PaX
@PaX@hexbear.net
- Comment on why not 3 months ago:
- Comment on Tawny Frogmouth 3 months ago:
- Comment on Here’s your chance to own a decommissioned US government supercomputer 6 months ago:
If we can somehow figure out how to distribute a web browser across all 4,032 nodes of a supercomputer containing 145,152 processors, I’m down
I suggest we figure out process migration for the Plan 9 kernel
- Comment on Here’s your chance to own a decommissioned US government supercomputer 6 months ago:
We could make our money back if the RSA factoring challenges were still being paid, we would prob have enough computing power and people to figure out some kind of improved sieve
Just dreaming…
- Comment on Here’s your chance to own a decommissioned US government supercomputer 6 months ago:
- Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world 1 year ago:
That’s a great way of putting it, thanks. I’m actually only 30 years old (lol).
Yeahh, and I saw someone compare you to the “old man yelling at cloud” lol. Even though there are good reasons to yell at the cloud hehe
Sometimes I feel there’s so few people who’ve ever used or written software at this level in the part of the industry I find myself in. It seems more common to throw money at Amazon, Microsoft, and more staff.
I’ve replaced big Java systems with small Go programs and rescued stalled projects trying to adopt Kubernetes. My fave was a failed attempt to adopt k8s for fault tolerance when all that was going on was an inability to code around TCP resets (concurrent programming helped here). That team wasn’t “unskilled”; they were just normal people being crushed by complexity. I could help because they just weren’t familiar with the kind of problem solving I was, nor what tooling is available without installing extra stuff and dependencies.
I haven’t had the “privilege” of working for a wage in the industry (and I still don’t know if I want to) but I think I know what you mean. I’ve seen this kind of tendency even in my friends who do work in it. There is less and less of a focus on a whole-system kind of understanding of this technology in favor of an increased division of labor to make workers more interchangeable. Capitalists don’t want people with particular approaches capable of complex problem-solving and elegant solutions to problems; they want easily-replaceable code monkeys who can churn out products. Perhaps there is a parallel here with what happened to small-scale artisan producers of commodities in early capitalism as they were wiped out and absorbed into manufactories and forced to do ever-increasingly small and repetitive tasks as part of the manufacture of something they once produced from scratch to final product in a whole process. Especially concerning is the increasing use of AI by employed programmers. Well, usually their companies forcing them to use AI to try to automate their work.
And like you gave an example of, this has real bad effects on the quality of the product and the team that develops it. From the universities to the workplace, workers in this industry are educated in the virtues of object-oriented programming, encapsulation, tooling provided by the big tech monopolies, etc. All methods of trying to separate programmers from each other’s work and the systems they work on as a whole and make them dependent on frameworks sold or open-sourced™ by tech monopolies at the expense of creative and free problem-solving.
Glad at least you were able to unstall some of the projects you’ve been involved in!
Thanks for your understanding :)
Glad we could share ideas :3
You and other people in the thread gave me a lot to think about. Hope this comment made some sense lol.
- Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world 1 year ago:
Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.
- Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world 1 year ago:
I’m glad I at least got closer to understanding your criticism than they did.
Don’t let anyone tell you you’re old or naive or “stuck in the past” for thinking these things! There is a real crisis in the operating systems world that your criticism is reflecting. It takes an army of software engineers and billions of dollars to keep this ecosystem and these systems going and they still struggle with reliability and security.
We can’t go back to the old way of doing things but we can’t keep maintaining these fundamentally flawed systems either. You may find something inspiring in this brief presentation by Rob Pike: doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
- Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world 1 year ago:
True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool’s built-in usage information.
- Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world 1 year ago:
Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.
The difference is grep is a simple tool that takes in text, transforms it, and outputs it to a console. It operates in a powerful and easy to understand way by default (take in text and print lines in the text containing the search parameters). This vmalert tool is just an interface to another, even more complicated piece of software.
Claims to have a Unix background, doesn’t RTFM.
Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…
Translation: Author does not understand APIs.
The point is that these abstractions do not mesh with the rest of the system. HTTP and REST are very strange ways to accomplish IPC or networked communication on Unix when someone would normally accomplish the same thing with signals, POSIX IPC, a simpler protocol over TCP with BSD sockets, or any other thing already in the base system. It does make sense to develop things this way, though, if you’re a corpo web company trying to manage ad-hoc grids of Linux systems for your own profit rather than trying to further the development of the base system.
Ok. Now give me high availability
I would hope the filesystems you use are “high availability” lol
atomic writes to sets of keys
You’re right, that would be nice. Someone should put together a Plan 9 fileserver that can do that or something.
caching, access control
Plan 9 is capable of handling distributed access controls and caching (even of remote fileservers!). There’s probably some Linux filesystems that can do that too.
In the end, it’s not so much about specific tools that can accomplish this but that there are alternatives to the dominant way of doing things and that the humble file metaphor can still represent these concepts.
This reads as “I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There’s nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken”.
This is the maybe the worst way of interpreting what they said. They can come and correct me if I’m wrong but I read that as: they have a particular ideological objection to this “cloud” ecosystem and the way it does things. It’s not a lack of skill as your comment implies but rather a rejection of this way of doing things.
- Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world 1 year ago:
Agreed. What we need is real distributed operating systems, like Plan 9, not band-aids and kludges to keep old-world operating systems relevant in a networked world.
- Comment on Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them? 1 year ago:
It’s 100% a problem, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it’s racist, so it’s already inherently a problem for that reason alone.
Nothing is “inherently” anything. What makes, for example, anti-black (as contrary to anti-white) racism bad in spaces like this? It furthers the psychological harm caused by the racist material conditions of white-supremacist society and normalizes these conditions. Racist rhetoric is part of the superstructural justification for these conditions that makes the oppressor feel superior and the oppressed feel inferior and like they deserve it. This contradiction does not exist for white people and that is why anti-white racism effectively does not exist, except maybe beyond a limited level in inter-personal relationships. It might make individual white people feel a little bad but it has no material backing.
But it’s also a problem because your [hexbear’s] moralistic self-righteousness
I’m not the one pearl-clutching over anti-white racism.
combined with your [hexbear’s] obvious hypocrisy gives people opposed to your ideals that much more ammunition (and of course you don’t care about that, but that itself is also part of the hexbear problem).
This issue doesn’t really give anyone “more ammunition” against us. Part of the reason we do keep these kinds of jokes around (besides being funny) is because it tends to out reactionaries (like how you are being right now).
And the worst part is that, as with so many of hexbear’s problems, there’s no reason for it. It’s such an easy problem to fix, and would give an instance like hexbear that supposedly prides itself on its inclusivity such a huge boost in credibility.
I’m pretty sure most of the people making “cracker” jokes on here are white themselves. I don’t think Hexbear is known as the “anti-white” instance lol
And sure, I get the importance of having a place where you can feel comfortable and meme hyperbolically about problems you feel are important, and about the people who don’t agree with you. That seems to be the direction that most hexbears seem to want to go.
Yeah, I mean that’s pretty much what Hexbear is. I don’t think anyone here would wants to be “morally-unimpeachable leaders” or even to what end that would be.
- Comment on Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them? 1 year ago:
Do you think “anti-white racism” is even remotely as bad as other forms of racism? Or even a problem at all? White people already have all the privileges bestowed upon them by a fundamentally white-supremacist society. I don’t think making fun of this concept on our tiny social media website is hurting anyone.
- Comment on Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them? 1 year ago:
Is that an inside joke?
Answering genuinely, yeah it is lol
That being said, what is considered the “political center” varies a lot from place to place, a lot more than just 1930s Catalonia.
- Comment on Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them? 1 year ago:
Hey, I’m a Hexbear user and I really think you have the wrong impression of what our site is. Idk if you’re open to reconsidering or if you’re just trying to get a few antagonistic words in but I’ll tell you my experience as a long time user:
Being pro Russia
Our site isn’t pro-russia. We just want the war to come to a swift end without any further bloodshed. Some people take offense to that because we don’t think the best way to do that is to send more guns, tanks, planes, dollars, etc into the warzone. That benefits no one except the arms manufacturers and the money lenders. Not regular people on either side.
genocide denialism
The only thing I can think of that you would be referring to is the “holodomor” or something similar that happened in the USSR. It’s not that we deny that many people did die in these horrible tragedies or that there wasn’t Soviet government involvement in some of them but that these very real events are being distorted for political reasons by people who want to paint the USSR in a certain, wholly bad, light. As communists (or anarchists), we try to be very open to criticism and new ways of thinking about or doing things but not when the intent is to do historical revisionism to make the people who liberated the concentration camps and ended the crimes of Nazism seem like Nazis under a different name.
Authoritarianism
Well, I guess this is true in a way. As revolutionists, we do seek to change the system by establishing a new authority with the capability to make this change. But have you ever noticed how the current system maintains and perpetuates itself? Sure, you can vote (and we don’t seek to abolish that!), but when that fails and working-class people take to the streets seeking change, why is it that people with guns and tear gas and riot shields try to stop them and maybe even imprison them? It’s not that leftists are uniquely “authoritarian” but that we want to use that authority for representing regular, working-class people and to bring about a better world where that authority isn’t necessary anymore. Our anarchist users probably have a somewhat different take on this but one of them will have to talk about it lol
being hateful of ideas that don’t conform to their worldview
Sure, there are a lot of ideas that we hate. But isn’t that everyone? I hope we could all agree on hating things like fascism, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc etc. Our users probably feel more strongly about that than most people lol but that’s just cuz a lot of us have been targets of those kinds of ideas. Other than stuff like that though… this site has been one of the most accepting places on the Internet in my experience. Sure, we argue a lot (sometimes too zealously lol), but just cuz we care a lot about getting things right. On our site, we don’t have downvotes to encourage users to actually challenge bad ideas and voice their opinion instead of just feeling satisfied having slightly influenced an algorithm.
racism (just not towards the same people)
This just hasn’t been my experience and I know most of our users would agree. Racism gets swiftly removed on Hexbear and lots of people replying challenging it. Do you have any examples? This has just been so contrary to my time on the site. Unless you mean jokes about white people but I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s not a problem lol
Anyway, I just want our instances and our users to exist together in peace. I know we have very “different” ideas from what is considered the mainstream in the west and on most of the English-speaking internet but I know our presence on the “fediverse” can be a positive thing and that we can get along. I hope this helps you to understand our site a bit better.
