Gee guys, where are the dipshits to remind us MicroSoft <3 open source and totally isn't just opportunistically fucking it over again? It's not as if they took a game that worked everywhere and have increasingly restricted it for no reason. No, wait, MicroSoft is a big corporation, so this is just a different department, right?
Hey - would you mind clarifying what you mean re whitelisting?
An expert can only be an expert on a repository that they have a history of contributing to, so I would hope that that would have an effect on the advice they give. If they still chose to give bad advice then I would be disappointed.
I host the SMTP server I use and keep my programs on my personal website. By whitelisting I mean it's like when an e-mail field only accepts addresses from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and a few others. Realistically, very few people use my programs, but I have noticed some users, because they put my code on Github for their convenience.
> An expert can only be an expert on a repository that they have a history of contributing to
This is what I mean. Not everything happens in a repository like this. Unfortunately, I'm in the overwhelming minority here, but I still wanted to comment on this.
> If they still chose to give bad advice then I would be disappointed.
I'll take the advice of this article lacking substance, and complain.
Well, companies used to have employees write code, rather than stitch together random garbage written by random dipshits who could be tricked into using loose licenses. That's one cause for concern.
> Open source won because everyone worked together.
No, ``open source'' has ``won'' because it helped corporations defang Free Software and get gratis labor.
> Supply chain security will happen because everyone works together. If you try to do this alone, you will fail.
This isn't food, but perfectly uniform applied mathematics. There's no ``working together'' with corporations. Doing it alone is the only reasonable option, which means aggressively reducing the size of this foul shit is necessary.
> Thank goodness others had the foresight to create our current SBOM formats.
Yeah, MicroSoft totally *<3* ``open source'' guys.
> Long ago all the software supply chain work was done by hand.
Oh, right, all of this new security theatre is always about trust and reputation, and not trusting those disgusting lone programmers such as me or other silly things; it's always really about doing anything but truly auditing that yucky code.
If Kiwifarms broke the law, then that is a matter for law enforcement. It's not the purview of an internet cartel and hate mob acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Every defense I've seen of censorship is exactly like yours. Some insinuations about how "distasteful" a group is, and then an implied "Can you really blame them for going after it?"
The comparison here is clever, certainly. But the scope matters: KF relentlessly attacks individuals, to the point of suicide. The anti-KF campaign only seeks to take KF offline by making it too expensive for hosting providers.
Nobody is trying to SWAT the guy behind KF. It is a huge, consequential difference.
This is just untrue for the most part. Some users of KF have harassed some people, sure. But the point of the forum has never been that. I will however concede that the nature of the forum tends to attract such people.
Now this I find doubtful considering everything else in this post. If anything the point has been exactly that with the exception of provably illegal things
He has already been swatted multiple times. In the past trans activists have shown up at his house with weapons, looking for him. Keffals doxed his mom on Twitter a few days ago, posting her full face photo and calling for her firing while lying about her links (there are none) to her son's website:
What happens when enough people realize coexistence won't be permitted? He made his own forum, and a relentless campaign has conspired to bring it down. We can't have freedom of speech if only one side gets to communicate and also has access to all of the help it could ever need. Without freedom of speech, we eventually won't have peace.
It's really disgusting to see someone argue that people don't want to pay for quality, when old phones worked. Now, the pilpul here will be to claim that those old phones totally didn't actually work, they just appeared to basically always work, so it's totally the same thing; it's not.
The fact of the matter is that old phones may not have been formally-proven to work, but basically worked. The new phones aren't formally-proven to work, and basically don't.
> People just don't know what they're demanding.
As a programmer, I want the cretins claiming to be programmers to face justice for their disgusting work, about which they're so smug and condescending.
> Unless you've worked at a place where you've had access to something like GPFS(or whatever IBM calls it now), where you can put hooks into everything, and programme how you want to mirror/cache/copy namespaces, it all seems impossible.
Do I understand correctly that this would be one possible interpretation of this sentence: If you've only used UNIX, and not something IBM made decades ago, then it seems impossible.
IF you want to take it in isolation, and assume that no-one uses GPFS, then yeah?
The general gist is that unless you've worked in a place that has setup a "proper" network, that is roaming home directories, mapped posix storage, kerberised user account, and some sort of multi-machine graph based job dispatch system (ie airflow, grid engine, large scale k8s with a batch plugin, aws's batch pixar's tractor), then you will have not seen a need for a large clustered filesystem with a posix-like interface.
moreover, given the "filesystems are hard and bad, use object storage instead" noise that we've had since we joined the cloud era, why would you _try_ to use a clustered filesystem? Especially as most of the "free" ones are shite.
Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves. They can't stand by the thought of people who don't need an Internet connection to program, who don't copy and paste from the fools over at StackOverflow, and the many other things they do which their betters don't.
The fools over at Reddit call some things "adulting", because the idea of growing out of childhood is so foreign to them that they'd rather make it childish too. It's the same basic disease.
There’s difference between being humble and insecure. Generally people who repeat that mantra are trying to guard themselves by “we’re all fools”veil from any critique.
The disgusting natures of UNIX, UTF-8, and the general culture here whose members don't understand that touching a computer (poorly) doesn't entitle them to dominion over the non computer-touchers is generally controversial on orange Reddit.
a professional community has the right to a place to communicate among themselves, about things they like and understand. This has nothing to do with dominion
I'll elaborate. Firstly, this may be a community of "professionals", but that term means something very different for programmers. No "professional" here is an engineer, as an example, because real engineers would be imprisoned and stripped of title for what the typical programmer does. The dominion to which I refer is the fact that many of these "professionals" work for large advertising corporations who encourage them to believe they know better than the people trying to do real work with a computer. They expect their tools to have a price, and then work on tools intended to never be sold, but be rented forever. They touch computers poorly, because out of one side of their mouths do they decry things such as Bitcoin and out of the other they excuse the extreme waste of their corporations and of asinine practices such as embedding an entire WWW browser solely to execute a chat program wastefully.
> about things they like and understand
They like politics and understand very little about being a hacker, certainly.
Why is this linked to the nature of UTF-8 and Unix? And since you're explaining your thoughts, are those nature the same or is each one a different facet of the programmer culture?
And lastly: do you honestly think most production or data engineers should be imprisoned or stripped of their titles?
>Why is this linked to the nature of UTF-8 and Unix?
Those are just another two sacred cows.
>And since you're explaining your thoughts, are those nature the same or is each one a different facet of the programmer culture?
UNIX and UTF-8 are alike because they were made by the same fools, and both made to avoid upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the disgusting C language. The nature of Hacker News is similar in its ignorance and wastefulness, but it's not a consequence of either.
>And lastly: do you honestly think most production or data engineers should be imprisoned or stripped of their titles?
Sure, probably; it's not as if their titles mean anything anyway.
After a cursory look I found it interesting. Homoiconocity of assembly language isn't something I had thought of--although I have been working on a higher level S-expression based assembly that is lowered to more concrete assembly for Scheme86 microcoded emulation.
I'm no genius for sure, but even when I do sometimes find myself ahead of the curve, I fall into Hamlet's dilemma:
"...Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of Thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
I wish I could explain why the best people and ideas are ignored, or bullied away, but I am at a loss. Best wishes.
I appreciate the praise. The base of much of my work involves removing what we currently consider to be text from computing, on both ends. An assembler with its language is inferior to my machine code development tool with an interactive interface filled with redundant information; on the other end, I don't believe we should store text as characters, and I'm currently making progress on that.
I've largely given up on promoting my novel work here, as it never makes the front page, and none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does.
> I don't believe we should store text as characters
Could you briefly elaborate?
[edit]
I read the article on your HN link. I didn't quite "get it". Program text gets in the way, let's replace it with [?]. Dr. Strandh at U. of Bordeaux, et al., have argued that we shouldn't store programs as text files in an operating system--is that what you are advocating? An image based system, for example?
> none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does
Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. :) My work doesn't get much attention either, even if someone else happens upon it:
I don't know why I keep quoting Shakespeare this week, I mostly slept through the Shakespeare module in high school English, but I guess some filtered through and maybe WRT promotion on the Internet:
"Had I so lavish of my presence been, so common-hackneyed in the eyes of men, so stale and cheap to vulgar company, opinion, that did help me to the crown, had still kept loyal to possession and left me in reputeless banishment, a fellow of no mark nor likelihood." Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 2
It seems to me like for the most part only the best connected, ruthless, garrulous, overly vocal people get their ideas heard. I've tried business development orgs (including personal connections), directly contacting relevant researchers or sources of funding, on and on. Mostly, the advice has been to throw the spaghetti on the wall (put up a Github project, e.g.) and see what sticks (yell on Twitter, try to get some users). Even one of the founders of this site had difficulty marketing his idea for a new variant of Lisp, you know.
The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems):
It's like a Scheme interpreter running on hardware, and the latest successor to Steele/Sussman's Scheme-on-a-chip--I'm working on microcoding it with my inferior S-assembly. :) I didn't think you were being insulting--my last refuge in an increasingly humorless world appears to be self-deprecating humor.
Have you reached out to John Cowan, who is working on the R7RS Large Scheme standard, and is interested in topics like auxiliary human language as well as computer language and their representation? I'm not serious enough, I'm afraid, for the Scheme community (see above)--but they might take you more seriously:
Another Scheme person, Jonathan Rees, was (or still may be) at a forward-thinking institute called "Ronin Institute"--I'm not sure what their process is for onboarding scholars but they might be interested in your work:
Elmer Hanks wrote a forward thinking book many years ago called "Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment: A Proposal for a Universal Human Language" (my Shakespeare quote), about his machine readable, sign-language friendly, auxiliary language, and is worth a look in your domain of study.
I have been meaning to re-install Whitaker's Words which I used frequently in my own study of Latin, but lost when I upgraded my OS. You might have heard of Ido, an auxiliary language designed by Louis Couturat, a French logician, and the successor to Esperanto. It's almost completely regular, and I thought it might be a start for a more human-language neutral Scheme implementation (it is a Eurocentric language, so not completely neutral, unfortunately). My middle-school English teacher in 1981 pointed at the Esperanto booth in the language arts faire we took a field trip to and said, "I don't know why that booth is always so disappointingly unattended." I guess "ain't much changed", right?
I recommend "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" if you haven't read it:
and maybe we should both just continue to choose "to be" rather than "not to be".
[edit]
I was talking this over with my wife, and after reading your links, I still don't completely understand the overall advantage of coding word stems rather than characters. It did remind me of the first computer I owned, a Sinclair ZX-81 I built from a kit. Its Basic keywords, FOR, GOSUB, RETURN were each represented as a bytecode--and I think you could enter with a special key modifier with one key-chord. Is this like what you are saying?
I'm aware of the Scheme chips. I chose machine language because it doesn't need many names for code, and thus was suitable as a starting point for my work on textless programming.
I've not reached out to John Cowan but think I might, despite my dislike of Unicode. I'll also look into this Ronin Institute. I'll keep the book in mind. I appreciate the help.
As I explain in the last linked article, a lot of these artificial languages retard language work, rather than help it. I expect to target real languages with most of my time now.
Think of Elision like MIDI, but for human language. Text is stored uniformly as indices into a dictionary, rather than as a sequence of characters with interspersed control codes.
I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. :) Languages like Ido aren't completely "artificial", and I certainly think Couturat didn't fail in some sense--my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.
> my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.
For people too. And isn't that exactly how many natural languages work? Verbs -- someone doeS something -- all end with an 's'[1] in English: He/she/it writes, reads, encodes, builds, blathers, creates, excels, triumphs, loses, sucks...
___
[1]: Admittedly only in the present tense third-person singular, but that's something. Arguably, more of that would make the language easier to parse and learn.
> I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out.
Yes, this is why I call them insidious.
The issue with constructed languages is that they simply don't have the beauty of something such as Latin, and never can, due to their very nature.
Anyway, feel free to send me an e-mail at some point, if we're to continue our discussion at some later time.
