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portable is a different word from ported.

Yes, my grasp of english is adequate to understand these words. I just think it's a huge stretch of hubris to claim something is 'portable', especially to claim it's "ultra" portable, if you've not done the actual work to port it or only ported it once. For example, people have learned an awful lot about real world memory alignment issues by actually porting something to SPARC. The author is guessing at best.

But yeah...for some people "meh, close enough" is good enough.


I don't like that there are any good sounding stories, but this sounds pretty good.

Even re-written by hand isn't the same because a hand re-write proceeds slower over a longer period of time with more smaller updates that get tested somewhat along the way.

Also I don't think it's wrong to use an action as an input to judging engineering character. That could be read as judging yt-dlp or judging bun but in this case I mean it's reasonable to judge bun's developers.

IDK if i'd personally judge this action quite so badly though. It depends how they went about it and what they proffessed to get out of it.

I am very much against letting llms think and decide for you, but I don't think it's so wrong for an actual coder to employ automation.

But if they are acting like it's magic and everything will be so much better after the magic llm uses the magic safe language... yeah that definitely gets the side eye. Or no eye. Just no longer interested in or concerned with their output.

Since this is being offered as the next release version while still being new and stuffed with unsafe, looks like it's the latter. So I'm with yt-dlp in this case.

It doesn't matter if the new code happens to be ok or not, it's still a problem that they got there by hoping a black box does the right thing. A black box that that no one wrote and no one understands, not just themselves.

gcc is a black box to me, but I know that someone wrote it and understands it (or some people collectively understand all it's parts), and I know that any time I want, I can choose to understand any part of it, and satisfy myself that it is doing something both sane and deterministic.

So a developer choosing to use gcc when it's a black box to them does not reflect badly on them to me.

But no one can say that about any llm or ai. So yeah, a developer choosing to use them, depending on exactly how, may reflect badly on them.

The same was true for cheap off-shore gig coding by humans too. I have tried to use them myself in the past, hire out for small generic programming jobs using those web sites where you put up some escrow money and post a job and people bid for it, you choose one, they do it and get paid from the escrow. I only tried about 3 times for the same small job and every time I git ridiculously shit (but technically functional) results.

These were humans 15-20 years ago, no possibility of hidden ai usage like today, and it's essentially the same dynamic of just hoping some magic will get you something good for cheap, and accepting any result that appears good as good.

If someone said that that's how they made their product, I would decide that product is probably pretty crap inside and no way should I buy it or invest in it as a dependency if I have any choice.

And that's humans not ai. The problem isn't really the ai, it's the judgement to use an ai that way.


This does nothing. It does not remove shorts.

And that subscriptions screen has a row of all shorts across the top, and shorts trun up in searches and side bar related recommendations.

This while paying them for premium for 20 years.


I don't recognize any such thing as a "dead open source project".

If one project is dead, what makes another one alive? Recent updates? It's working as intended and no updates needed or worth the effort. Even if "working as intended" only means it works on some old platform and no current one. Other users? Why do I or you or anyone care about that?

Other users only matters for commercial software where you are selling copies or expertise or your resume or something tied to it.

If someone writes something and publishes it, and not a single other person ever uses it, and the author never adds another update, that is still not "dead". It's just software that exists.

It's some kind of focus on a weird goal. If your purpose in writing open source was for it to be popular, then buy advertising until you force it to happen.


Tell that to CVEs

Tell me how they matter.

They don't. If some code is so old or un-used that you would call it "dead" then there are no cve's on it. No one is using it to discover a vulerability, no one is studying it to find a vulnerability, who writes these supposed cves?

Even if by some miraculous combination of unlikely contrived coincidenses, someone researches, discoveres, writes up, and submits a cve, and the tracking orgs accept and publish it, so what? You just called it "dead" so who does it affect? What does this "cve" matter?

If they do matter because there are users, then it's not "dead".

It's just code that exists that may or may not be useful or interesting to someone sometime for something, or not, like a novel or song or painting.

If it's half-baked code with some problem if it were used exactly as it sits with no further work, so what?


huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.

Rather you're a bad comprehender of what words mean.

What they said was what it looks like, and in fact it does look exactly like what they said.

The comment contains the exact same content and value as a bot comment. It doesn't matter who or what wrote it, the critique of the comment itself holds water.

So the critique was not "a bot wrote this" it was "either a bot wrote this, or a human wrote a comment that is no better than the ones bots write".

You know what else a human might do even worse than a bot a lot of times? A bot would read this and apologize for getting something so wrong.


It wasn't even a critique of the comment. I was just pointing out the text of the comment resembled a bot comment on youtube shorts- almost an exact keyword match.

y'all be crazy af

Do you even realize the irony of your unnecessary complaint about potential bots generating more noise than actual bots?


It wasn't even a complaint! I was mainly commenting on the similarity of the text (I've seen text extremely close to that in youtube shorts comments). If it was a genuine, organically sourced comment, you can simply ignore my message.

I can play this game too:

I never actually said they are a bad judge of what comments are botted, just merely suggested it as a possibility.

Otherwise:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

https://youtu.be/IJEaMtNN_dM

Suffice to say, I'd thus kindly reject being a "bad comprehender of what words mean", thank you very much. It was a perfectly reasonable initial reading of their comment as far as I'm concerned. It's ambiguous. Happens.

The fact that "is this AI? this is AI." is a damn near fixture of every thread these days, doesn't help.


freebsd = utility

openbsd = security

netbsd = portability

freebsd: performance, features, drivers, software compat - closest to linux in utility & usability though unlike linux in execution

openbsd: safety for exposed services

netbsd: portable across many cpu & hardware platforms - big-endian powerpc sun, hitachi sh3 jornada, etc, easiest to port to a new arch


Can FreeBSD be stripped down to be more like OpenBSD security wise while still keeping the performance benefits ?

It can be customized just like linux where you can compile a custom kernel omitting unneeded features and then also ship a small userspace around it, and the core userspace tools are generally a little less feature rich than linux's already.

But it's not a matter of surface area that makes openbsd solid, it's the priorities while writing that affects how every little thing has been written over time.

You can write 10 different versions of a function that all work and are all nominally perfectly free of security gaps.

Yet they will all still be 10 different levels of robust. Some versions will fail as soon as some assumption is violated, and some make fewer assumptions and remain safe even when varying amounts and forms of "that can't happen" happens.

It's not just cosmic ray bit flips either, or a hacker trying to do power glitch attacks or rowhammer etc, stuff that makes the hardware violate it's promises. But stuff like a different developer updating something 15 years later who is not the original and does not realize every single facet of how it works and just how the current implimentation covers all possible edge cases, and so doesn't realize how their change opened up an edge case that was covered before. With fragile code, the new code simply has the new security gap until someone discovers it the hard way. With robust code, it's more likely to still be safe. The edge case maybe makes it fail to function, but not in a way that anyone can use productively.

Not that freebsd is exactly swiss cheese. These are all relative. I would and do rely on freebsd any day.


Oh this is a wonderful and succinct summary; thanks!

It's also superficial and wrong, and as bad as dividing people up by hair colour into blondes, brunettes, and redheads.

The way that the BSDs differentiate cannot be reduced in this way, not least because there is a lot of what Justin C. Sherrill (of the DragonFly Digest) calls 'cross-pollination' amongst the BSDs.

A case in point:

Superficially, and erroneously, one might observe that OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD have nvi, and only DragonFlyBSD has nvi2. In fact there was a three-way fork of actual Bostic nvi, all of them making revisions and leaving the original behind, and then things got really complex with nvi2 taking from OpenBSD's nvi, and FreeBSD's nvi taking from nvi2; not even getting into the existence of nvi-m17n along the way and how there are nvis in base and nvis in ports. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132452) One cannot divide the BSDs up into those that have nvi2 versus those that have nvi.

The split is complex in other areas, too.


Yes, you're not at all wrong! However my goal is not to definitively 100% know the exact differences between the BSDs...i merely wanted to seek out a quick/easy starting point (the very high level diffs)...so that i can start *somewhere* and hopefully avoid my paralysis by analysis. :-)

It is a generalization of the essentials, and not wrong.

You know even though I said the execution is unlike linux, in fact, there are many many details that are just like linux! What a freaking ignorant liar eh? There's like 100 things like that you could say. No wait, no way it's exactly 100. There's obviously some other number like 105 or 612 things like that. So superficial and wrong!


You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.

And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.

But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.

I don't mean that you could substitute a voice with writing out words on the floor, I mean your actions, the overall totality no single act, would would expose a driving source of actions that so far nothing else exhibits.

We just anthropomorphize everything because we have so much in common with all the other animals. When a dog or a dolphin does something, we have had experiences that we recognize as being practically identical, and we know what our experience was like. It's protecting it's baby. I protect MY baby! Yes and an electric motor can turn a crank, and you can turn a crank.

Simple outward alignments like that are some kind of logical trap everyone falls for because we don't have any other conceptual vocabulary to even think with.


This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?

No, the mere capacity to do something means nothing.

In other comments I've distilled that down to "It can't be about what a thing can do, but about what a thing chooses to do." Which is a bit too distilled by itself but whatever.

The ability to solve a puzzle is just a correlation, probably a required ingredient, not significant itself.

The comment above was more focussed on it's parent about what you can deduce from outside observations. It's not true that there is nothing to go on. It's merely true that you can come up with a lot of examples of observations that don't prove anything.

Hearing something say "I think, therefor I am." doesn't prove that it thinks or is. Seeing something solve a puzzle or care for a baby doesn't prove that it is the same as you who can also solve puzzles and would care for a baby.

And yet, no matter how limited your means of expression were, if you had any means of acting at all, you could and would make yourself known. How I don't know because it's infinite and context sensitive. You would do something that only has meaning to me or other immediate observers because it would somehow refer to other immediate context.

You're nothing but a remote controlled roomba, and just to make the point we'll artificially remove the obvious easy direct possibility of writing letters out on the floor or tapping out morse code by bumping into something, etc. You can only communicate by actions. You don't know morse code and something like that simple doesn't occur to you because not everyone thinks like that or is good at thinking of things like that.

Yet... You see me looking around for something, and you push the cookie I dropped across the floor to where I see it. Then when I reach for it you move in the way because you wish to tell me I'm not supposed to have sugar & carbs, and indeed I do get that message. No single act like that says or proves much by itself, but stuff like that adds up to a pattern that exceeds the same sorts of things any dog routinely does, and none of it requires hardly any brute brainpower. Or maybe it does require brute brain power but it doesn't have to mean an ability to solve impressive puzzles. IE a dog will absolutely model that you are looking for that cookie and will absolutely desire to please you by bringing it to you, but will not joke with you by bringing a particular type of cookie that you both know you don't like. But it could be trained to do all the same outward actions. It has the brainpower to figure out even very complicated rules.


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