ornxka

Alternate take, the people who keep mucking up the perfectly fine UI[1] that I've been using for years should get on that bus, so the rest of us never have to worry about waking up and everything is in a different place for absolutely no reason.

[1] In general, I mean - I actually don't use AWS.

Oh, well I guess it's not just me then.

>I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

- Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal

Different resource usage patterns aside, why do people think that robots are somehow less "legitimate" consumers of data than their human operators? Do the authors of this article think that humans only use data for purposes sanctioned by its producers?

I think the world would be a much better place if we stopped treating programmatic access to interfaces differently than human access to it. Anybody can learn to code.

"Reality is that which doesn't cease to exist when you stop thinking about it", they say.

Or, to elaborate, these things have a cost whether people are aware of it (and care about it) or not. Maybe it's not so high now, but eventually it's likely to manifest itself, especially when the codebase needs to run in a new environment or be modified to follow a new paradigm. Those situations are where things tend to either "make the jump" and continue to be used or end up in the (already vast) graveyard of abandoned software because the cost of maintaining it became higher than the return it yielded.

Wait, Chrome is now requiring HSTS for localhost? This is absolute madness. Somebody needs to sit down with the people responsible for this and explain to them that this is not solving anybody's problems and is just making life more difficult for everyone.

Swap has always been so slow for me that I just disable it on all of my machines. I would rather the OOM reaper just SIGKILL whatever is using all my RAM than deal with slowness (which often persists after the OOM situation is gone).

>Bitcoin is a silly idea based on scarcity that doesn't exist.

If its scarcity isn't real, then why can't you conjure up an arbitrary number of bitcoins at will?

The point is that as long as telemetry is delivered over the internet, it is also tracking. There is absolutely no difference whatsoever unless your telemetry is delivered via Tor or some other mathematically proven means of nearly-anonymous transport.

>Which is a big problem.

Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?

Five's how many fingers I have.

That's a good point about the critical path - I was thinking it would be a bit bigger and slower since you'd have to decode it, but I hadn't realized what an impact that would probably have. No bit-perfect round trips is also absolutely horrifying and I would never have even thought that would be a thing.

>Compiler writers and tool authors are perfectly comfortable working with binary file formats. There's nothing more inherently future-compatible about JSON than a forward-compatible binary format like flatbuffers. Having to escape and then unescape naughty bytes is a huge downside for text-based formats that are hardly ever read by humans.

Well, the problem isn't binary or non-binary, the problem is that these formats like ELF are, apparently, really annoying to deal with, have weird limitations, and are difficult to extend. The reason I thought of JSON in particular is because it doesn't really need to be extended to encode anything (unless you include escaping or base64 encoding binary data you want to put inside of a JSON document as "extending" it). You can encode all of the fields in ELF (or any other format) inside of JSON, while it doesn't make sense to consider the converse because ELF has fixed fields with fixed meanings.

That's the problem with these bespoke binary formats like ELF - they're not designed to encode arbitrary schemas of data, they're designed for very specific tasks and then when they get used outside of their intended environment, we get problems like have been described in this thread. Nobody has ever had these problems with a JSON document - maybe with something that consumed one, but the file format itself simply does not have the same kind of limitations like ELF does. It has different limitations, but they're not of a fundamental and semantic nature like they are in a more rigid format.

You're right that it would be a problem to have to escape/unescape every section every time you wanted to run something because that's very slow, but I think that's basically the only problem that these bespoke binary formats solve. If that's the case, I wonder why something like Matroska wouldn't work for binaries? My understanding is that it's basically binary XML and allows for basically a completely arbitrary dictionary structure. It doesn't have nice tooling like JSON or XML do, but there's no weird restrictions on things like field length that I'm aware of. I guess it doesn't exactly have any "momentum", though, but maybe the NixOS people will get sick enough of ELF to consider such a drastic solution :P

I'm not really sure why it has to be that hard, like, why don't we just use base64-encoded JSON or something?

>Postfix is written in C, and none of us should be comfortable with that

qmail is written in C, and it has never had a serious security hole that I am aware of. Not all C code is unsafe.