fargle · HackerTrans

3 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

why did they find the need to rename this? Am i missing something?

3 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Netgear GS305e supports VLANs and can be ~$21

ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

i have to agree with a lot of sibling comments: i don't think 6502 is a good pick. first, it's highly atypical and limited. second, it's borderline RISC and i'd start with a simpler to use CISC ISA. CISC makes sense and was designed exactly for hand-written assembler.

VAX or 68K would be cleaner CISC ISA to learn first.

8086 (16 bit) x86 has the advantage of being ubiquitous and you can run on "hardware" everywhere. but the disadvantage of being a little weird wrt. segment registers. x86 32-bit is complicated, but at least flat memory space and you can mostly ignore the segments.

MIPS or one of the RISC-V variants is a second one to learn to contrast RISC load/store with CSIC.

fargle

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

contrary to a sibling comment, your last few sentences are 100% right.

military service-men are special because of their sacrifices they all make, whether it be health, freedom, separation, adversity, injury (mental or physical), or ultimately even death. they do this out of respect and service and to protect their families, loved ones and communities.

every society does, in fact, need those who sacrifice for the good of others.

very, very, few military people get off on killing - these are also called psychopaths. the rest of the servicemen that have been put in that position to kill, even in war, will always carry scars.

clearly Palmer does not speak from experience - he's a naive autistic, imagining that simply being part of Anduril makes him a party to the "violence" while in reality he's a healthy billion dollars away from it - of course he can sleep at night!

fargle

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

this is a lovely and well written article, but i have to quibble with the conclusion. i agree that "it’s not clear to me that NT is truly more advanced". i also agree with the statement "It is true that NT had more solid design principles at the onset and more features that its contemporary operating systems"

but i don't agree with is that it was ever more advanced or "better" (in some hypothetical single-dimensional metric). the problem is that all that high minded architectural art gets in the way of practical things:

    - performance, project: (m$ shipping product, maintenance, adding features, designs, agility, fixing bugs)

    - performance, execution (anyone's code running fast)

    - performance, market (users adopting it, building new unpredictable things)

it's like minix vs. linux again. sure minux was at the time in all theoretical ways superior to the massive hack of linux. except that, of course, in practice theory is not the same as practice.

in the mid 2000-2010s my workplace had a source license for the entire Windows codebase (view only). when the API docs and the KB articles don't explain it, we could dive deeper. i have to say i was blown away and very surprised by "NT" - given it's abysmal reliability i was expecting MS-DOS/Win 3.x level hackery everywhere. instead i got a good idea of Dave Cutler and VMS - it was positively uniformly solid, pedestrian, uniform and explicit. to a highly disgusting degree: 20-30 lines of code to call a function to create something that would be 1-2 lines of code in a UNIX (sure we cheat and overload the return with error codes and status and successful object id being returned - i mean they shouldn't overlap, right? probably? yolo!).

in NT you create a structure containing the options, maybe call a helper function to default that option structure, call the actual function, if it fails because of limits, it reports how much you need then you go back and re-allocate what you need and call it again. if you need the new API, you call someReallyLongFunctionEx, making sure to remember to set the version flag in the options struct to the correct size of the new updated option version. nobody is sure what happens if getSomeMinorObjectEx() takes a getSomeMinorObjectParamEx option strucure that is the same size as the original getSomeMinorObjectParam struct but it would probably involve calling setSomeMinorObjectParamExParamVersion() or getObjectParamStructVersionManager()->SelectVersionEx(versionSelectParameterEx). every one is slightly different, but they are all the same vibe.

if NT was actual architecture, it would definitely be "brutalist" [1]

the core of NT is the antithesis of the New Jersey (Berkeley/BSD) [2] style.

the problem is that all companies, both micro$oft and commercial companies trying to use it, have finite resources. the high-architect brutalist style works for VMS and NT, but only at extreme cost. the fact that it's tricky to get signals right doesn't slow most UNIX developers down, most of the time, except for when it does. and when it does, a buggy, but 80%, solution is but a wrong stackoverlflow answer away. the fact that creating a single object takes a page of code and doing anything real takes an architecture committee and a half-dozen objects that each take a page of (very boring) code, does slow everyone down, all the time.

it's clear to me, just reading the code, that the MBA's running micro$oft eventually figured that out and decided, outside the really core kernel, not to adopt either the MIT/Stanford or the New Jersey/Berkeley style - instead they would go with "offshore low bidder" style for the rest of whatever else was bolted on since 1995. dave cutler probably now spends the rest of his life really irritated whenever his laptop keeps crashing because of this crap. it's not even good crap code. it's absolutely terrible; the contrast is striking.

then another lesson (pay attention systemd people), is that buggy, over-complicated, user mode stuff and ancillary services like control-panel, gui, update system, etc. can sink even the best most reliable kernel.

then you get to sockets, and realize that the internet was a "BIG DEAL" in the 1990s.

ooof, microsoft. winsock.

then you have the other, other, really giant failure. openness. open to share the actual code with the users is #1. #2 is letting them show the way and contribute. the micro$oft way was violent hatred to both ideas. oh, well. you could still be a commercial company that owns the copyright and not hide the, good or bad, code from your developers. MBAAs (MBA Assholes) strike again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

fargle

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

i knew there was an advantage to being 8-10 years out of date at all times...

and when they do port finally backport this bug in 2026, they will probably implement the systemd integration with openssl (pbthththt...) via 600 patch files in some nonstandard divergent manner that thwarts the payload anyhow. see? i knew they were super duper secure.

fargle

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

github should add a badge for "inject backdoor into core open source infrastructure"

fargle

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

as another engineer from another company, i'm sad to relate that i see point-by-point the same things with different names of course. i sympathize. it's sad to see the cancer, the nepotism, the grifters that move in on the now weakened, once great, company.

f*ck them. just say it. it's useless, but good for your psyche.

fargle

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Poe's law

fargle

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Well, exciting can mean different things. I have a job where I never know what I'll be doing at 2PM when I walk in at 8AM.

AND, I am not a sucker.

fargle

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> Autopilot is for middle age

??? I thought that middle age was where you still had the energy and the brainpower, but also had a bunch of hard-earned experience to bring it all to the highest level.

Oh, wait. I forgot. You slacked off when you were in your 20's and 30's so you don't. Never mind.