I’m L. Tindall and I write about Rust, Python, hacking, reverse engineering, and sometimes hardware at https://leotindall.com

Apart from the right to complain under the new rules and few marginal rights — which are primarily of interest to the corrupt and the criminal, like the right to be forgotten

This is a very dangerous path to go down. It’s possible to do things you regret and want the world to forget without being either corrupt or criminal. See, for example, the recent case of director James Gunn, who pissed off the alt right to the extent that they dug up deleted Tweets from a decade ago, for which he had already apologized and which in no way indicate his current beliefs as far as anyone can tell, in order to pressure his employer into firing him.

Immediately connecting this argument to Mastodon, Pleroma, and the rest of the AP-based fediverse is largely missing the point. The use case for federation is Mastodon isn’t privacy; it’s moderation.

Mastodon especially, and Pleroma and PeerTube as well, have or are building robust anti-harassment toolkits which integrate well with the federated model, because:

1. Keeping nodes (and thus communities) small reduces moderator burden at any one node
2. Threat of de-federation will force moderators to actually moderate
3. Splinter fediverses can form for instances unwilling to provide adequate moderation (freezepeach.x instances come to mind) or with extremely strict moderation standards (awoo.space did this on purpouse).

As I read this I thought about my experiences with Diaspora and Mastodon. Pages like this one or this one (click “Get Started”, I couldn’t do a deep link because JavaScript) are, IMHO, a big part of the reason these services don’t take off. How can an average user be expected to choose from a basically random list of nodes? How can I, a reasonably “technical” person, even be expected to do so?

So then why not host my own node? First, I don’t have time and most people I know don’t either. If I was 15 again I totally would because I had nothing better to do. I also don’t want to play tech support for a good chunk of my social network, and providing a service to someone has a tendency to make them view you as the tech support.

Second, if I do that I’m now in charge of security for my data. As terrible as Twitter and Facebook are, they’re probably still a lot better at securing my data than I am (at the very least they probably patch their systems more often than I would). Even worse, if some non-technical person decides to bite the bullet and create a node for his/her friends, how secure do you think that’s going to be?

Further, what are the odds that I, or whoever is maintaining the node, basically gets bored of it one day and kills the whole thing? Pretty damn high (maybe I and all my friends are assholes, though, so whatever).

Anyway, this post really spoke to me because I’ve been trying to escape Evil companies for awhile now and “federated” just doesn’t seem to be the answer. I now believe that centralized is here to stay, but that we should start looking at the organizations that control the data instead of the technology. For example, if Facebook were an open non-profit with a charter that legally prevented certain kinds of data “sharing” and “harvesting” maybe I wouldn’t have any problem with it.

One of the biggest pet peeves[1] I have with the software industry, and something I try hard to be conscious of in my work, is that we have a tendency to build software for our hardware, not the hardware our customers will use, and sacrifice performance for our convenience; this is the old maxim of “CPU time is cheaper than developer time”.

This is problematic partly because we neglect the needs of many users. We buy nice computers, peripherals, data plans, and home internet access plans because they are our tools; we need them. However, this means that something snappy and responsive for us, which we don’t question during our design and testing, could be very slow or even unusable (in the case of highly restrictive timeouts) for people with less money or simply no particular reason to buy an expensive phone or PC.

It is also problematic because CPU usage generates heat and uses energy. Modern CPUs are very, very good at “spinning down” via P-states and C-states [2]. I suggest you read the linked blog posts, but the very reductive TL;DR is that CPUs can use less power than their maximum TDP when executing sparse instructions (P-states) and can use even less power during periods in which one or more cores is completely idle by shutting off almost all power to those cores (C-states).

This means that two developer practices can introduce major energy savings: batching and optimization. Optimization is obvious - if your program requires fewer instructions to run, it will run for a shorter time and will allow the CPU to sleep in a C-state for longer.

Batching, collecting expensive operations to be run together, can have a similar effect. Rather than running one 50ms operation every 100ms, we could run three 50ms operations every 300ms. The duty cycle is the same (50%), but the CPU is likely to be able to enter a deeper sleep for a longer time during that inactive 150ms than during the three 50ms inactive periods, thus saving power.

Similar techniques can be applied with great success to memory access, storage access, and especially radio access (WiFi and cellular).

This is one reason I constantly rail against tools like Electron, which trade off developer efficiency (not having to learn a GUI toolkit, maintain multiple front-end codebases) for extremely terrible performance, huge memory usage, and constant CPU wakeups.

In short, inefficient programs produce heat and use energy, not to mention causing problems for less wealthy or less technical users of one’s software, and the maxim that “CPU time is cheaper than developer time” is less accurate than many seem to think.

1: In that it’s probably not that big of a deal compared to other things like Amazon exploiting warehouse workers or people writing racist predictive policing systems, but it annoys me a lot.

2: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/power-management-states-p-states-c-states-and-package-c-states

I don’t understand why OP didn’t actually progress from the “evaluating Rust based on online documentation” stage to the “trying to implement a solution in Rust” stage. The exact issue being looked at, responding to certain OS signals, is entirely trivial due to this crate, which came up with a simple DDG search.

If the language has the problem that people are fighting with the language in order to become productive with it, perhaps something is wrong with the language, and not the programmers?

This misses the point. Rust is opinionated about how code should handle sharing access to data, and about when data should be shared rather than copied. It has been observed that people often take time to adjust to this, which is noted in the docs. I don’t see why that’s an issue.

Interesting slide deck, I’m excited to see what comes of these projects.

I find the idea of a near-native WebAssembly kernel interesting too… Perhaps someone will build a wasm machine!

I like the sound of the headline. Ironically, I couldn’t read the article, as this banner covered most of the page:

This site uses cookies, tokens, and other third party scripts to recognize visitors of our sites and services, remember your settings and privacy choices, and - depending on your settings and privacy choices - enable us and some key partners to collect information about you so that we can improve our services and deliver relevant ads. By continuing to use our site or clicking Agree, you agree that CBS and our key partners may collect data and use cookies for personalized ads and other purposes, as described more fully in our privacy policy. You can change your settings at any time by clicking Manage Settings.

It appears I have to visit every “key partner’s” website to opt out. I use a tracking blocker extension, but still found it humorous.

In the Rust community this is known as the “newtype” pattern.

I really don’t understand these manifestos. This feels like an extension of look-at-me culture with little substance but a ton of platitudes.

We can add the most value as professionals by drawing on the diversity of our identities, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Homogeneity is an antipattern.

This already happens. I’ve worked at a company that was mostly white males, but none of us had very similar backgrounds. Some would argue our skin color and genitals would make us homogenous, but it’s not true. We all had vastly different experiences in getting to where we were (and there were only 2 of us in software out of like 15 people).

How do you hire for a heterogenous company anyway? If you base it on superficial things like skin color, you’re racist. If you base it on gender, you’re sexist. I’m talking about people on both sides here - you can’t use those as qualifiers for how good someone is at their job. You also can’t ask their personal history and sexuality. So what are you trying to do here?

It feels like another one of those “too many white/males in the industry, we need to diversify” without realizing that not all whites/males are the same. Surely if I said all black males are the same, someone would question it.

We can be successful while leading rich, full lives. Our success and value is not dependent on exerting all of our energy on contributing to software.

I’ve never worked at a place that acted differently than this. I’m not saying those types of places don’t exist, because I’m sure they do. I’ve worked at a fair number of companies, though, big and small, and no one has acted like this.

We have the obligation to use our positions of privilege, however tenuous, to improve the lives of others.

What does this even mean?

We must make room for people who are not like us to enter our field and succeed there. This means not only inviting them in, but making sure that they are supported and empowered.

No one is like me, and I welcome anyone to try out what I do if they’re interested. Beyond giving them feedback and code reviews, I don’t know what else people want. I didn’t even get that when I was coming up, but I had the desire to keep learning and pushing myself regardless of who I worked with. I feel like this may border on hand-holding.

We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people.

This is a total judgment call on what negatively impacts the well-being of other people. If I worked for the cattle industry, I could be deemed as hurting the well-being of other people (deforestation, hormones, etc). I work for the credit card industry right now, which absolutely hurts the well-being of some people. It helps others. I don’t feel like I’m in a predatory company, though. I wouldn’t even bother with a place that I felt was that way.

We acknowledge the value of non-technical contributors as equal to the value of technical contributors.

Hmm, sort of. It depends on the role. There are definitely some roles that do NOT match the value of technical contributions, but there are others that are vastly more important. That goes for any role, though. I’m not sure what this even means.

We understand that working in our field is a privilege, not a right. The negative impact of toxic people in the workplace or the larger community is not offset by their technical contributions.

This would apply to any career path. You don’t really have a right to be in any field. So ..?

We are devoted to practicing compassion and not contempt. We refuse to belittle other people because of their choices of tools, techniques, or languages.

You probably write PHP, don’t you? (I’m kidding!!)

The field of software development embraces technical change, and is made better by also accepting social change.

I don’t see the connection between software development and social change. Gay marriage being legalized does literally nothing to my list. Nor does it change anything in my credit score application for work. I mean, I guess if you’re saying you’re in the wedding cake biz and you now get more customers, sure, you’re going to embrace that. This is a huge stretch, though.

–

I’m done ranting, I guess. I’m obviously not going to sign this and I would implore anyone thinking of doing so to ask themselves why they are. If you’re thinking of signing it because something speaks to you, I would ask you to “be the change you want to see” despite how corny that is. Signing this doesn’t mean anything, acting in a way you feel best expresses your values does though!

I try to stick to the golden rule, despite how jerky some people can be (including myself). We’re all going to be dead soon, so make the best of it that you can.

The article doesn’t appear at all without Javascript :(

I’d like to point out that this is done by the same person who created the Contributor Covenant, which was intended to embed feminist views into Open Source projects.

This is likely an push with political intentions.

Continuing to work on several video courses for Packt Publishing, as well as trying to get the 0.3 release of my cross-platform, minimal UI toolkit (based on libui) out the door.

“We understand that working in our field is a privilege, not a right.” <- This is bullshit. Anyone at all has the right to program, and attempt to get other people to pay them for programing.

Agreed wholeheartedly with everything on this list (esp. Docker and Nix) except for the Code of Conduct line. Sadly, we’re living in a time where assholes need to be explicitly uninvited.

overreaching Code of Conducts.

The author realizes that you don’t have to follow the code of conduct to use the software? Also 80% of the items on the freebsd code of conduct are illegal. the four that stick out to me that aren’t are these.

Comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.

Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.

Deliberate misgendering.

Deliberate use of “dead” or rejected names.

Author basically feels that if the developers can’t get intimately involved with another developer’s personal life without consent then the author does not want to use the software. Frankly it seems like you could just create a code of conduct with the line “Thinking code of conducts are bad” and you’d filter out everyone who apparently wants to get in your grill.

The other rules are okayish but would rule out basically everything if applied strictly.

There really needs to be a federated github.

Is anyone else bothered by the use of the term ricing? As far as I know it is co-opting the automotive term which has racist origins.

The main thing one has to watch out for in my opinion is to not get caught up in excessive ricing and over-customisation. It’s kind of the same thing like distro-hopping, which I have come to interpret as projecting a lack of satisfaction with ones computer experience onto presumably “wrong” consumer user choices. I used to be stuck with both, until I managed to get a sane setup, and but some thought into what I actually want and need, instead of focusing on aesthetics. I mean, it’s a worthwhile game to play from time to time, but at least in my experience it does become stressful after a while.

Part of the reason for this could be that, remembering that the major ricing community (around /r/unixporn, YouTube, and /g/, especially on the latter) constantly see spam threads like “KERNEL BUG FOUND. Linux users on suicide watch!!!!” or “When did you grow up and stop using Linux?”, where one could feel the need to legitimize ones choices (especially in a society where who you are is the same question as what do you choose). I’m not saying that everyone is subconsciously motivated by these kinds of things, all I know is that I see that factor playing a role when I was into these kinds of things, and maybe it might be true for others too.

Did you try to apply terminal padding?

Like this: https://i.redd.it/rh3n3dxby8fy.png

Every terminal has its own setting how to do this kind of padding, i.e. for gnome-terminal or xfce4-terminal you can set it like this:

[~/.config/gtk-3.0]$ cat gtk.css 
VteTerminal, vte-terminal {
    padding: 20px;
}