e-dant

Time

I developed a rich social life simply by saying "yes" to (nearly) every opportunity I was asked.

It takes energy and commitment, just like anything else worthwhile in life. Have the courage to not be good at something, to do it anyway, and to keep doing it.

Many years ago, there weren't so many opportunities, have to make some of your own. (I began my adult life in the midst of the pandemic. I am very aware of how empty the world can feel.) Join clubs, large events, book clubs, art shows, these things exist, you can find them. You won't have many friends at first, but you'll meet a lot of people. I nearly took the LSAT for fun because at some point some kind-of-friends/acquaintances were preparing for law school. Take every opportunity, do anything, figure out what you like, and who you like.

Later on, there is simply not enough time in the day. You can wake up grateful every day that you can do whatever you wish. You will never want for a closer friend. There will always be some challenging adventure you can take. Or a comfortable evening with some close friends. Your friends will show up at your door with gifts, you will see the sunset from some mountain you climbed, you'll run through the rain with your friends and laugh, you'll be familiar with half the rooftops in whatever city you're near, you will have career and social opportunities just because of how many people you know.

And finally, you will have a responsibility to provide good prosocial opportunities for someone else who is figuring out the world.

It is possible.

Is gitea any good?

Are security vulnerabilities good marketing?

Rarely do I think "that would make great poem"

Microsoft is a strategic risk for the US, too

The market is perfectly efficient, value is well attributed, lobbying is a social good, being rich means you’re smart and should have special privileges, optimizing for returns on investment is equivalent to optimizing for a better society

Obviously I’m kidding, and something is rotten

Since there are comments below asking about benchmarks, others noting or expressing interest in other projects, I'll drop the one I made: https://github.com/e-dant/watcher (and also an ebpf experiment https://github.com/e-dant/bpf-fs-events)

There are benchmarks in there, and comparisons with all the other watchers out there I could find at the time I made it (see "Comparison with Similar Projects" at the very bottom of the readme).

It's a pretty long list. Tons of watchers out there with different design philosophies and shapes of problems they solve.

There are a lot of caveats to the filesystem monitoring APIs provided by kernels. Some projects (like facebook's watchman) take that as a kind of antagonism, and decide to fight back with layers and layers of fallbacks and distrust and rescans. That projects basically only makes sense as a daemon.

Other programs and libraries try to take that complexity and tame it by being super-focused on one platform or providing a lot of configuration options.

Some provide debouncing logic. This particular feature comes up from time to time, I believe, both for practical reasons and because over-reported events from the kernel subsystems, especially for some arcane events like moving a file across mount points can trigger a flurry of hard-to-associate events for the same path.

If you want to avoid dealing with under-documented filesystem event subsystems, you can also just make your own with ebpf. Especially for security-oriented systems, you'll find that the only (nearly) perfectly accurate filesystem event subsystem you can make, is the one you make from the ground up.

This is cool stuff, but a nitpick: It’s not undefined behavior in the language sense in C to do socket ops on a bad file descriptor. It’s just an error from the kernel’s point of view, and the kernel will throw -errno at you.

Think the world would be a better place if 70-80% uptime were more tolerated. We really don’t need everything available all the time. More time to talk to each other, to think, more “slow time”.

Just don’t like the slop that’s getting us there.

A fascinating en dash, used as an em dash, followed by two em dashes.

Hmmm.

I have no mouth and I must scream

Some of these I’ve been told are taboos in the opposite way. For example, the one about serving or taking food from the opposite end of the chopsticks, I was told, is polite. But here they say it is taboo. Maybe they meant it’s taboo not to do that?

Linux does not have a marketing team. Microsoft, Apple, Google do. The market is not efficient, it is gullible.

I think, if I’m reading correctly, that PFAS are the thing that PFXX stuff gradually breaks down into? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12028640/

Edit: Nevermind, Wikipedia makes it pretty clear that even the non-broken-down PFAS are totally unsafe, evil things which we knew were dangerous since the 70s and did nothing about until recently

Good fucking riddance. Time to start actually talking to each other again.

The issue this paper is grappling with (to what extent humans have a place in the middlespace between them asking an ai to do something, and the ai doing it) is interesting (although I disagree with how the paper tries to solve it).

I’m empathetic to a non-native English speaker using ai to help communicate. I mean, seriously, I would do the same thing if the lingua franca was Japanese.

The author is here saying, well yeah, there’s this weird thing that happens when I use ai by which the ideas that come out the other end are a bit different from what the author intended.

I think the sentiment “well you shouldn’t have used ai” is incomplete.

The paper is not great, but it’s an interesting question.

Thought it was obfuscated C code, then I realized it’s a tree or something

It is an accomplishment in a healthy, pro-social environment.

It blows my mind that we need any research at all to convince us that shoving tons of burning oil down our throats is a bad thing

Maybe, next time we need to drive 5 miles for groceries, we should just fucking walk, and say hi to one another, too

This life is needlessly absurd.

Why does this even exist?

And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.

I have more of a problem with poor governance than strong automation. The economy should provide us all food and shelter, beyond that, do what you love.

You never had a voice to lose

A masterclass in debugging

It disappoints me to see hardware compensate for the failures of software. We should have done better.

ARM and lots of non-x86 architectures often use a series of bootloaders to kick up ram, wake up parts of the hardware, blah blah, and read devicetree blobs to know what the hardware looks like

I don’t understand the fs url hyperlink to a child nutrition website.