"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.
I get that. That's not my criticism. My criticism is that you can do say that about many things. With that argument you can essentially encompass everything, which is cool in a way, but also means that the scope is at least bigger than the original - hence what the speaker says.
What I worry about here is that when I think about implementing it the scope will likely grow as well. And while I very much get the wish to encompass things in a standard (I think everyone who ever wrote any kind of specification knows that) a standard doing that extension when the initial goal of being a (commonly used) system interface isn't achieved - at least that's how'd interpret being 0.3 now - then what if that scope extends like that. Will we see full implementations?
To me it seems like maybe it would have made sense to separate that a bit. Something like a WASI based standard. Or something else. The fact that you almost need to change your name like this indicates that you went quite a bit away from the initial goal and doing that before a 1.0 seems like a very early point to get of course for any project. Sure sometimes you find out that you have looked at it from the wrong angle, but honestly this doesn't look like it. This looks a lot more "this is something we can reuse".
Fair enough. Isn't that another topic more tied to WASM compare to what initially claimed to be a "System Interface" and not a language interface or a browser interface?
Even if something lasts due to pure inertia it lasts. And something that lasts is pretty nice if you want a standard to last, or be implemented. The standard usually isn't the thing that you use to proof you can do something better, by being different. Because then everyone will have a harder time adapting it. People implement interfaces they dislike.
Since this is related to Webassembly, Browsers, the Web. The web has a lot of historically baggage, that one might have to work around at times, sometimes more sometimes less. There are good bits and not so good bits and in the end a lot of the time more modern web applications (whether you think they are good or bad) as well as web browsers jump through hoops to do things. For many applications there would be better protocols. But it became the dominant standard, a standard that is actually being used a lot and that is why it has become a success story. It wasn't a hundred times better than everything else. It simply was something that people managed to implement successfully and something where they were willing to deal with shortcomings, because there are great benefits in implementing the same standard as everyone else.
Don't know much about the US constitution, but it seems that it was largely good enough to make people work together that otherwise might have ended up fighting each other. That's what you'd get if everyone had a different idea about what a good constitution is. Maybe things are unclear, and maybe there are uproars because of things, but it doesn't even get to that if people don't agree on a standard or a constitution in first place.
And while over the years I often imagined how great it would be if everyone just used that better standard that has been there for a long time and nobody uses and is completely forgotten, if it ever had any popularity, then everything would be so much better and greater and I wouldn't have to do that senseless thing I am doing now. But if that standard doesn't allow for people to agree with it by implementing it it's essentially worthless (outside of maybe "prior art" consideration).
And like it or not we currently live in a world where designs persist due to pure inertia. But we know that obviously people are willing to implement these which means when a standard comes along that is similar to what already is there then having many people adapting it is realistic. Otherwise it's that super interesting university project that never makes it into anything in the real world.
I think there is a difference between "just copying" and "building upon understood systems and standards".
Also to be fair "just copying" works really really well, especially for standards. The primary goal of standardization is not to invent something new, but to have a target that isn't constantly moving.
If you want to build something new and better do that, and if you are ready to build a standard based of it which is very valid. You can also build them together, and CloudABI which they mention as inspiration in their readme for example did it that way. All valid paths.
But you want to start out simple and something common so that people that make use of the standard have an easy time to implement it. After all having more than one implementation is why you need a standard. Otherwise it's maybe a specification, which again, fair enough.
I can stand behind not copying Unix until the end of time, but "Unix" is a common target that people know how to implement and use. And while not even the authors of Unix claim it's great or even good it is something that people already implement (often enough even when not targeting anything unixy at all) so if your goal is to create a standard that those people can target then abandoning that does seem like a wrong move.
At 18:00 the speaker states something like "It should not be Systems Interface but Standard Interfaces" which honestly sounds like a different project. As an implementer or even as just a user in general, can it be trusted that tomorrow it isn't something completely different? Seems like an odd standard to follow.
(EDIT and aside: Rereading this it reads more dismissive than I meant it. So if this isn't clear: I want WASI to succeed. I think having a widely used system interface is great, but I think many know standards that suffered from scope creep. And while big successful standards for better or for worse at least have a chance of surviving this, WASI as the 0.3 indicates is in its infancy. So I worry about it turning out bad, leading to people abandoning the idea altogether or the standard losing sight of its initial goal. So while this is criticism the only reason I bother to write it in first place is because I badly want it to succeed. I worry that if WASI tries to do too much at once - and I totally understand wanting to do that - it makes it less likely to be successfully implemented and thereby less likely to succeed as a standard.)
I agree. This is saddening. It seems to often happen in "standard first" scenarios for some reason. I was very happy when CloudABI and POSIX were picked as prior art inspiration.
Now it feels like it moved from "what would we need to get things done and achieve our goals?" to "what could be done and which goals could we achieve?"
Maybe I am missing something, but are the recent changes something that people requested?
I am curious about how many of these cases are self-diagnosis and how many of them are wrong self-diagnosis.
Highly subjective (which is why I am curious), but I know zero people in real life that have an actual ADHD diagnosis, but two that were pretty much convinced to have ADHD and when trying to establish it for real learned that they actually have a different kind of neurodivergency/mental disease.
I think both of those cases were caused by a pretty large set of ADHD and other things are not as specific as they appear to a non-professional and also some conditions can make you more sensitive to noticing specific "symptoms".
For anyone reading this: Please don't read this as "you don't have it", but also if you think please try to confirm it via a trained professional, because the result could make your life quite a bit better, whether you are diagnosed ADHD or anything else.
That's something that is really really common in other contexts as well. For example lower level languages and especially more verbose languages make one feel a lot more productive. Another example is over-engineered infrastructure and especially cloud infrastructure that somehow make me feel very productive, because you have to think about certain details and things can feel puzzly where just running a service with a service file or init script on a random server might get you just as far and provide a lot less surface for things to go wrong.
I think another set of related effects might when people switch programming languages. There two major things tend to happen. Rewrites of something they now understand way better and having a clean slate. As well as - in case of new programming languages - way less historical bagged, 15 ways of doing the same way, deprecated tools, lots of the "new way" code in dependencies and "old ways".
What I mean with that is that there are a lot of overlooked things going on. And humans in general are really good at mistaking moving a problem somewhere else as not having to deal with that problem. Sometimes that is the case, sometimes even moving things to another apartment or being able to move work to a free coworker is a worthwhile investment even if it adds overhead. But it's also really easy to forget about how you didn't make issues disappear but just moved the issue somewhere else.
I think psychology plays a much bigger role in many of these things than technology does.
These are just examples. I don't argue against any of these things, also because whether they are worthwhile depends a lot on context. However, I do think that LLMs aren't the first example of that happening.
> as a self described good person i believe theres a lot more good people than bad people in the world (most are neutral) so if access to tech is equal the good side always wins. the problem here is again that access is not equal under capitalism. but thats a political thign not a tech one.
I believe there are mostly people who think they are good. And as the proverb goes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Really rather unfortunate. I wished religious people took their stuff seriously and not so often end up concluding that the bible wants them to harm people or something.
I guess it must be the same that make people think they must deliver freedom in form of bombs all the time.
And of course the AI salesforce was there pretending they take stuff seriously, maybe even believing it themselves. At least I don't believe that when the choice is maximizing profit or being a good person it will be the latter. Or at least I don't find a career path like that all too likely.
Given that technology, science, and the archival thereof stems from cloisters, the Vatican, etc. I guess they had a long history of figuring out what stance to take on technology.
Let's not forget that Galileo Galilei studied at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that Mendel (Mendel's Laws) did made his discoveries in a cloister and books, translations and libraries on pretty much everything for a really long time was pretty much only done within religious institutions. And for the longest stretch those were Christian Catholicism and Islam.
The Vatican Observatory also is an important source of high quality papers.
I mean one of the primary things Christians and Muslims based they believes on are books. So many got in touch with it. And that's not even touching the whole architecture, arts, philosophy department yet.
The fact that in thousands of years of history there have also been a couple of really dumb people in charge that were paranoid or wanted to distract from their failures and got mad or scared when someone challenged their world views isn't exactly surprising. Looks like no matter how good a large enough group of people gets their will always be idiots messing things up.
I guess when you look back as much as the people in Vatican appear to do I guess you see patterns. Technology and science (race theory, chemical castration, ...) or simply "progress" are often used to justify acts of evilness. Just like religion, democracy, freedom and what not.
That said of course there's still die hard anti-science creationists. But talking to a very religious person once it seems that there is simply also a lot of philosophy around science. Eg. there was a big bang (fun fact, a theory started by a religious person) and the universe simply didn't exist for an infinite time there must have been some cause for it. And unless that cause is some kind of infinite cycle it also must have started somehow and even though I do not share that believe there is a notion of a deliberate start in there. That won't make me a religious person, but it won't make them an atheist either. So I guess that's fair enough.
What I wanna say with that is that the science vs religion trope is as true or false as democrats/republicans or other groups of people are opposed to science. They all are when they are confronted with something they don't like. I think the HN comments section is the best proof for that. ;)
Also atheist here. Just not the kind that doesn't even know the difference between knowledge and beliefs.
> > In the country where I live even if you want to make just a tiny website for family and friends you essentially have to set yourself up for doxxing. You are required to put your real name on, as well as city and in case of something like a blog the whole address.
> I know that a lot of people who are into privacy topics would immediately willing to buy a round to celebrate when a politician who voted for these laws dies.
> The hate among privacy-minded people for these laws, the politicans who voted for them and the judges who judged in the name of these laws is insane.
I don't really understand what you are saying or maybe are implying. Are you saying I want to see people dead? Are you saying everyone who is privacy minded secretly wants people to die?
What does a judge have to do with laws being passed?
Or do you mean something completely different?
I mostly just wished that I could post like you and I do right now on a personal website on a personal server without putting my home address on it. Basically for the same reason nobody seems to have it in their "About" here. Not sure why that should make me "buy a round" if someone dies.
Also wouldn't make much sense to be complaining about a law and then have a problem with laws being exercised. If one would not care about judges exercising laws, why would one hate them? Seems all a bit strange to me. Also never saw any privacy minded people like that are that hateful. Sounds a lot more like mafia or something. And there often the people seem to be kind of in the open, just like many extremists. So I guess they don't care about privacy?
> If you don't mind my asking, where does that happen?
In countries where websites need an "imprint" (see the wikipedia article linked by someone else)
> Is it required for registering ccTLD
It's required for "publishing" something and websites are considered that. The idea was I think to be anti fake news, but I never understood why for websites you couldn't just go to the provider and have it turned off.
> would it be available by WHOIS?
Not completely sure how you mean. With whois there are many providers that allow for privacy options.
> Is it enforced
Not sure.
> and how, if you make make your site on another TLD but are clearly a resident of that country?
I think it's not hard to get around, but having to break the law to put a website on the internet without putting everything out there is just saddening. I don't want to break laws, just cause I'd get away with it.
Just to clarify. It's not emulation in the sense it's slower or something. They call it compatibility layer, which is better, but also nobody knows what it means.
This is simplifying a bit, but it's essentially "Linux is just a kernel" so the interface is just Linux syscalls, so the FreeBSD kernel when executing a Linux binary simply answers like Linux (so it has those system calls). How this is used in practice is that on your file system you have Ubuntu/RedHat/... "installed" (so the files and the file hierarchy are lying there) and you either directly or in a FreeBSD jail execute things in there or the binary you have.
I don't know how well it works in the present but in the past that means you could simply download the Unreal Tournament 2004 multiplayer demo or Enemy Territory or other games and just play them as if you were running Linux, 3D acceleration and all, without VM without real emulating, just the kernel providing what a Linux kernel would provide.
Also "heavy" is very very relative and subjective. You can totally have a tiny FreeBSD and a huge OpenBSD and one could argue OpenBSD is "heavy" because it comes with three window managers, an HTTP server, a full blown SMTPD server, ACME client and a ton of stuff that eg a server install of Debian or Ubuntu doesn't come with. But also if you run eg. ZFS things are heavy of course. FreeBSD has however had a time when it tried to strip a lot of stuff from the default install and make stuff either optional or make things available through ports/packages only.
And also there are surprises to be had with such overviews: Eg. your Lenovo laptop likely will give you a more "out of the box" experience on OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD with things like simple wifi setup, sound often doing the right thing (work, come out the right place, etc.) compared to FreeBSD. Also with stuff like HTTPD with ACME being available in a simple way after install I'd say OpenBSD is easier than FreeBSD.
FreeBSD to me feels a bit more like "it can be everything you want it to be". Ports and packages can be complicated if you just start out, compared to OpenBSDs "just use packages" stance. On OpenBSD things in my experience are more of a "it works or doesn't" and when it works often out of the box and/or with docs, while on FreeBSD it's more like it throws some tools into your direction you can build stuff (poudriere, jails, a build system with many options). So it's really cool if you want flexibility but a bit more like you have to figure out if it's possible and how. But that might simply be because of the use cases I used it for.
That said all of them are real general purpose systems, unlike eg. some Linux distributions. So it's not like "OpenBSD is for routers" even though it often seems like it. There are time when the GPU support is better on OpenBSD than FreeBSD's. But also FreeBSD has official NVIDIA drivers, so it's all not that clear cut.
Work: I need a simple easy to use system that I can configure to meet third party compliance requirements without jumping through hoops. It really excels when you can mostly use the base system there, maybe couple services. For example it's so nice to just have a couple pledge/unveil lines for example in a Go service.
Also super nice for "set and forget" style stuff. For example "I just need a HTTPS server with acme and SFTP". That's something you get out of the box with no third party packages (so everything vetted, pledge/unveil for everything, maintenance just running syspatch and sysupgrade), which is really nice.
Personal: Private mail server, family website, a quick and dirty "watching streams together" service I set up to watch stuff with people not in the same place as I am. prosody to have XMPP for friends and family.
I would NOT use it for "people throw stuff at you" use cases (Linux and FreeBSD do a far better job there). But I absolutely love it for scenarios where you want very very low maintenance. For example that private email server. I don't have time to do big upgrade plans, or "hardening" systems or reinventing the wheel. I cannot afford to do privately what I do in a day job or consulting (setting up or maintaining really rather complicated infrastructure).
I have done that many years with Debian, but the Linux world sadly is a big complex and complicated mess. That's great, when I get paid to deal with it, but annoying otherwise.
And I don't mean that bashing wise. I use Linux, I like Linux, but somehow there is a huge drive to overengineering and then building hacks and weird workarounds that become normalized until it's a proper job. Without wanting to start a flame war, but the whole Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Orchestrators, etc. story is a lot of reinventing the wheel and a static executable like a Go service in a container, so essentially coming with a whole Linux distribution even though one never thinks about it that way is just really absurd. That's what executables, processes, etc. were invented for.
And since I've lived through the story and as mentioned make a limit, I understand how that came to be, but it feels like the industry took a wrong turn because it was cool and exciting and then (nearly) everyone decided to use that hammer for everything one could imagine to be a nail. And then the next layer came and the next and the next. But all of them doing things differently. And suddenly to have a Postgres cluster you need Kubernetes, and Helm, but also need to know both PG config and the orchestrator's config, etc.
It's a mess and the OpenBSD people somehow knew that decades before I did.