very far. There are established legal processes to follow.

Just like the physical world, if you want to compel Cloudflare to identify one of their customers, you have to use the legal system.

johnsoft··on While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
You're right, I used the word "logout" imprecisely. I meant "lock".
johnsoft··on While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
This is why desktop apps use the Ctrl key for shortcuts. I'm not sure how that bit of common sense got lost in the transition to webapps.
johnsoft··on While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout, then log back in.
johnsoft··on While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
The same way you know you can run any command with `--help`.

Most commands anyway. I'm looking at you, netcat

johnsoft··on Seed – A Rust front-end framework for creating fast and reliable web apps
>This is especially important given the fact that it is much slower sending wasm over the wire and instantiating the module and the wasm environment vs plain js

You might be surprised. JS is a very slow language to parse. WASM was designed to be parsed quickly. And browsers have implemented streaming compilation for WASM, which means once the last byte comes over the wire, 99% of the work is already done.

Check out js-framework-benchmark[1] startup metrics. The page weight for Yew (another WASM framework) is pretty heavyweight at 300KB, but it has a consistently faster time-to-interactive than vanillajs.

[1]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

johnsoft··on Seed – A Rust front-end framework for creating fast and reliable web apps
At one point I prototyped a wasm framework inspired by Solid[1]. The results were very promising—an implementation of js-framework-benchmark was 41KB (18KB gzipped), and perforrmance was close to vanillajs. The developer ergonomics were definitely lacking, though.

Benchmark results (look for "cope")[2][3]

I definitely think whatever happens over the next few years, VDOMs are on their way out.

[1]: https://github.com/whatisaphone/cope/blob/master/crates/js-f...

[2]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/751355413701591120/77...

[3]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/751355413701591120/77...

johnsoft··on Is Digital Ocean Down?
Their systems could be both operational, and unreachable from the network. The beauty of network partitions is that it's impossible to know for sure :)
johnsoft··on Kubernetes is our generation's Multics
I use Helm because I haven't found another tool that deletes resources in the cluster when I delete them from the yaml. kubectl --prune is unstable and super buggy. I would love to ditch Helm. Is there a tool I should know about that covers this?
johnsoft··on Netflix's “Love Is Blind” Wants Unpaid Photographer for Five Weddings
Someone complaining they can find senior engineers, but not junior engineers? I would gladly trade places with them!
johnsoft··on Pulumi 3.0
I think state management is unavoidable for something like Pulumi. If it had to query AWS's API for all of your thousands of resources every time you deployed, deploys would be unbearably slow. So it just assumes your hundreds of DNS records from yesterday are all still there, instead of querying AWS for all of them every deploy. The state file is how that happens.

If you want, you can run pulumi with the --refresh flag and you can see just how much slower it is.

johnsoft··on Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee
Pay for food, you'll just be hungry again tomorrow
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