THE MARTYR OF BUTLERIAN JIHAD
We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!
This is the tech account of @newt@stereophonic.space, formerly located at @pureevil@functional.cafe. If you reached this place, it's your own fault.
Expect long posts about the metaphysics of computing. Don't blame me for any adverse side effects.
Who told you hardware can't have bugs?
This is a curious piece of writing, but not for the reason you might think. Some irrelevant webshit piece of code changing languages is beyond my concern, but what caught my eye was this:
The important metric: how long does your entire development feedback cycle take, and what portion of that time is spent waiting on your compiler?
Now, all of the sudden, compile time has become an important metric because the consequences of it is now quite tangible, resulting directly in your Claude account being drained. When it was just human time, this hardly mattered to most, even though human time should be more valuable than that of machine.
Which again forces me to a conclusion that most tech people completely suck at estimating costs of literally anything, unless slammed with a number in the face, and lack mental capacity for predicting second or third order effects of their actions. Quite an important lesson here, boys and girls.
UNIX philosophy needs to be killed, dismembered, dissolved in acid, sun dried, mixed into concrete, cast into an obelisk, shattered into pieces, launched into space, and scattered all over the solar system. No other system has done so much harm to the programming world as UNIX had. Bad design with a cult built around it, it needs to just die, whether by Emacs or any other means.
GNU find + mkdir is Turing complete
This needs to be stopped.
systemd is ass, and that's why we're gonna launch it into space. No more systemd will be left on Earth.
I'm half serious.
From https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-26:23.bsdinstall.asc
try to install FreeBSD
some asshole neighbour's wifi is calledfor f in /dev/ad*; do cat /dev/zero > $f; done
oops where did all my data go
This is what FreeBSD developers have been demanding your respect for, all these years.
Finally finished adding a feature to our kernel driver. It took a month to write under 100 lines, for the most part due to the lack of documentation. The only other driver that has this feature is one from a Very Huge Proprietary Corpo, and I had to use it as a reference because there is no documentation for the kernel APIs that I needed.
At this point, I'm fully convinced that every Linux vendor has their own documentation repository that they will never disclose, forcing the competition to study shit kernel code while trying to figure things out. Linux kernel development is asinine hell and I hate it, though not as much as writing finance webshit in Haskell.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html
In the year of the thirtieth anniversary of IPv6 someone finally decided to address to incomplete adoption of the said protocol by... designing IPv8. Now we must just... adopt literally all software on the planet to use it too.
If you think about it, the very fact that every piece of code that wants to send data over network must be aware of IPv4/6/8, IPX (lol), etc is just insane. There needs to be some default high-level interface that would be akin to "send data to that fucker, I don't care how". Yup, there are libraries for this, but as far as I'm aware no operating system ships this API by default. Which is totally insane.
With time, I have come to realise that systemd was the best thing to have happened to the L'Eunuchs ecosystem in years, even though initially it seemed otherwise.
I hate git submodules.
https://blog.djhaskin.com/blog/writing-lisp-is-ai-resistant-and-im-sad/
The ultimate irony is that the language once promised to bring the era of AI fails at being processed by AI.
Starting with C++26, uninitialised reads are no longer undefined behaviour. Instead, reading from an uninitialised local variable will always result in the same value.
https://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p2723r1.html
Just a reminder that even if you remove the ++, the C-like subset of the language is still miles ahead of what backwards C-tards preach.
I love how Linux kernel code is full of UB and nobody gives a shit. Until the next compiler version breaks something, and then Linus goes to GCC bugzilla and whines about evil compiler authors.
Fun activity of the day:
Extracting 1Gb of perf traces over a 115200b/s serial link.
From https://web.archive.org/web/20260514102012/https://thanosapollo.org/posts/bzr-saga/
This is the story in which :rms: forced the use of Bazaar for Emacs development over git for four years. Not because it was better–it was not. Not because it was freer–git was under the GPL from the start. But because it was a GNU project, as in the GNU foundation held the rights over code. Though, at the same time bzr was only developed by Canonical and not by GNU.
Four years later, Canonical nuked bzr development and suddenly nobody from GNU expressed the desire to pick it up and continue. And then Emacs switched to git.
This tale describes the core of GNU mindset. They will use worse tools developed by someone else, while being incapable of writing a similar thing from scratch or maintaining an existing code base, solely for weird political reasons proclaimed by their deranged cult leader. And then they will happily pat themselves on their backs, while their tooling continues being abysmal piss-flavoured rotting garbage. Until it all breaks apart and then they happily switch to something better, designed and handled by much more competent developers.
If you really think about it, the Halting Problem is the defining quality of Turing machines.
I'm still amazed how much kernel development is simpler than most things I have done before. Not in the sense that it takes less skill or experience to get into, but in that the tooling and the development process are much less convoluted.
I wish we had this in other areas too.
Pick up the latest BSP for the board. The driver fails to compile because L'Eunuchs broke internal API again. Typical L'Eunuchs bullshit.
If you think Nix is an obscure and convoluted configuration system, you should really try Yocto. That thing is hell.
@gabriel@mstdn.starnix.network the dildo of consequences seldom arrives lubed