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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You don’t need to provide root access just because you used GPL code, you just have to follow the GPL.

    Well, to follow version 3 of the GPL, you do actually need to provide effective root access.

    Specifically, version 3 of the GPL adds language to prevent Tivoization.

    It’s not enough to just provide the user with the code. The user is entitled to the freedom to modify that code and to use their modifications.

    In other words, in addition to providing access to the source code, you must actually provide a mechanism to allow the user to change the code on the device.

    The name “Tivoization” comes from the practice of the company TiVo, which sold set-top boxes based on GPL code, but employed DRM to prevent the user from applying custom patches. V3 of the GPL remedies this bug.





  • is a pretty surreal. Considered on of the most influential films of all time. One of the earliest examples of post-modernism in film.

    Every scene in Ex Machina is basically a dialogue covering different arguments in the philosophy of AI. Plus a surreal dance scene.

    I was blown away by Mother when I first saw it. But looking back on it, the allegory wasn’t exactly subtle.

    Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a meta-modern masterpiece.

    Tropic Thunder, as a meta commentary on comedy, is actually really good. Aside from the great comedy itself.




  • However, Linus’s kernel was more elaborate than GNU Hurd, so it was incorporated.

    Quite the opposite.

    GNU Hurd was a microkernel, using lots of cutting edge research, and necessitating a lot of additional complexity in userspace. This complexity also made it very difficult to get good performance.

    Linux, on the other hand, was just a bog standard Unix monolithic kernel. Once they got a libc working on it, most existing Unix userspace, including the GNU userspace, was easy to port.

    Linux won because it was simple, not elaborate.





  • Fair. But unwrap versus expect isn’t really the point. Sure one has a better error message printed to your backtrace. But IMO that’s not what I’m looking for when I’m looking at a backtrace. I don’t mind plain unwraps or assertions without messages.

    From my experience, when people say “don’t unwrap in production code” they really mean “don’t call panic! in production code.” And that’s a bad take.

    Annotating unreachable branches with a panic is the right thing to do; mucking up your interfaces to propagate errors that can’t actually happen is the wrong thing to do.


  • Unwrap should literally never appear in production code

    Unwrap comes up all the time in the standard library.

    For example, if you know you’re popping from a non-empty vector, unwrap is totally the right too for the job. There are tons of circumstances where you know at higher levels that edge cases defended against at lower levels with Option cannot occur.



  • \1. Many retro games were made for CRT TVs at 480p. Updating the graphics stack modern TVs is valuable, even if nothing else is changed.

    \2. All of my old consoles only have analog A/V outputs. And my TV only has one analog A/V input. The mess of adapter cables and swapping is annoying. I want the convenience of playing on a system that I already have plugged in.

    \3. I don’t even still have some of the consoles that play my favorite classic games, and getting retro hardware is sometimes difficult. Especially things like N64 controllers with good joysticks.

    Studios don’t need to do a full blown remake to solve these problems. But I’m also not going to say the Crash and Spyro remakes weren’t welcome. Nintendo’s Virtual Console emulators tow this line pretty well.

    But studios should still put in effort to make these classic games more accessible to modern audiences, and if that means a remake, that’s fine with me.

    (I’m mostly thinking about the GameCube/PS2 generation and earlier. I don’t see much value in remakes of the Wii/PS3 generation yet.)