mjw1007

8 ms·

61.
by mjw1007 3y ago
Maybe not untenable. If everything is done carefully enough with reproducible builds, I think using a binary whose hash can be checked shouldn't be a great extension of trust. You could have multiple independent autobuilders verifying
62.
by mjw1007 3y ago
The fact that the protocol has changed over time is itself a problem. It isn't reasonable to expect everyone maintaining a daemon to keep track of additions.
63.
by mjw1007 3y ago
When was "today" when that was written?
64.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I never liked the way he used TCP as an example here. I don't think it's sensible to think of "make it reliable" as a process of abstraction or simplification (it's obviously not possible to build a reliable connect
65.
by mjw1007 3y ago
The old documentation often wasn't good. But if you're trying to replace an existing system, it's a mistake to think "the old system had poor documentation so it's OK for the new system's documentation to be po
66.
by mjw1007 3y ago
> Hyrum's Law isn't about what you should do, or how things should be, it's telling you an observable fact about our world But it isn't. Neither Hyrum, nor anybody else, has ever seen a system where "all observab
67.
by mjw1007 3y ago
That is emphatically not what I am "getting at". I cannot express my opposition to that approach strongly enough. I do not believe that the place people should hold documentation is "in their heads". I do not believe tha
68.
by mjw1007 3y ago
Yes, the relationship between "Hyrum's Law" and having a terrible documentation culture is strong. The important part of the "Law" is the bit where it says "it does not matter what you promise in the contract&q
69.
by mjw1007 3y ago
If I'm considering reporting a bug I came across in a free-software project while at work, that's already something I probably couldn't justify with a strict cost-benefit calculation for my employer. In practice my employer w
70.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I think the main lesson here is that a scripting interface that lets you make major changes to an application, including building UIs, is a great deal more valuable than one that only lets you plug in to extension points that the applicatio
71.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I was thinking something along the lines of people who tend to set unusually high standards for themselves. Rust has something of a self-image of always being best-of-breed in everything it attempts, so I could believe that it might be part
72.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I think, from observation, that the Rust project has worse burnout problems than most other similarly-sized open source projects. I'm not sure whether it's more to do with the way the project is organised, the state of the codebas
73.
by mjw1007 3y ago
Have Google actually documented what they mean when they say DMARC is mandatory? Does a DMARC record with p=none count? Does DMARC with an SPF record that that places no restrictions count?
74.
by mjw1007 3y ago
The theory that Red Hat users are supposed to be paying for development of the system is a recent one. What Red Hat used to say is that the software is free and their users are paying for support. That made a great deal of sense, as of cour
75.
by mjw1007 3y ago
The GCC Ada frontend is written in Ada (and has been maintained that way in the gcc source tree for well over twenty years now).
76.
by mjw1007 3y ago
That RFC is accepted, and this is starting to happen. Progress has been disappointingly slow, but the project is alive, and has potential to speed up next year. https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/1
77.
by mjw1007 3y ago
True. The traditional binding was was just `C-x x`, but they've already done one round of making register features more inconvenient to get at.
78.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I see this advice a lot, and I think it's making the problem worse. The most common form of bad documentation I come across is simply documentation with pieces missing: it uses terms without defining them, it tells you what problem an
79.
by mjw1007 3y ago
If the X11-and-Wayland maintainers had put X11 up for adoption that might not have been the case. That is, they might have said "We're looking for new maintainers for X11. They will be responsible for its future direction, represe
80.
by mjw1007 3y ago
The attribute for controlling this is implemented but not yet stable: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/unstable-book/language-featur...
81.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I'm not so relaxed about how easy it will be to move to a new issue tracker. When you're moving from a self-hosted system to a proprietary system, you can do the work yourself to make sure there are redirects from the old URLs to
82.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I agree. I'm not, at this stage, tremendously worried about Microsoft finding ways to use its control of Github to get its own way in some kind of conflict. I am worried about what happens if, or when, Github's owners decide it&#x
83.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I think we already give Github far too much influence over the free software world without also paying attention to who they see fit to hand awards to. I wonder whether Github would have considered the PSF to be "wonderfully welcoming&
84.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I think a lot of it is that there was pent-up demand for a language like Rust. Rust feels like the language that in 1990 I was promised I would have in the year 2000.
85.
by mjw1007 3y ago
Over the years I've done a fair amount of reworking documents from "he or she" style to "they" style. I've found that using "they" style does quite often make it harder to be clear, when you've g
86.
by mjw1007 3y ago
One reason CPUs don't trap on overflow is that it lets them use the same instruction for unsigned values and two's complement values. The instruction can then set one condition code that means "if you intended this as an unsi
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by mjw1007 3y ago
Their motivating example is dealing with a function that needs to both indicate success/failure and return a value on success. One option is to make this a first-class feature of the language, rather than sugar for something else. Icon
88.
by mjw1007 3y ago
CSS was to a large extent a Microsoft project (when the time came to introduce stylesheets it was more-or-less Opera and Microsoft against Netscape, and Microsoft had many more users than Opera). Nonetheless Microsoft managed to use CSS to
89.
by mjw1007 3y ago
I don't think you're being an idiot. There are some connections in mathematics that are quite "magical", where you get something like a correspondence between a family of curved surfaces and a family of integer-valued eq
90.
by mjw1007 3y ago
Nowadays there is a configurable tramp-allow-unsafe-temporary-files variable, which defaults to annoying me by prompting.

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