xorcist

Why is it reasonable? I understand that it would be financially reasonable for a commercial endeavour, but isn't Firefox more like an open source project?

Debian supports MIPS and SPARC still. Last I checked OpenSSL is kept buildable on OpenVMS. Surely there must be a handful of people out there who cares about good old x86?

If your numbers are correct, there are millions if not tens of millions of Firefox users on 32-bit. If none of them are willing to keep Firefox buildable, there must be something more to it.

The registry, not the registrar (sorry, I managed to mistype above, despite trying to be careful about these terms). The comparison with the CA is apt. The registry signs the DS record.

The model you suggest is a variant of what I allude to in my second paragraph above. That is indeed both an obvious, simple, and much more secure model than the web PKI we use today. I tried to push for similar ideas several years before things like DANE but no one seems interested enough. I have no idea why this is, as the model is both trivial and obvious.

Dokuwiki is my go-to tool for internal wikis. Unfortunately it won't help you with the two issues listed above: It's still PHP and there's no conflict resolution to speak of. It also hasn't changed much in two decades.

What it does right is that it's trivial. Trivial to understand, trivial to use, trivial to upgrade, and trivial to write plugins for. These plugins can then suck in data from external systems and CMDBs which is perfect for internal documentation. Mediawiki is designed for another use case and much more complicated.

Yet free military, completely socialized and completely state funded, is completely unproblematic. It's even in such high organizational regard that it is usually considered a merit to have made a career there, even in the private sector.

That should teach us that we can't look at soeciety from some sort of logical principles. It bears all the markings of sociologically created in-groups, or as the kids would put it, "identity politics". It doesn't have to make sense.

No, it doesn't. It makes the registrar the CA. Which makes sense, they already authorize who owns which domain. They should absolutely do so cryptographically in some fashion.

What's weird is that the major registrars never even tried to enter the PKI business. It would have made sense. It would even have hastened the adoption of much needed TLS extensions.

Strong players in the web space are also trying to centralize DNS resolvers, using similar arguments.

Moar encryption, much secure.

In a place with even less IPv6 adoption, probably. It's not like there wasn't similar proposals discussed, and there's no need to rehash the exact same discussion again.

The problem quickly becomes "how do you route it", and that's where we end up with something like today's IPv6. Route aggregation and PI addresses is impratical with IPv4 + extra bits.

The main changes from v4 to v6 besides the extra bits is mostly that some unnecessary complexity was dropped, which in the end is net positive for adoption.

So being non-commercial I can just fork and redistribute the software under MIT license? Strange, but acceptable.

> all you have to do to bypass age verification is steal their ID for a few minutes?

There are numerous interesting and/or problematic aspects of this, but this question is perhaps the least interesting.

If your kid, or anyone else really, steals your ID then age verification is the least of your problems. They could transfer all your money, move house, get married, change your name or a myriad of other much more serious things. Willingly letting your kid use your ID would be borderline illegal and not an insurance in the world would cover it.

> literally over 2.5 million

These people have never borrowed a book, visited a doctor, paid taxes or opened a bank account? There are many things in society that require validating who you are. Surely they have some form of ID. Perhaps just a more insecure one than a cryptographically signed.

I don't think a federal identity is as far fetched as you make it sound, for better and for worse.

The music industry.

The film industry.

Any which words we choose about it, we're still talking about a government mandate which books are not ok to read. I don't doubt your personal experiences, but the leap to blacklisting literature is a huge one and doesn't follow logically at all.

While this is a ground one should tread most carefully, surely you can see the historical precedents?

Apple is a consumer company. They're all about catering to the consumer class, and growing that class at any price.

Developers are necessary, and their needs has to be tolerated, but only as long as they are successfully kept distinct from consumers.

All of your examples did tank the stock market. At least in the meaning a 20+% drop over a time period in the order of months of less.

They are however not examples of long depressions. Which I think is reasonable to expect we'll see less of, given that more and more regular people feel the need to put their money in the stock market. There is simply no alternative. And every time we reach new heights. This is also expected.

Will this go on forever? Probably not. But it won't look like the 1930s. The stock market is a crowd, not a science.

> is instincts are for negotiation and peace

That's a pretty wild statement given that he just invaded Iran. He's also made direct military threats towards allied Denmark, even in press conferences. There's also the less overt threats about making Cananda a US state and giving Ukranian land to Putin.

Pretty militant for the first six months, even from an objective historical context. Should he keep up that tempo for a full term of office, that would measure up with the more intervention oriented presidents including Nixon himself.

> the left has a much smaller Overton Window

Above is a long text that completely rests on small statements such as the above, stated with full confidence. I could easily argue for the opposite. And historically speaking, where these terms originate, it's quite clear that the left had to build a larger tent, as the saying goes.

Without these small but confident statements of questionable veracity, the rest of the text sort of fizzles down to one big anecdote about Texas living. Which is nice, but Texas is big and while I have never lived there myself I understand there are large differences between big cities like Austin and the rest.

Much can be said about how forgiving the debate climate is, and how heterogenous different political groups are. But one observation I think can be made is that it shifts with where the center is, the center being the deciding socioeconomic group in a modern democratic society. The opposition needs to rally support and needs to be much more allowing and accepting, and their Overton window as you call it grows wider. The ones with the political wind in their backs, winning elections, will find the power to hone their political skills and sharpen their issues, thereby shrinking this window.

So I believe much of it can be explained by who are winning elections and whose questions are being heard. These are slow processes, society does not change every election, but we did have an almost decade long period where traditional leftist questions were being heard in mainstream media, but right now it's quite clear the wind is blowing in the opposite direction in most Western democracies.

Justification from principles is for rationalisation. Never confuse cause and effect.

If the free market is good for my business, it is good. Same thing with foreign relations. Same thing with control over democratic instutions.

Always look at what people do, not what they say.

(Keep in mind though, that just because things have always been this way does not justify getting bitter over it. Society has been through this before.)

What does that mean in practice? Will you get your money back if they do?

That doesn't make any sense to me. Why would you merge more often if it takes less time to create a new branch?

What types of merges are we talking about? Surely it must be where you merge in changes from a main branch to your local branch, which in the case of long-lived branches will be the more common merge. Creating new branches isn't even part of that workflow.

At least they don't follow Kodak's strategy from the late 10s, with KodakCoin.

Oh, wait.

What is this eternal meme about merges in svn being harder than in other tools? Git used literally the same merge algorithm, even if that has changed a bit since then, and merge conflicts are not something a tool can't just magically make disappear. If you want concurrent edits (the c in cvs), conflicts come in the same package. Various algortihms can supply their own dose of magic, but they're more similar than different (minus a few special cases such as rerere in git).

People do this, but it feels a bit weird to start a whole new language interpreter which is much more powerful than the pitiful shell language we use, just to split a field. Why not write your whole program in awk, then? It's likely more efficient anyway.

The canonical shell tool to split fields is cut. Easy to use, simple to read.

For the very common use case to set variables to fields, use the shell built-in read. It uses the same IFS as the rest of the shell.

There are invalid column separators for awk too. To handle consecutive spaces in cut you have squeeze them:

  echo '999  888' | tr -s " " | cut -f2 -d " "

There's also the issue of having a dozen moving parts form the system, each developed for their own reasons. So you could find that upgrading one product changes something, say collation for utf-16, which might be entirely reasonable taken in isolation but that the rest of the system is unprepared for.

It is up to you to fend off dozens of small things. Over time that accumulates. It's like python programmers using two dozen pypi dependencies because they've heard nih is bad. Or think nodejs if that's your thing. What you do in practice is you freeze everything in place and then you postpone it all for an increasingly indefinite future. Organizations then periodically need to freeze work for weeks or even months at a time just to keep up with dependencies. This is clearly a lot of work.

Terraform, or even better Ansible, is a good choice to document make those changes over time in a standardized way. But it doesn't make the work go away. The work is there and still has to be done. Those tools also clearly suffers from the same many-moving-parts problem, as soon as you include external modules with their dependencies too, so you have take care not to magnify the problem by accident instead.

This is what system admins and integrators do all day. They will tell you in unison that the best integration is the one that doesn't exist.

"Essentially the same thing" as a shell pipe, except each function run sequentially in full, keeping output in a variable. So nothing like a shell pipe.

For short constructions '$out = sort(fn($in)' is really easier to read. For longer you can break them up in multiple lines.

  $_ = fn_a($in)
  $_ = fb_b($_)
  $out = fn_c($_)

Is it really "cognitive overhead" to have the temporary variable explicit? Being explicit can be a virtue. Readability matters in a programming language. If nothing else I think Python taught us that.

I am skeptical to these types of sugar. Often what you really want is an iterator. The ability to hide that need carries clear risk.

But that's the thing. These are hired people. Their job is to bring glory to the great leader. Exactly the same way Altman get the OpenAI fame.

If you really had thoughts in your head worth a quarter of a billion, the rational thing to do is not to spill those beans.

Approximately no one is motivated by money they already have.

What I most would like to understand is how you intend to motivate someone you just gave a quarter of a billion dollars to? Especially a young person. They never have to work again, and neither do their grandchildren.

You can just doodle away with whatever research interests you the most, there's no need to deliver a god mode AI to the great leader even if you had the ability to.

Indeed, this will continue as long as the market allows it to. There is a well known quote about how long markets can stay irrational, but I would like to remind where we are right now:

Telco capex was $100 billion at the peak of the IT bubble, give or take. There's going to be $400 billion investments in AI in 2025.

Not really the same, is it? Actors are hired to act. Athletes get paid to improve the sport. It's not like nerds are poached to do academic research or nerd out at their hearts desire. This is a business transaction that Zuck intends to make money from.

Locking up more of the world's information behind their login wall, or increase their ad sales slightly is not enough to make that kind of money. We can only speculate, of course, but at the same time I think the general idea is pretty clear: AI will soon have a lot of power, and control over that power is thought to be valuable.

The bit about "building great things" certainly rings true. Just not in the same way artists or scientists do.

For all practical purposes they mostly are. Linux famously hasn't broken userspace in over thirty years. Pretty much all commercial software for unix (and Linux) is distributed this way since several decades. Things like ld-linux.so is mostly backwards compatible for this reason. You can still run ancient Firefox builds even if you might have to fetch an old libstc++. But those are still around, for exactly that reason.

Of course, the world changes. Running X11 software might be tricky a few decades from now if nobody speaks the protocol. Something compiled for ALSA or esound might not work forever. Software dependent on a mail transport might not work when email is finally dead and everyone uses Facebook instead. Perhaps one day IPv4 sockets won't be available.

That type of dependencies are the hard ones that will kill your software before any binary incompatibilities will. As long as there is a.out binaries or 32-bit software out there someone will make it work. Software from the past three decades still runs so there's hope for the next three.

Until then, don't let perfect be the enemy of what's simple and works.

If only someone told me proposing new allows is the bottleneck to fusion engineering! I could have been rich!