The beliefs of the creator of Urbit are particularly repugnant to me but for some reason every time I see the name I think of the Borges story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. I have no idea why.
Tlon is the name of the company developing Urbit and the name is self-consciously a reference to that Borges story. I’m sure there are other Borges references in Urbit that I’m not familiar enough with the author’s work to pick up on.
Borges is a fantastic author… with some problematic history as well. He supported the right-wing juntas that killed thousands during the last dictatorship in Argentina, under the pretense of saving the country from ‘communism’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Urbit’s author is aware of that connection.
Either way, if you are interested in another Argentine author with similar themes, I couldn’t recommend Julio Cortázar enough. His book Final del Juego is on par with Borges’ Ficciones in terms of mind-bending stories that’ll leave you thinking for a few days.
As someone fairly far to the left side of the political spectrum (you have nothing to lose but your chains!) I’m aware of his political leanings, and can separate that from his writings (I quite enjoy a lot of Orson Scott Card’s work, but abhor homophobia, in a similar vein).
I will definitely take your recommendation, thank you. I’ve been meaning to improve my Spanish in part to read Borges as it was written, but my Texan half-Spanish is nowhere close to being able to handle Borges’s Castellano…
I do not think that Borges’ opposition to Peron’s pro-Nazi totalitarian regime is “problematic”. Just read the history of what was going on and how it affected Borges. Argentina effectively became a one-party state which took control of all mass media, and brutally suppressed dissent. Many critics of the government were imprisoned, tortured and killed. Borges wasn’t imprisoned, but he was fired from his job for criticising the government. Of course Borges wanted Peron out of power, which is why he initially supported the 1976 coup. He didn’t support the subsequent death squads, and it is incorrect to imply that he did. From wikipedia:
During the 1970s, Borges at first expressed support for Argentina’s military junta, but was scandalized by the junta’s actions during the Dirty War. In protest against their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing in the newspaper La Nación.
If you’re on OpenBSD and this is biting you, I guess the fix would be to patch the port to push it up to at least 1.8.1 which has this fixed upstream. Or, you can just build it yourself and use that version instead.
Has Rachel submitted a patch to the ports? Seems like she hasn’t, and I don’t blame her. The OpenBSD project sets a high bar for contribution, in means of tolerance towards user-hostile tooling. Contributing to open source can be far more tiresome than fixing it for yourself, and I found OpenBSD even more taxing than other projects.
It makes me sad as this phenomenon is one of the reasons classical open source made by the people for the people is dying, and large companies take over opensource with their PR-open sourced projects.
Has Rachel submitted a patch to the ports? Seems like she hasn’t, and I don’t blame her.
Don’t hold your breath. (That said, I’d happily to contribute to most projects, and OpenBSD’s process would require significantly more effort on my part.)
What is it about the OpenBSD process that you feel makes it so hard?
It’s a bit harder than sending a PR on GitHub. And the quality expectations are high, so you need to read the docs and get an understanding of the process.
But when I contributed some things to OpenBSD ports (updating versions in an existing port and it’s deps) I found everyone I interacted with to be very helpful, even when I was making dumb mistakes.
no easily searchable bug database with publicly available status discussion to know if anybody is working on it, what work and maybe dead-ends were hit. No, a mailing list is not a proper substitute for this.
everything is done in email with arcane formatting requirements.
the whole tooling is arcane to contemporary users. (CVS, specifically formatted email, etc)
I have done my BSD contributions in the past when I had more time and willingness to go the extra mile for the sake of others. I no longer wish to use painful tools and workflows for the sake of others’ resistance to change. It is an extra burden.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not only about OpenBSD. The same goes for Fedora for example, they have their own arcane tooling and processes, and so do lots of other projects. They have tools and documentation, but lots of docs are outdated, and for those not being constantly in the treadmill these are a lot of extra research and work which is “helped” by outdated docs etc. and it is a giant hill to climb to publish an update of a version number and re-run of the build script.
Oh. Now this is totally a different reason from what I was thinking about. (I personally don’t agree to her on this one. Still I don’t blame her, even if her different “political”/cultural stance would be her sole reason. People must accept that this is also a freedom of open source users.)
Recently I have made up my mind to once again contribute more than I did in the past few years, and while my PRs were accepted, some still didn’t make it to a release, and the project has no testing release branch (which I also understand for a tiny project), thus compiling your own fork makes sense even this way. And this way contributing stuff stuff often gets left behind in the daily grind. On the other hand some other tiny contributions were accepted with such warmth and so quick response time that it felt really good.
Saint Florian (Latin: Florianus; 250 – c. 304 AD) was a Christian holy man, and the patron saint of Linz, Austria; chimney sweeps; soapmakers, and firefighters. His feast day is 4 May.
In the United States, May 4 is informally observed as “Dave Brubeck Day”. In the format most commonly used in the U.S., May 4 is written “5/4”, recalling the time signature of “Take Five”, Brubeck’s best known recording.
The original iPhone didn’t even support UMTS (3G), it was GPRS (2G) EDGE (2.5G). A load of mobile providers who had already rolled out large UMTS had to go and deploy older hardware to support the iPhone without it falling back to GPRS. The latency on GPRS was awful (500ms RTTs were common, making it unusable for anything interactive).
To be fair: when Apple announced this, React did not exist, Vue did not exist, precursors like Backbone didn’t even exist, and most critically, most of the technologies and tools we use in 2021 to do SPAs, let alone offline webapps, did not exist. Hell, I think the dominant offline storage solution was WebSQL, which was never standardized and is not (AFAIK) supported in any contemporary browser, and no equivalent of web workers existed unless you had Google Gears installed. You also had nothing like WebGL, or web sockets, or even widespread contemporary CSS that would make reasonable, cross-platform styling feasible. So what Apple was offering at the time was morally equivalent to having bookmark links on the home screen.
(Yeah, I’m very aware of the pile of old meta tags you could use to make the experience be better than that in a literal sense, but that doesn’t resolve anything else I highlighted.)
Speaking purely for myself, I found the initial announcement infuriating, not because I didn’t believe in the web (I did! Firefox was growing! Safari was proving the viability of KHTML! IE was on the decline!), but because Apple’s proposal was just so damn far from what doing that seriously would’ve actually looked like that it felt condescending. The Palm Pre, which notably came out two years later, was dramatically closer to what I’d have expected if Apple were being sincere in their offer. (And even there, webOS, much as I love it, is more an OS that happens to have JavaScript-powered apps than a genuine web app platform in the 2021 sense.)
Even at the time, Apple’s stance felt to me like, “We aren’t finished with our native SDK yet and it’s so far from ready for public consumption that we’re going to just pretend it doesn’t exist at all.” I remember talking about the iPhone with my coworkers when it first came out and everyone just assumed native apps would be coming at some point.
Even webOS (which I also loved) ended up supporting native apps eventually, despite having a much more feature-rich platform for JavaScript code.
Games seem to be the killer app category that pushes mobile OS vendors to support native code. They’re one of the few categories of application where a lack of native code support can make an app impossible to implement, rather than just making it a bit slower or clunkier but still basically workable.
Overriding dependencies to use a fork in straightforward manner is virtually impossible.
There are some possible solutions:
In certain cases simply importing the source of the dependency into the solution, and adding as a project reference may work. In some cases I have resorted to this. (licensing, build complications all can hinder this)
Procmon is the closest equivalent, but Portmon and ProcDump, alongside the tightly-related-but-different Spy++, can also be very useful in this context (some of those being closer to e.g. ltrace than strace, specifically, but the division of responsibilities on Windows are a bit different, so there’s not a one-to-one mapping).
Back when Gnome + Mono was a thing lots of interesting stuff was born, eg. Beagle.
Suse was actively developing nice user facing tools in mono at astonishing pace, then C# fell from favour because of politocs, most stuff was half rewritten in C++/Python/JavaScript, usually in lower quality/featureset.
Since then I find Gnome worse with every release, but that has not so much to do with .NET support.
There are a few Mono apps from back when the Gnome project was kind of adopting Mono as their standard runtime for apps. Two that come to mind are Tomboy (notes app) and Banshee (music player).
If anything should work on Linux, it should be F#, but here’s a tweet from yesterday from the author of an F# course bemoaning the difficulty he is having getting his course to seamlessly work.
PowerShell for one, but it’s fairly recent that .NET Core got Linux support, so I doubt there are many large projects around yet. Most likely any really large open source projects in the coming years will come from Microsoft open sourcing their own products.
There may be some, but I have been waiting for a bit more maturity in the .Net Core, .Net 5 (and now .Net 6) ecosystems before diving in. A year ago, I was reading a lot of stories about cross platform issues in core and I had my own painful experience setting up .Net Core with Asp.net.
I’m actually quite surprised how quickly there is now a .Net 6 version coming out.
I use KeePass compatable password managers. At the moment that’s KeePassXC on the desktop. I use it because there’s a choice of clients all using this same database format; said format is a single file I can sync between devices myself (I use Syncthing); and because it’s good enough! And of course a local database allows me to make sure my secrets never leave my devices.
I previously used 1Password but I reached a point where I couldn’t tolerate relying and trusting a third party with my secrets. At the time their Linux and BSD support was essentially non-existant, although believe that’s recently changed for the better.
The biggest problem I have with KeePass is its limited data model. For example, items can’t be associated with more than one URL and trying to store anything other than website username-password pairs feels unnatural. But that’s not a major issue.
It is not as polished as the alternatives, but has tons of customizablilty, is open source, and has a wide range of compatible alternative “frontends” for the database.
I use vanilla KeePass 2.x on windows, and KeePassDX on Android. Both do their job well enough for me. KeePassXC is more polished, probably OP should try that instead of vanilla KeePass.
How do you sync between your devices? I’m using MacPass on macOS and KeePassium on iOS but I’m always a bit worried about the sync, because it doesn’t operate record by record but on the whole file instead.
I couldn’t tolerate relying and trusting a third party with my secret
The whole point of 1Password is that you don’t have to trust them at all. Your secrets are encrypted with a combination and your master password (in your head) and a random secret key (only stored on your devices) both unknown to 1Password.
Bitwarden does something similar, albeit without the random secret key, which can or cannot (I’m still not sure about that) an office attack easier if their server is hacked.
You still need to trust that that’s what actually happens and that they have not and will not be coerced into changing that. Now, I probably do trust AgileBits - I used 1Password for a long time. But a while back I decided that I don’t want to have to trust others when it comes to my password manager. YMMV :)
Another +1 for keepass - I use xc on desktop with the Firefox plugin and keepass2android on phone, with Dropbox handling the sync. Works perfectly for me :)
I’m also in KeePass land. I’m attracted by the fact that it’s free and open source. I currently use KeeWeb with database files stored in Dropbox across my MacBook and iPhone. I especially like the ability to store arbitrary info along with my password and use it remember what address/phone number I gave the account and the lies I’ve told as answers to my security questions.
For ease of use I remember less critical passwords (low impact if compromised or accounts with app-based 2FA) in the Apple keychain (iCloud) and keep the important ones only in KeeWeb.
While I get the idea, I think all that would happen is that conversation would continue while referencing the dead/removed content. Lobste.rs does a really good job of keeping the conversations consistent, by for example preventing the editing of comments after a certain amount of time.
IMHO if the content was removed unjustly, discussion in IRC or private communication with mods would probably be preferable. Lobste.rs isn’t the Orange Site, and I think a Backbone Cabal suits it well.
It could cause inconvenience for the operators in the current (cancel)cultural environment, eventually maybe even risking the site’s existence. It would pretty much undermine the purpose of moderation.
53 dBA still seems to be pretty average, if not above average sound level for a keyboard to me.
I wonder if there are really quiet keyboards available, as my keyboards are still too loud to type in the night when my spouse wants to sleep for example.
I have an oldish rubber bell Fujistu keyboard and a Dell latitude notebook, both seem to be pretty loud in the silent night.
The article is really interesting, and very polished, but I still missed something: The actual sound of the synthesizer. It would give nice context for someone not so deeply knowledgeable in the topic.
I’d suggest some sound/video to the start of the article, to showcase the sounds, effects being constructed in the article. I checked on YouTube, and found out that I do know the sound of this instrument, just didn’t know it was done with it. (I understand that there are equivalent products, but as I understand this is an iconic piece)
Yeah, the article doesn’t go into what makes the Juno’s sound distinctive. Saw and square/pulse waves are ubiquitous, and many synths since it have used DCOs. There may be quirks of the Juno’s osc circuit that color the sound. But filters are a huge component of the sound of any subtractive synth, so I’m guessing the Juno’s filter circuit(s) had a lot to do with it. The Juno also had an analog chorus effect built in.
One of the iconic Juno sounds is the “hoover” or “mentasm” which was all over early-90s hardcore/gabber music. Apparently this was done on the Alpha Juno (a later iteration?) which had an uncommon “PWM sawtooth wave, which inserts flat segments of variable width into a sawtooth waveform”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_sound
This is a great summary of my impressions as well. Just take a look at new OS projects anywhere: most are some forms of UNIX clones, replicating the old design decisions (failures) for the sake of better compatibility with existing software, which are also captives of their own path and post success.
The web-platform (Chrome) as a giant monolith swallowing everything is a new such monster after POSIX, which has grown too big and too successful to be ever substantially improved upon/redesigned.
When will we have something better, yet still free instead of email?
I use the Bullet Journal method. Electronic/digital tools don’t work for me, they are inhumane, inflexible, and I have too many distractions.
I suggest reading the book. It has lot of stuff one might know from other places, still it gives a toolset to organize your life with one of the simplest and most flexible tool available: pen and paper.
Well, one thing I really liked about the book was that the author emphasized several times that there is no silver bullet, and he is not triing to given he one true method, that will be the holy grail of life organization, rather showed some approaches to solve some problems.
I use pretty much vanilla BuJo, but I have some “collections” for some topics which are typically slower moving, and regularly check those pages and try to schedule something for my day. Otherwise I mostly use the daily notes, and sometimes groom them to these special collections (or monthly schedule or future log),but I still rely on the daily tasks as a main compass for things to do.
My examples for these colelctions are: home improvement todos (like fixing that clogging drain in the bathroom, etc..), car related todos (I have and oldish car that has some minor non-critical problem list ever needing some attention, like a broken button, etc), home network related todos, work projects related todos/idea collections, book reading lists, etc.
So I have:
index
future
special collections (see above)
monthly schedule
daily logs for the month
repeat last 2/3 steps until notebook is full or year ends
Is this what you were thinking about by trendy hip bujo?
Not really, I was thinking more about sleeping / eating / gratitude trackers that people draws in everyday. Using it also as a logging for various aspects of their daily life body/mind interaction. So, your way does not fit what trendy bujo I have seen around. I don’t find those uses of the method neither good or bad just different for each of us and I was curious.
I had a vanilla bujo during an year (special collections did not stand the test of time) with only an index, future, monthly calendar + todo and daily logs but finally stopped gradually to uses it as the time go because life got messy quicker than I can effectively use it. I still use the notation of bujo (., o, x, >, <, etc) in my notebooks as it seems a clear visual legend when I write some stuff that fit that format.
Ok I see. I guess then I’m pretty much on “vanilla BuJo”.
I tried some health tracking in the daily log, by coding some health status/symptoms with a few symbols on the margin near the current date in the daily log. Luckily my health problems necessitating this are gone, so I stopped doing it.
I think the gratitude tracker is also a good idea, I don’t do it, but often think maybe I should. When I have a really good or really bad day, I simply note that in my daily log, and add an appropriate smiley as a signifier.
On a related note I often feel like the goal of these trends in general is to re-invent what the average PHP + MySQL (LAMP stack) web space used to be. Something where someone else manages your server, where disk space and so on were just an abstraction, something you deploy some file (back then some PHP, now often a Docker image) and it just runs. Somehow over some web interface, sometimes via FTP there’s also access to logs. Only if you had a decent enough internet connection, deployment went a lot faster compared to now. I know there’s testing, etc. that are good developments but some parts are due things like pulling base images, installing packages into them, building things on top, etc.
I know, I am oversimplifying, but it feels like largely that’s the overall goal with many cloud products. Bringing back the ease of just uploading some PHP. Just that people use other languages as well.
I wonder what would have happened if stuff like [Hack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) came along a bit earlier and became big. Maybe that could have lead to other languages targeting the VM and we’d have seen things similar to the JavaScript world happening.
As an AWS Lambda (and also Azure Functions) user (developer) I agree. I have to admit, that the downsides (limited debuggability) also remind it to the early PHP times. (Personally I find Azure smoother in local emulator/debuggability support)
Still I think it has its merits, and is a good choice in many cases.
Yes exactly! That’s why I have been talking about FastCGI. I would like the deployment model of PHP without actually using PHP. When you switch to Python or Ruby, you get a better language, but all of the sudden you have all these other problems (managing a server).
There’s no reason that those 2 things should be coupled (language and deployment model). Maybe when modphp and modpython were a thing they were coupled, but these days FastCGI seems to be the more standard / decoupled / server-agnostic deployment model.
But you also need container support for Python/Ruby. virtualenv/bundler may suffice in some cases but you also want to deploy specific versions of native libraries, which are better handled by containers.
There’s no reason that you can’t do that with a FastCGI process in a container, although as far as I know almost nobody does it. Some hosting provides run CGI in chroot, but you can’t really install and libraries there. It’s just a single script.
BTW I tried NearlyFreeSpeech’s fastcgi support, mentioned in the thread, and they use FreeBSD jails with a fixed “realm” that they update every quarter or so. It’s a big bundle of software like Python, Ruby, and even Go and Rust compilers on FreeBSD. So that is not quite what I want either.
Also, although FastCGI is meant for front ends, it’s not a stretch to imagine it as a basis for a “FaaS” platform.
People complain about the shell language (which I’ve taken pains to clean up), but YAML is a worse language than shell (and double that for Go templates generating YAML or JSON)
We need to bring the interactivity of Unix shell back to distributed systems. The great analogy is that YAML configuration is basically like “IBM Job Control Language” before Unix came around.
Shell is already used to configure local development environments, and he’s complaining we have to push to clusters all the time to test, which is a great point. We should be able to test locally.
Can I install Microsoft Store packages non-interactively with this from a script finally?
there is an ansible issue that was logged a year ago to ask for a feature in Ansible to leverage the new Package Manager.
I would certainly hope script-based installs will be possible
The beliefs of the creator of Urbit are particularly repugnant to me but for some reason every time I see the name I think of the Borges story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. I have no idea why.
Tlon is the name of the company developing Urbit and the name is self-consciously a reference to that Borges story. I’m sure there are other Borges references in Urbit that I’m not familiar enough with the author’s work to pick up on.
Thank you. I knew there had to be some sort of connection my subconscious made every time I read the damn name.
Borges is one of my favorite authors. The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel…all great.
Borges is a fantastic author… with some problematic history as well. He supported the right-wing juntas that killed thousands during the last dictatorship in Argentina, under the pretense of saving the country from ‘communism’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Urbit’s author is aware of that connection.
Either way, if you are interested in another Argentine author with similar themes, I couldn’t recommend Julio Cortázar enough. His book Final del Juego is on par with Borges’ Ficciones in terms of mind-bending stories that’ll leave you thinking for a few days.
As someone fairly far to the left side of the political spectrum (you have nothing to lose but your chains!) I’m aware of his political leanings, and can separate that from his writings (I quite enjoy a lot of Orson Scott Card’s work, but abhor homophobia, in a similar vein).
I will definitely take your recommendation, thank you. I’ve been meaning to improve my Spanish in part to read Borges as it was written, but my Texan half-Spanish is nowhere close to being able to handle Borges’s Castellano…
I do not think that Borges’ opposition to Peron’s pro-Nazi totalitarian regime is “problematic”. Just read the history of what was going on and how it affected Borges. Argentina effectively became a one-party state which took control of all mass media, and brutally suppressed dissent. Many critics of the government were imprisoned, tortured and killed. Borges wasn’t imprisoned, but he was fired from his job for criticising the government. Of course Borges wanted Peron out of power, which is why he initially supported the 1976 coup. He didn’t support the subsequent death squads, and it is incorrect to imply that he did. From wikipedia:
Luckily left-wing dictatorships don’t have such problematic history.
Yours, an Eastern European
Has Rachel submitted a patch to the ports? Seems like she hasn’t, and I don’t blame her. The OpenBSD project sets a high bar for contribution, in means of tolerance towards user-hostile tooling. Contributing to open source can be far more tiresome than fixing it for yourself, and I found OpenBSD even more taxing than other projects.
It makes me sad as this phenomenon is one of the reasons classical open source made by the people for the people is dying, and large companies take over opensource with their PR-open sourced projects.
Don’t hold your breath. (That said, I’d happily to contribute to most projects, and OpenBSD’s process would require significantly more effort on my part.)
Asking you and the parent comment.
What is it about the OpenBSD process that you feel makes it so hard?
It’s a bit harder than sending a PR on GitHub. And the quality expectations are high, so you need to read the docs and get an understanding of the process.
But when I contributed some things to OpenBSD ports (updating versions in an existing port and it’s deps) I found everyone I interacted with to be very helpful, even when I was making dumb mistakes.
I have done my BSD contributions in the past when I had more time and willingness to go the extra mile for the sake of others. I no longer wish to use painful tools and workflows for the sake of others’ resistance to change. It is an extra burden.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not only about OpenBSD. The same goes for Fedora for example, they have their own arcane tooling and processes, and so do lots of other projects. They have tools and documentation, but lots of docs are outdated, and for those not being constantly in the treadmill these are a lot of extra research and work which is “helped” by outdated docs etc. and it is a giant hill to climb to publish an update of a version number and re-run of the build script.
Thanks, this is a good answer.
It was nice to see Debian move to a Gitlab instance, and nice to see FreeBSD is finally moving to Git.
But I suspect not much is going to change with OpenBSD, though maybe Got will improve things at some point.
Oh. Now this is totally a different reason from what I was thinking about. (I personally don’t agree to her on this one. Still I don’t blame her, even if her different “political”/cultural stance would be her sole reason. People must accept that this is also a freedom of open source users.)
Recently I have made up my mind to once again contribute more than I did in the past few years, and while my PRs were accepted, some still didn’t make it to a release, and the project has no testing release branch (which I also understand for a tiny project), thus compiling your own fork makes sense even this way. And this way contributing stuff stuff often gets left behind in the daily grind. On the other hand some other tiny contributions were accepted with such warmth and so quick response time that it felt really good.
Nice story and a well written post.
However I ended up with the feeling if the author would like to do something similar now, would he have any chance in today’s IT landscape?
So happy to see progress on HAMMER2. Eventually, when it’s ready, I hope it gets ported to OpenBSD and becomes the defacto BSD file system.
I love how every discussion about DragonflyBSD is about how it’d be so great if HAMMER2 was in OpenBSD, and never about Dragonfly.
edit: correct typo
I was talking about Open. Free isn’t interesting to me.
I meant OpenBSD, sorry.
If the OpenBSD developers would be open to modern, reliable storage they would have some other options as well (eg. zfs).
Storage is simply not a focus for OpenBSD. Is even TRIM support implemented yet?
Hence why it’s more likely to be lifted wholesale than imported.
ZFS is a non starter because OBSD is rather careful and risk-avoidant with licenses.
Saint Florian (Latin: Florianus; 250 – c. 304 AD) was a Christian holy man, and the patron saint of Linz, Austria; chimney sweeps; soapmakers, and firefighters. His feast day is 4 May.
In case you suspected:
Apparently it is also:
among other things.
Which are also interesting, and neither is a free advertisement by proxy for a megacorporation.
Also you may spot the origin of the Firefighters’ day in my original post.
Ah yes, didn’t notice that.
I’d give it a shot but it’s around 10 degrees C here and we have snow forecast…
Edit I re-potted a store-bought spice plant but I did it fully clothed …
So basically we finally arrived at the “make your app a web page” that Apple demanded when launching the iPhone
Yes, and the latest trend in web development is to render content on the server. Everything old is new again!
I think it’s better this time, because phones and network are fast enough that doing everything in the browser isn’t limited by UMTS speeds.
The original iPhone didn’t even support UMTS (3G), it was GPRS (2G) EDGE (2.5G). A load of mobile providers who had already rolled out large UMTS had to go and deploy older hardware to support the iPhone without it falling back to GPRS. The latency on GPRS was awful (500ms RTTs were common, making it unusable for anything interactive).
I have noticed this and had the very same reaction a few weeks ago.
To be fair: when Apple announced this, React did not exist, Vue did not exist, precursors like Backbone didn’t even exist, and most critically, most of the technologies and tools we use in 2021 to do SPAs, let alone offline webapps, did not exist. Hell, I think the dominant offline storage solution was WebSQL, which was never standardized and is not (AFAIK) supported in any contemporary browser, and no equivalent of web workers existed unless you had Google Gears installed. You also had nothing like WebGL, or web sockets, or even widespread contemporary CSS that would make reasonable, cross-platform styling feasible. So what Apple was offering at the time was morally equivalent to having bookmark links on the home screen.
(Yeah, I’m very aware of the pile of old
metatags you could use to make the experience be better than that in a literal sense, but that doesn’t resolve anything else I highlighted.)Speaking purely for myself, I found the initial announcement infuriating, not because I didn’t believe in the web (I did! Firefox was growing! Safari was proving the viability of KHTML! IE was on the decline!), but because Apple’s proposal was just so damn far from what doing that seriously would’ve actually looked like that it felt condescending. The Palm Pre, which notably came out two years later, was dramatically closer to what I’d have expected if Apple were being sincere in their offer. (And even there, webOS, much as I love it, is more an OS that happens to have JavaScript-powered apps than a genuine web app platform in the 2021 sense.)
Even at the time, Apple’s stance felt to me like, “We aren’t finished with our native SDK yet and it’s so far from ready for public consumption that we’re going to just pretend it doesn’t exist at all.” I remember talking about the iPhone with my coworkers when it first came out and everyone just assumed native apps would be coming at some point.
Even webOS (which I also loved) ended up supporting native apps eventually, despite having a much more feature-rich platform for JavaScript code.
Games seem to be the killer app category that pushes mobile OS vendors to support native code. They’re one of the few categories of application where a lack of native code support can make an app impossible to implement, rather than just making it a bit slower or clunkier but still basically workable.
Even Firefox OS was too early in the game for that (besides other problems of FFOS).
If it was timed right, Mozilla would have found another way to run it into the ground. ;-)
Could not agree more !
I’m not quite sure what happened to the link I posted, now did this end up here :S
should have been https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/
edit: as I see the canonical URL in the header of the linked post is incorrect…
I’d suggest deleting and resubmitting.
I can’t find a way to delete my submission, and also currently I’m on mobile only.
I reported the problem to the author and try to sort this out on Monday, when I got back to my desktop.
There are some possible solutions:
These have their limitations, but both are simpler than setting up a nuget server, manually or as a SaaS subscription.
Is there a working strace equivalent for Windows? It’s the tool I always miss when I have to debug anything there.
Procmon?
Procmon is the closest equivalent, but Portmon and ProcDump, alongside the tightly-related-but-different Spy++, can also be very useful in this context (some of those being closer to e.g.
ltracethanstrace, specifically, but the division of responsibilities on Windows are a bit different, so there’s not a one-to-one mapping).procmon seems to work well, thanks for the suggestion!
The followings are the fallbacks:
Guid.NewGuid().ToString()Wow! Some are features I really missed (
DROP COLUMN,RETURNING), others are also nice to have! All are really useful for my usecases!Are there any well-known open source .NET apps (CLI or GUI) that run on Linux?
KeePass.
Back when Gnome + Mono was a thing lots of interesting stuff was born, eg. Beagle.
Suse was actively developing nice user facing tools in mono at astonishing pace, then C# fell from favour because of politocs, most stuff was half rewritten in C++/Python/JavaScript, usually in lower quality/featureset.
Since then I find Gnome worse with every release, but that has not so much to do with .NET support.
I was using keepass on my windows desktop. When my machine started to die I was pleasantly surprised to find my keepass database worked on debian.
There are a few Mono apps from back when the Gnome project was kind of adopting Mono as their standard runtime for apps. Two that come to mind are Tomboy (notes app) and Banshee (music player).
Jellyfin media server (FOSS fork of Emby and alternative to Plex) runs on dotnet.
If anything should work on Linux, it should be F#, but here’s a tweet from yesterday from the author of an F# course bemoaning the difficulty he is having getting his course to seamlessly work.
https://twitter.com/kitlovesfsharp/status/1362125496683819012
It works fine for me on Fedora. As the comments suggest, it may be related to snap.
Ionode is buggy sometimes, but so is Visual Studiofor F#.Both are steadily getting better.
PowerShell for one, but it’s fairly recent that .NET Core got Linux support, so I doubt there are many large projects around yet. Most likely any really large open source projects in the coming years will come from Microsoft open sourcing their own products.
There may be some, but I have been waiting for a bit more maturity in the .Net Core, .Net 5 (and now .Net 6) ecosystems before diving in. A year ago, I was reading a lot of stories about cross platform issues in core and I had my own painful experience setting up .Net Core with Asp.net.
I’m actually quite surprised how quickly there is now a .Net 6 version coming out.
I use KeePass compatable password managers. At the moment that’s KeePassXC on the desktop. I use it because there’s a choice of clients all using this same database format; said format is a single file I can sync between devices myself (I use Syncthing); and because it’s good enough! And of course a local database allows me to make sure my secrets never leave my devices.
I previously used 1Password but I reached a point where I couldn’t tolerate relying and trusting a third party with my secrets. At the time their Linux and BSD support was essentially non-existant, although believe that’s recently changed for the better.
The biggest problem I have with KeePass is its limited data model. For example, items can’t be associated with more than one URL and trying to store anything other than website username-password pairs feels unnatural. But that’s not a major issue.
+1 for the KeePass universe
It is not as polished as the alternatives, but has tons of customizablilty, is open source, and has a wide range of compatible alternative “frontends” for the database.
I use vanilla KeePass 2.x on windows, and KeePassDX on Android. Both do their job well enough for me. KeePassXC is more polished, probably OP should try that instead of vanilla KeePass.
How do you sync between your devices? I’m using MacPass on macOS and KeePassium on iOS but I’m always a bit worried about the sync, because it doesn’t operate record by record but on the whole file instead.
I use syncthing. KeePass has some basic conflict resolution support in case it is needed.
Syncthing has file versioning, which I also use
The whole point of 1Password is that you don’t have to trust them at all. Your secrets are encrypted with a combination and your master password (in your head) and a random secret key (only stored on your devices) both unknown to 1Password.
Bitwarden does something similar, albeit without the random secret key, which can or cannot (I’m still not sure about that) an office attack easier if their server is hacked.
You still need to trust that that’s what actually happens and that they have not and will not be coerced into changing that. Now, I probably do trust AgileBits - I used 1Password for a long time. But a while back I decided that I don’t want to have to trust others when it comes to my password manager. YMMV :)
Another +1 for keepass - I use xc on desktop with the Firefox plugin and keepass2android on phone, with Dropbox handling the sync. Works perfectly for me :)
I’m also in KeePass land. I’m attracted by the fact that it’s free and open source. I currently use KeeWeb with database files stored in Dropbox across my MacBook and iPhone. I especially like the ability to store arbitrary info along with my password and use it remember what address/phone number I gave the account and the lies I’ve told as answers to my security questions.
For ease of use I remember less critical passwords (low impact if compromised or accounts with app-based 2FA) in the Apple keychain (iCloud) and keep the important ones only in KeeWeb.
While I get the idea, I think all that would happen is that conversation would continue while referencing the dead/removed content. Lobste.rs does a really good job of keeping the conversations consistent, by for example preventing the editing of comments after a certain amount of time.
IMHO if the content was removed unjustly, discussion in IRC or private communication with mods would probably be preferable. Lobste.rs isn’t the Orange Site, and I think a Backbone Cabal suits it well.
I think that making it visible only in moderator log would be inconvenient enough to prevent that from happening.
It could cause inconvenience for the operators in the current (cancel)cultural environment, eventually maybe even risking the site’s existence. It would pretty much undermine the purpose of moderation.
What would you do with content which is illegal and could cause legal consequences?
As far as I can tell this is not a real issue on this site.
There was a link to the leaked WindowsXP, which was removed because of that reason.
But it is a failure mode that can be exploited by a bad actor. I’ll expand on that in a top-level comment.
We could possibly lock conversations on the removed content. It would only be visible.
53 dBA still seems to be pretty average, if not above average sound level for a keyboard to me.
I wonder if there are really quiet keyboards available, as my keyboards are still too loud to type in the night when my spouse wants to sleep for example.
I have an oldish rubber bell Fujistu keyboard and a Dell latitude notebook, both seem to be pretty loud in the silent night.
The article is really interesting, and very polished, but I still missed something: The actual sound of the synthesizer. It would give nice context for someone not so deeply knowledgeable in the topic.
I’d suggest some sound/video to the start of the article, to showcase the sounds, effects being constructed in the article. I checked on YouTube, and found out that I do know the sound of this instrument, just didn’t know it was done with it. (I understand that there are equivalent products, but as I understand this is an iconic piece)
Yeah, the article doesn’t go into what makes the Juno’s sound distinctive. Saw and square/pulse waves are ubiquitous, and many synths since it have used DCOs. There may be quirks of the Juno’s osc circuit that color the sound. But filters are a huge component of the sound of any subtractive synth, so I’m guessing the Juno’s filter circuit(s) had a lot to do with it. The Juno also had an analog chorus effect built in.
One of the iconic Juno sounds is the “hoover” or “mentasm” which was all over early-90s hardcore/gabber music. Apparently this was done on the Alpha Juno (a later iteration?) which had an uncommon “PWM sawtooth wave, which inserts flat segments of variable width into a sawtooth waveform”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_sound
This is a great summary of my impressions as well. Just take a look at new OS projects anywhere: most are some forms of UNIX clones, replicating the old design decisions (failures) for the sake of better compatibility with existing software, which are also captives of their own path and post success.
The web-platform (Chrome) as a giant monolith swallowing everything is a new such monster after POSIX, which has grown too big and too successful to be ever substantially improved upon/redesigned.
When will we have something better, yet still free instead of email?
I use the Bullet Journal method. Electronic/digital tools don’t work for me, they are inhumane, inflexible, and I have too many distractions.
I suggest reading the book. It has lot of stuff one might know from other places, still it gives a toolset to organize your life with one of the simplest and most flexible tool available: pen and paper.
Do you use the basic bullet journal format or do you add the multiple trackers pages that we see when looking for trendy/hip bujo?
Well, one thing I really liked about the book was that the author emphasized several times that there is no silver bullet, and he is not triing to given he one true method, that will be the holy grail of life organization, rather showed some approaches to solve some problems.
I use pretty much vanilla BuJo, but I have some “collections” for some topics which are typically slower moving, and regularly check those pages and try to schedule something for my day. Otherwise I mostly use the daily notes, and sometimes groom them to these special collections (or monthly schedule or future log),but I still rely on the daily tasks as a main compass for things to do.
My examples for these colelctions are: home improvement todos (like fixing that clogging drain in the bathroom, etc..), car related todos (I have and oldish car that has some minor non-critical problem list ever needing some attention, like a broken button, etc), home network related todos, work projects related todos/idea collections, book reading lists, etc.
So I have:
Is this what you were thinking about by trendy hip bujo?
Not really, I was thinking more about sleeping / eating / gratitude trackers that people draws in everyday. Using it also as a logging for various aspects of their daily life body/mind interaction. So, your way does not fit what trendy bujo I have seen around. I don’t find those uses of the method neither good or bad just different for each of us and I was curious.
I had a vanilla bujo during an year (special collections did not stand the test of time) with only an index, future, monthly calendar + todo and daily logs but finally stopped gradually to uses it as the time go because life got messy quicker than I can effectively use it. I still use the notation of bujo (., o, x, >, <, etc) in my notebooks as it seems a clear visual legend when I write some stuff that fit that format.
Ok I see. I guess then I’m pretty much on “vanilla BuJo”.
I tried some health tracking in the daily log, by coding some health status/symptoms with a few symbols on the margin near the current date in the daily log. Luckily my health problems necessitating this are gone, so I stopped doing it.
I think the gratitude tracker is also a good idea, I don’t do it, but often think maybe I should. When I have a really good or really bad day, I simply note that in my daily log, and add an appropriate smiley as a signifier.
On a related note I often feel like the goal of these trends in general is to re-invent what the average PHP + MySQL (LAMP stack) web space used to be. Something where someone else manages your server, where disk space and so on were just an abstraction, something you deploy some file (back then some PHP, now often a Docker image) and it just runs. Somehow over some web interface, sometimes via FTP there’s also access to logs. Only if you had a decent enough internet connection, deployment went a lot faster compared to now. I know there’s testing, etc. that are good developments but some parts are due things like pulling base images, installing packages into them, building things on top, etc.
I know, I am oversimplifying, but it feels like largely that’s the overall goal with many cloud products. Bringing back the ease of just uploading some PHP. Just that people use other languages as well.
I wonder what would have happened if stuff like [Hack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) came along a bit earlier and became big. Maybe that could have lead to other languages targeting the VM and we’d have seen things similar to the JavaScript world happening.
As an AWS Lambda (and also Azure Functions) user (developer) I agree. I have to admit, that the downsides (limited debuggability) also remind it to the early PHP times. (Personally I find Azure smoother in local emulator/debuggability support)
Still I think it has its merits, and is a good choice in many cases.
Yes exactly! That’s why I have been talking about FastCGI. I would like the deployment model of PHP without actually using PHP. When you switch to Python or Ruby, you get a better language, but all of the sudden you have all these other problems (managing a server).
There’s no reason that those 2 things should be coupled (language and deployment model). Maybe when modphp and modpython were a thing they were coupled, but these days FastCGI seems to be the more standard / decoupled / server-agnostic deployment model.
https://lobste.rs/s/xl63ah/fastcgi_forgotten_treasure
But you also need container support for Python/Ruby. virtualenv/bundler may suffice in some cases but you also want to deploy specific versions of native libraries, which are better handled by containers.
There’s no reason that you can’t do that with a FastCGI process in a container, although as far as I know almost nobody does it. Some hosting provides run CGI in chroot, but you can’t really install and libraries there. It’s just a single script.
BTW I tried NearlyFreeSpeech’s fastcgi support, mentioned in the thread, and they use FreeBSD jails with a fixed “realm” that they update every quarter or so. It’s a big bundle of software like Python, Ruby, and even Go and Rust compilers on FreeBSD. So that is not quite what I want either.
Also, although FastCGI is meant for front ends, it’s not a stretch to imagine it as a basis for a “FaaS” platform.
Also, this is post is very on target; the OP is saying a lot of things I want to address with Oil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25483270
Summary: