Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
There is a guy named Arthur David Olson who maintains a small database of all the time zones in the world, including things like leap seconds and such. It’s used by everybody and it is updated several times a year. See here:
I bet he’s paid nothing to do it. Then one day, when a timing attack happens that can be traced to the DB, some knobhead CTOs and tech influencers will start talking about “securing the supply chain”. They’ll want other such bullshit and responsibilities to be shoved unto volunteers.
Two quotes come to mind “Fuck you, pay me” and “Open source maintainers owe you nothing”.
It would make sooo much more sense for the ISO to set something up, and make governments each responsible for keeping it updated, since they’re the ones doing the changing.
Require all participants to amend their law/regulations, so there’s a note to prompt whoever is in power and changes it next.
I’m sure some places would still neglect to do it… Haha
It has organizational support from ICANN, so it’s not done in total isolation.
Oh neato, then all good!
It’s also worth pointing out that this was sued in a copyright lawsuit some time ago. The wikipedia article mentions it, but here’s the slashdot discussion if you want to feel like stepping into a time machine: https://m.slashdot.org/story/158778
It caused a momentary panic when everyone realized that this thing runs the system clocks for everything everywhere, and if it got taken down by a copyright suit it would be disastrous for, well, everybody.
Wasn’t there also very recently a whole thing about the single guy who maintains the NTP spec threatened to retire so he could get a “real” job, which caused a gigantic internet-wide panic as pretty much everything we do relies on computer’s clocks being perfectly synced?
If we could all just stop making changes to time zones, that would make my job very slightly easier.
Perhaps we’ll move to UTC+10¼, and then move forward 45 minutes in the summer.
If the day number is a prime, then we’ll go back π hours.
Hope that will help!
Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
Like half of the npm is maintained by a single, arguably awful, person who writes his microprojects into large pieces of software to maximize how often his code gets installed.
Sindre Sorhus?
Just looked them up… holy hell. How does one have so many repos! And all the apps he’s made. What’s the story on them?
Jon Schlinkert, I believe. Sindre has a lot of stuff as well, but has a better reputation afaik
That’s them, yup!
Sounds like a fork is in order
Is-even and is-odd are the stupidest packages ever written. Except for all the others that guy wrote.
deleted
left-pad
The popularity of these two packages shows that something is very wrong with JavaScript.
No, it shows people are lazy.
Well, that as well, but it’s an also bit tricky to safely check if a number is even because JavaScript uses floats for numbers.
It’s not tricky. Modulus operator works fine.
I would love this even more if one depended on the other and just did a “not even” for example.
I thought that was the case tbh, has it changed?
Edit: is-even depends on is-odd.
It would be even better if each one depended on the other.
Well good news! Time to let yourself love again!
The
core-jsstory always makes me sad. Sure, he’s developing an open source project and no one HAS to pay him. But the meager amount of donations and the tons of hate he receives isn’t justifiable either.I had seen the hate before and foolishly just assumed he was deserving of it. Its a horrible situation he’s in and he is being cast in a bad light because he reached out for help.
It’s especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He’s been taken advantage of by the whole world.
GNU readline is a library that handles text input
Until very recently the whole Resident Evil modding community relied solely on a Maya 3DS script that a Chinese dude named Maliwei777 created in 2012. The community cherished that script but it got harder and harder to get the correct 3DS version to run it.
Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.
The modern man uses
ripgrep👍What does that offer offer grep/egrep
-
much faster
-
proper unicode (and other encodings) support
-
automatic recursion (no extra flags needed)
-
can search inside compressed files/archives like gz/xz/zip (also see ripgrep-all) for even more archive support)
-
honors
.gitignoreand ignores binary/hidden files
probably a lot more things too
-
Speed and memory efficiency, mostly. If you ever have to grep for something in a large number of files ripgrep will be done while regular grep will only be reaching the 25% mark.
But it’s three more letters. No deal.
You joke but this is facts
Alias. To
gr, even!Its going installed binary is
rg.I shall begrudgingly consider it then, with much begrudgement.
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can’t even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.
And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).
I cannot for the life of me find what you’re referencing. I only remember the
sqlite/etilqsfiasco with McAfee.https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
Here’s an example from NASA
I feel a bit split about this. Seems it is an actual law, and it kind of makes sense. You probably don’t want random components from unknown people and places in your multi million dollar space equipment. But it feels rather arrogant to just demand such things.
Is NASA actually a customer? Did they pay for a license to use curl (genuine question - I’m not familiar enough with it to know if enterprises and organisations require a paid license)? Are they planning on becoming a paying customer? Do they make donations to the project? If not, it feels kind of rude to send a demand letter to the lead developer of a free piece of software straight up demanding a formal letter stating where the free software is being developed and maintained (for free), or if outside the USA, that the free software has been tested in the USA. Oh, and a bonus demand that such information be returned within 5 business days (naturally with an implied “or else”, just to really make sure those pesky people maintaining open source software for free really get the memo)
In any case, why don’t all their scary 3 letter spy agencies go and figure it out on behalf of NASA themselves? It’s open source, they could just like, read the source, test the source, and audit the source themselves. Or fork it and make any modifications they’d like to ensure its safety
I don’t blame the person sending the emails, obviously, they’re just following orders, but the whole email reads as very entitled and arrogant, assuming NASA don’t provide any compensation to the project and projects maintainers for their use of curl
https://bagder.github.io/emails/ has the email collection.
Thank you!! I knew I must have been missing something.
Thanks for sharing these gems. I can almost feel the exasperation in some of the emails and their replies.
Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
That’s not remotely true, but it is nevertheless outstanding work and very much deserving of recognition and support.
Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?
Git has tons of contributors though.
Yeah, and Linus mostly handed off the project to Junio Hamano quite early on (same year, 2005). Seriously, huge kudos to Junio for all his work. Still, it’s fun to say this quirky guy who likes penguins started not one, but two free software projects that took the world by storm. Humbling, even.
It’s really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn’t been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.
Yet the vast majority of the world probably don’t even know what it is, and wouldn’t even understand it if it was explained to them.
Everybody would use Mercurial, since Fossil completely lost the race, and both Subversion and CVS are unfit for today’s needs.
What is too bad, because Fossil would be much more productive than Git or Mercurial if the software just finished running at all; and Mercurial is way easier to learn than Git.
And it all happened because botbicket decided to become greedy, to which Linus responded with taking a month break from Linux to make his own basic versioning tool, and here we are.
Without bitbuckets decisions, wer all still be stuck with SVn shudder
Not necessarily! Maybe we would live in a world of mercurial, or even some other alternative.
And it wasn’t bitbucket (botbicket?), it was BitKeeper, which gave the Kernel folks a license to use BK, but with some restrictions. Among those was a “no reverse engineering” clause, which is what eventually lead to the revoking of that license—lots of interesting articles on this!—frustrating Linus for a few weeks, and finally the start of Git.
Minor correction, it was Bitkeeper/BitMover - not Bitbucket. They were proprietary software linux used w/ a community license, and they later removed that free tier.
Really easy to imagine that world to most people. Like me. Who inspite of using computers since my 386sx family pc, never got into software engineering.
I understand a little about it, but its just a name of a thing i dont know how to use lol
I just find it funny how its a kind of ignorance(for entirely understandable reasons)is bliss situation to me, but a horror to those who use it
It’s not like there was nothing at all in that space before git came along, e.g. we had svn before, and mercurial more or less in parallel.
t’s really hard to imagine a world without Git
I’ve lived it.
- CriticalFile.vbs
- CriticalFile.V2.vbs
- CripicalFile.V2.5.vbs
- CriticalFile.DONOTEDIT.txt
- _Old.CriticalFile.aspx
- LinkToCriticalFilesFold.lnk
- GuideToDeploying.CriticalFliles.doc
- CritFil.bat
Lots of people still split latex documents into one section per file, because subversion used file locks and we only knew how one person could edit a file at a time.
The first job I had out of college was doing development on the production server with this method of version control. I still have nightmares.
Git is not the only version control software out there, and not the first one either.
Facebook for example is famous for not using git. Because their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better.
Microsoft didn’t use git until relatively recently either. They had to make some big contributions to make it work for their system.
their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better
The version I heard was that hg people were way nicer to them and very much willing to help compared to git.
I feel like Linus got a taste of his own medicine dealing with Gtk and Gnome people while developing Subsurface and that caused them to switch to Qt.
IIRC it’s both, sort of. They’ve contributed a lot to mercurial and, yes, that’s largely thanks to mercurial folks being more open and receptive to their desired changes compared to git. But they also have internal tools that build on top of mercurial, tools that you’re very unlikely to see used outside facebook projects.
Man, I remember ancient gmod addons released using (iirc) turtle svn so they could auto update. Was a wild time.
Th devs at my current organization use turtle svn, but that seems to be more down to organizational politics combined with a misunderstanding that git is platform agnostic rather than anything based on merits
turtle svn
that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time.
That’s a name I’ve never heard before. I have heard of Tortoise SVN though.
Meh, I knew what wizardbeard meant.
A few libraries come to mind immediately: fftw (I think the most widely used fft library) or GMP (I think the most used multi precision library).
Seconded. https://www.fftw.org/
Rink
Numpy
Mark Russanovich was just some guy who had trouble fixing Windows computers so he wrote systernals from scratch including widely used psexec and other required tools if you are forced to be a windows admin. He has since grown up into a very hansom who runs Azure which sucks.
“He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.”
Thanks for this. Really brightened my day.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the classic example. Jobs has some technical skill, but not a lot. He’s the “ideas guy” that all other “ideas guy” try to be. I don’t have a lot of respect for the “idea guy”; Jobs was a manipulative narcissist, and he should not be emulated.
Woz, OTOH, is an absolute genius, and one of the most genuinely nice people you’ll ever meet. Apple made him enough money that he can do whatever he wanted with his life, and what he wanted was to do cool things with computers and pull harmless pranks.
Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. That was more of a collaboration. They all had some level of technical and business skill mixed together. It wasn’t quite the complementary skillset we see with Jobs and Woz. A lot of Microsoft’s success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
And Woz wasn’t the only genius who worked at Apple at the time. Pretty much everyone who worked on the original Macintosh was brilliant.
A lot of Microsoft’s success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
It was also having friends on the IBM board that signed a contract that didn’t make any commercial sense…
It was also being ruthless beyond belief, and destroying anything that could have challenged them. They’ve held progress back for 40 or 50 years.
Reflecting on my IT education in school, it feels like it was mostly learning to use Microsoft Office. Reflecting on it makes me horrified, because I feel like we’re heading for a period where only a select few have tech skills and the skills gap we already see is going to get way worse. That’s what intense lobbying from Microsoft will get you
I’m shocked by how little new programmers know.
Yeah! These Generation X programmers know nothing about low-level languages and electrical engineering. They’re compelled to put everything on the World Wide Web even when it’s unnecessary.
I don’t really mean coding languages. That’s stuff they learn in school. But what a lot of people seem to be lacking is the ability to find answers on their own, how to troubleshoot problems they haven’t encountered before, and the ability to work independently. There’s a whole lot of hand-holding happening.
The thing I’m concerned about is how little non-programmers know. I think that much of the world went “oh, GenZ are digital natives, that means they’ll know their way around computers naturally” when if anything, being “digital natives” is part of the problem. But like my original comment said, I attribute a lot of blame to Microsoft’s impact on IT education.
I can’t speak much on how much programmers tend to know, because I am a biochemist who started getting into programming when studying bioinformatics, and then I’ve continued dabbling as a hobbyist. I like to joke that I’m a better programmer than the vast majority of biochemists, and that’s concerning, because I’m a mediocre programmer (at best).
Friends?, bill gates mother worked there
The world is built on is-even and is-odd!
NTP is the one that comes to mind for me.
Basically every device uses it and until fairly recently was maintained by a single person
Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!
Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you’re on Systemd, are usually better suited.
So they have a donation/support page?
