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Eric Raymond

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Hacker, philosopher, troublemaker, theorist of open source

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Eric Raymond

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One day to doom.

Reminder to all my followers: I've moved to MeWe.

MeWe: The best chat & group app with privacy you trust.

mewe.com

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Eric Raymond

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All my G++ followers should hear this: With Google's shutdown imminent, I'm moving to MeWe.

I had hoped to delay this announcement until my G+ content was actually up on MeWe, but it doesn't look like the import is going to finish before deadline.

See you there!

Edit: I'm the Eric Raymond that says "Yeah, I'm that three-letter guy."

MeWe: The best chat & group app with privacy you trust.

mewe.com

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Andrej Kvasnica: +Eric Raymond login before view looks like facebook's way of doing business (which is one of reasons I am not at facebook at all). The pluspora (diaspora node) allow view without login. I pluspora.com - Andrej followed the Alan Cox https://pluspora.com/people/46a85290ad6c013646b1005056268def and Jan Wildeboer https://pluspora.com/people/db9155a0add2013646c5005056268def there.

Paul Frederick: +Eric Raymond are you on gab? I love this that they made too.
youtube.com - Gab Dissenter Tutorial: The Comments Section of The Internet

Paul Frederick: +Ken Barber you've described the entire Internet, not just gab. Maybe even the whole Universe? I'm only here for the shitposting. I know enough about life to not take it too seriously. It always ends in tragic comedy anyways.

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New blog post: A puzzlement...

Am I really shipper's only deployment case?

esr.ibiblio.org

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New blog post: Sometimes I’m a helpless victim of my urges.

Declarative is greater than imperative

esr.ibiblio.org

Boyd Smith: I find it interesting that the answer to some of the questions in hacking.adoc are "Maybe" or "Depends" in Haskell.

For example, are are not interpreted normally, but we do allow #!runhaskell (or #!runghc) to allow programs to be run directly.

As another example, there's a language extension / compiler flag (which might be specified in a project file) to have a traditional cpp run over the file for poor-man's text macros. I've never used it, but I know there's a lot of code out there that uses it.

As a final example, the language grammar is defined in terms of explicit block start {, end }, and statement separators ;, but there's also the "layout rules" that convert stairstep significant indents (ala Python) to used when the start { is elided.

Also, I wonder how well these rules handle Python's 4+ types of string literals: triple-quote, triple-double-quote (generally docstring), quote, and double-quote. The previous two allow embedded newlines, the later two do not. There's also the "raw" prefix that changes things a bit, and the "bytes" or "Unicode" prefix.

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New blog post: voiding planner's arrogance in design.

How not to design a wire protocol

esr.ibiblio.org

Rudolf Polzer: It might be worth mentioning how protocol buffers (as well as a few competing alternatives) are basically some kind of binary JSON that assigns small integers, not names, to fields.

So discoverability is almost gone, but not entirely - you still have the field types and nesting structure (at Google we do have some guessing tools that looks at existing field indexes and types and does a great job at guessing which protocol buffer type it is). For your GPS protocol e.g. I would strongly prefer storing values with error bars as submessages (in JSON, dictionaries grouping the two), to make discoverability easier by creating a clear structure.

However sociability is trivial. Just add a new field index. And that is important when we want to willy-nilly roll services forward and back and forward again.

There is also another issue why I would not recommend JSON for NTP or any other widespread service - parsing JSON is a trap. It is just too likely that someone implementing the protocol will use a generic JSON parser, and then there are trivial DoS attacks to allocate huge amounts of memory for, say, a million levels of nested arrays. JSON profiles help there, as long as they never allow any variable structure content (like dictionaries with an unlimited amount of entries) - but only if the implementer actually uses them.

That is why I would suggest that even in case of a JSON profile, I would strongly recommend to provide a parser and configuration with that does not have these issues. Including code samples. And clear warnings to never, ever use a generic JSON parser.

(BTW: I haven't checked the implementation, but the interface of Go's encoding/json might be good enough, as it allows defining the struct to fill in before parsing to prevent any surprises - however I do not know if the implementation is really guaranteed to behave sanely, and not e.g. first create a huge dictionary, only to then throw it away because the struct has no field to store it in)

Rudolf Polzer: Oh, another issue with JSON specific to NTP but fixable: if the packet size is variable, this may introduce additional jitter, especially if - in worst case - routers prioritize packets differently based on size.

An easy workaround, of course, is to generate fields with always constant length, by e.g. using trailing zeroes in floating point values.

Petr Kočmíd: en.wikipedia.org - Cognitive dimensions of notations - Wikipedia

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After reading those last three panels, I now know how Rich Burlew feels about socialism.

giantitp.com

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Perry Metzger: "Yes, but every laissez-faire market yet tried has degenerated into a slave economy where the rich make their money off the labor of an exploited working underclass" — this has happened exactly zero times, not "every" time.

Edward Cree: +Jeff Read Having read the entirety of the Wealth of Nations (yes, even the digression on the price of silver, I'm that hardcore), I can say that it does not support your claim. Smith does invoke the 'iron law of wages', but (a) that is not a "slave economy" nor an "exploited working underclass", but merely an overproduction of labour, and (b) economic and demographic history since then has shown that the 'iron law' does not in fact hold, since improving birth-control technology and female ownership of their own bodies have caused the supply of labour to grow much less rapidly than that of capital.
(Of course, it is possible that the Theory of Moral Sentiments contains the claims to which you refer, but I mark it improbable.)
In any case, to claim that "markets must be regulated" is to ignore the problems raised by Public Choice theory, a branch of economics discovered long after Smith was writing (like any science, economics does occasionally make progress). How do you expect the regulators to come up with socially beneficial answers, rather than (as has historically been the case) answers that maintain their position as a not only de facto but also de jure "government of unelected elites" with a disconcerting tendency to "structure society to benefit their bottom line"?
A market's ultimate and best regulator is its customers.

Rudolf Polzer: I agree with the problem that regulators have the wrong incentives themselves.

However without regulation we have seen what would happen. Extreme abuse of monopolies. Almost every big player will then have an easy way to prevent competition forever.

Also, exploitation of workforce is a real thing.

Or are you implying that those things only happen in too weakly regulated markets, but never in unregulated ones? Of course this may even be true, as a truly unregulated market has not been tried yet - because any such market would quickly degenerate into having some kind of de facto government whose goal it is to enhance the bottom line of the biggest players.

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Read Alexandria Ocasio-Cotez's "Green New Deal" and laugh.

This is why Trump will be re-elected in 2020.

assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5729035/Green-New-Deal-FAQ.pdf

assets.documentcloud.org

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Paul Frederick: +J. Toby Knudsen if you think about it you can't blame journalists for the present state of affairs. They've just reacted to a shift in consumption that's happened over time. They still need to eat. So they got to do what they got to do in order to get by in today's world. Now that means churning out clickbait.

J. Toby Knudsen: +Paul Frederick Media struggling to stay in business has a long trajectory. Companies get bought, spruced up, and sold by those who have to lay people off. Low morale and writing yellow journalism for clicks have gone hand in hand. AP is non-profit and often does a great job, and it's really a shame when they screw up and someone has to sue them for defamation... Everyone is to blame for the descent of journalism. Consumers should demand quality journalism and pay for it. My dream is to win a big lawsuit and set up an organization to facilitate quality journalism as it is precious.
Nudge me if I should stop with these items:
youtube.com - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: A Bizarre Grab-Bag of Terrible Ideas

Paul Frederick: +J. Toby Knudsen people will rarely pay for quality if they can get an inferior product for cheaper. See Betamax vs. VHS

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Eric Raymond commented on a post on Blogger.

You expected the same Catholic Church that has spent decades covering for predatory homosexual pedophiles to protect a teenage boy this time?

Naive of you.

Sandmann is probably more realistic.

Covington Lawyers Begin the Big Payback

baldilocks-talking.blogspot.com

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"I have been to Hell and back. My first sword school was located nearby."

I totally said this on IRC today. Because it's true.

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Ron Lauzon: Yes, it was reported that it was -7F in Hell on Wednesday. I assume that many nerds got laid on that day (being a cold day in Hell). 8)

Paul Frederick: I totally got banned the last time I was on IRC. Because it's true. I miss lilo. Freeload really went to the dogs after he died.

Erik Itland: I've been guarding the gate at Hell (late in boot camp, Norwegian Air Force, Hell in Stjørdal, Norway
https://maps.app.goo.gl/FWocp)

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New blog post: All is proceeding as I have foreseen...

RISC-V is doing disruption right

esr.ibiblio.org

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