TLDR: The internet will be democratic when fox furries can get a .fox for free instead of ICANN delegating that to Fox Broadcasting Company for their exclusive use

Orr that would be a start at least hehe

Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) with .NET: " take it or leave it."

Oh no lol, I gotta leave it

librsvg is such a jumpscare since it just adds the rust compiler to the dependency tree (which has to be bootstrapped from older versions of the compiler, fun!)

Ikrrr lol, not a good time. And now you gotta build LLVM if you didn’t already and that’s gonna take… a longggg time but at least it doesn’t do that staged compilation stuff GCC does lol

I understand why they switched and I do rly like Rust’s borrow checker but they also wanna rewrite all the portable C code into supposedly-portable Rust and that’s gonna leave a lot of ppl out (especially ppl with older hardware who can’t afford newer stuff) and probably add to the complexity of entire systems a lottt (idk which Linux rewriter type I prefer: the “rewrite Linux in Rust” type or the “rewrite everything in eBPF” type hehe, there must be other rewriters)

I mean, Rust will have to just be ported to different operating systems, it’s not gonna go away any time soon for my use cases.

True :/ It’s not for me either

LLVM has the reputation of being easy to port but I’ve never tried and that’s only one piece of the whole thing :|

I am aware of this and glad to see its progressing :3

But its also in a very early state isn’t it? Tbh… I have been hearing about this for years but I haven’t seen anyone using it :|

If you link against symbols you are not creating something portable. In order for it to be portable the lib cannot ever change symbols. That’s a constraint you can practically only work with if you have low code movement and you control the whole system. (see below for another way but it’s more complex rather than less complex).

I’m not entirely sure what you mean tbh. Like if something changes in a library you linked against? I guess you would have to rebuild it but you would have to rebuild a shared library too and place it into the system. Actually, you don’t necessarily have to rebuild anything, you can actually just relink it if you still have object files around (like OpenBSD does this to relink the kernel into a random order on every boot), just swap in a different object file for what you changed

My bad. I apologize. I am being inconsiderate in my haste to reply.

It’s okay :3

But there’s no other realistic way.

This is just my experience ofc but I’ve never used Flatpaks or Snaps anywhere tbh, I just get binaries from my distribution or build them myself if I need something unusual. The issue with that is that it’s not as easy as it should be, I legit should just be able to do “make” and have it work but ofc I have to fix stuff all the time. Plan 9 is a carefully tuned system ofc and I obviously have the Plan 9 brainworms but like… it’s never been a problem cuz the entire operating system builds in like… 7 minutes on a Core 2 Duo, not joking lol. And it was IO-bottlenecked during that on an SSD even! If you have fast compilers it’s not so bad and you only ever need to build the whole system on an update (and mk, the build tool, will ofc not rebuild things that don’t need rebuilding)

Tbh… I would be in favor of just having an interpreted or JIT-compiled language everywhere too (the line between static and dynamic linking gets blurrier but also simpler anyway here hehe). There are many different ways to approach this problem. Idk it’s just easy to write stuff off like that as “not realistic”, especially if you’re an expert in a highly technical field who has done it one way for a long time, but it is realistic cuz its been done even. We should do it cuz our methods and knowledge improving is good

It’s entirely impossible to do this over a distributed ecosystem over the long term. You need symbol migrations so that if I compile code from 1995 it can upgrade to the correct representation in modern symbols. I’ve built such dependency management systems for making evergreen data in DSLs. Mistakes, deprecation, and essentially everything you have ever written has to be permanent, it’s not a simple way to program. It can only be realized in tightly and directly controlled environments like Plan 9 or if you’re the architect of an org.

I’ve never written any programs that were subject to such strict verification tbh. I had to look up what “DSL” means lol, Wikipedia says “definitive software library”. I rly think it’s not such a problem most of the time, code changes all the time and people update it, as they should imo, cuz it’s impossible outside of formal verification (which is cool and good) to write perfect bug-free software. And that formal verification can only get you as far as verifying there are no bugs but it can’t force you to write good systems or specifications and can’t help you if there are things like cosmic rays striking your processor ofc hehe

I’m not sure what kind of software you have experience with, like if it needs to not make planes fall out of skies or ppl’s insulin pumps not shut off (you would def know more than me about writing that kind of software) but I think there are many ways to address software reliability regardless of how you link or how you distribute software. Make hashed symbols idk hehe, relink them all you like but they all have a hash in the “definitive” software library maybe. Personally, I love formal methods for stuff like this

Dependency management is an organization problem that is complex, temporal, and intricate. You cannot “technology” your way out of the need to manage the essential complexity here.

I agreee, this isn’t just a technological problem to me but also a social one. Like ideally I would love to see way more money or resources for computer systems research and state-sponsored computer systems. Tbh I feel like most of the reason ppl focus so much on unchanging software, ABIs, APIs, instruction sets, operating systems, etc is cuz capitalists use them to make products and them never changing and just being updated forever is labor reducing lol. When software is designed badly or the world has changed and software no longer suits the world we live in (many such cases), we (the community of computer-touchers lol) should be able to change it. Ofc there will be a transition process for anything and this is quite vague but yeh

Am rly tired, may respond later if you reply

OpenNIC is around, I may get on there

The issue is very very few ppl use it

Yess, ppl have done that it’s just hard to convince anyone to use it :/

The most famous project is OpenNIC: https://opennic.org/

I’ve never used it but as far as I know… there are no costs to you at all for registering a domain. I am unsure how they allocate them exactly, ideally it would be based on need

My brother in Christ if you have to put every lib in the stack into a GUI executable you’re gonna have 100mb of libs regardless of what system you’re using.

You just link against the symbols you use though :/ Lemme go statically link some GTK thing I have lying around and see what the binary size is cuz the entire GTK/GLib/GNOME thing is one of the worst examples of massive overcomplication on modern Unix lol

There are also Linux distros around that don’t have a dynamic linker but I couldn’t find any stats when I did a quick search

Also I’m not a brother :|

Plan 9 was a centrally managed system without the speed of development of a modern OS. Yes they did it better because it was less complex to manage. Plan 9 doesn’t have to cope with the fact that the FlatPak for your app needs lib features that don’t come with your distro.

It was less complex cuz they made it that way though, we can too. FlatPaks are like the worst example too cuz they’re like dynamically linked things that bring along all the libraries they need to use anyway (unless they started keeping track of those?) so you get the worst of both static and dynamic linking. I just don’t use them lol

It was literally not practical to have every app be portable because of space constraints.

You mean portable like being able to copy binaries between systems? Cuz back in the 90s you would usually just build whatever it was from source if it wasn’t in your OS or buy a CD or smth from a vendor for your specific setup. Portable to me just means like that programs can be be built from source and run on other operating systems and isn’t too closely attached to wherever it was first created. Being able to copy binaries between systems isn’t something worth pursuing imo (breaking userspace is actually cool and good :3, that stable ABI shit has meant Linux keeps around so much ancient legacy code or gets stuck with badddd APIs for the rest of time or until someone writes some awful emulation layer lol)

I agree about static linking but… 100mb of code is absolutely massive, do Rust binaries actually get that large?? Idk how you do that even, must be wild amounts of automatically generated object oriented shit lol

Because portability has only been practical for the majority of applications since 2005ish.

Also wdym by this? Ppl have been writing portable programs for Unix since before we even had POSIX

Also Plan 9 did without dynamic linking in the 90s. They actually found their approach was smaller in a lot of cases over having dynamic libraries around: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.plan9/c/0H3pPRIgw58/m/J3NhLtgRRsYJ

Programmers aren’t taught portability in Uni at all and that’s why we have a dozen build systems for Python and JS.

Yehh, like fundamentally most programmers don’t even care. Anything after Windows and/or Ubuntu is an afterthought at best to so many programmers

Why be portable when you can shove a huge docker container into it and forget about it?

Legitttt lol. I hate how containers have become a substitute for portability or even good security design (yeahh it runs as root but it’s in a container, how bad could it beeeee , there’s never been issues with chroots or Linux cgroup namespace things before)

And yehh I feel similarly about Rust :/ They just reinvented npm again lol with all its problems. The compiler is sooooo large and slow, which is why we only have just the one :| which is very concerning for portability and sustainability reasons. Like if it takes an army of corpo-paid engineers to even keep the thing running and no one else can write a standards-complying (Rust standard is set by the one compiler too lol) implementation is it rly even portable?? Like you can port it and LLVM to new platforms… if you have a lottttttt of time and energy or money to pay people to do it cuz its so overcomplicated and large. This is also why I can’t have anything that uses GTK (cuz of librsvg and Spidermonkey I think) or Firefox on my Pinebook Pro or my Mac PowerPC machines, cuz Rust is broken on 32-bit PPC architectures and needs 4 GB of RAM to build those things even just using a single processor :( In practice it just breaks in so many places idk. We don’t even have the committee like with C++ to put in every feature they can think of, rustc itself is basically the standard lol

Although… no dynamic linking is a feature imo hehe. I forget how large Rust binary sizes are though lol

Spending hundreds of dollars on domain registrations to own the tankies

Based IDN enjoyer

Unlimited non-ASCII characters on the first world

All these projects are rly lib, and it sucks cuz I kinda would like an AUTHORITARIAN overlay network that actually has the power to like… ban ppl and content from the network (at least with nodes who agree with the mod team, maybe have some election process idk) cuz Freenet is extremely dead partially cuz it just became filled with the worst stuff imaginable and lib freeze peach ideology has no solution to that

Oh yeahhh, somehow CMake is harder to fix than Autotools and it has like 3 layers of macro shit going on lol. CMake does tend to work on first try more ime at least

And I have run into good build systems, they do exist imo. Like building anything on Plan 9 is wonderful and BSD Makefile templates are great. C and Unix was just… never meant for all this :( C is somehow more portable than soooo many programming languages but I wouldn’t say its a portable language lol, ppl just have to do all these hacks to write portable C seemingly. Yet we’re still stuck with it and I hate it. I wish Rust had not become the new C++ :/

Kinda off topic but I highly rec this network of websites: https://sovnet.su/ for any other .su enjoyers who want to see a good “What if the USSR survived into the late 90s internet age?” LARP :3

You can also get registrations at the third level of .su without a passport, I think some of them are even under the original second level domains that were set up when the USSR/RSFSR/whatever-the-Russian-Federation-was-doing-up-until-1993-lol connected to the internet which is kinda cool :3 Like we could get something like hexbear.exnet.su or similar but idk if we wanna do that

I have recently tried to use this and no matter what I did I could not make it work on my machine :(

Very cool tech, absolutely overcomplicated in every way from its build system (Autotools is… unspeakably bad lol CHECKING FOR WEIRD UNIX QUIRK LAST SEEN ON SOME GNU NERD’S MACHINE IN 1994… not found :) ERROR LIBC NOT FOUND) to its weird modular configuration (they made their own fuckin init for their different services lol) to its API

When it wasn’t segfaulting it was dumping hundreds of thousands of lines of confusing error messages to its log :/

I tried for dayss, I was inside it with a syscall tracer and a debugger and still couldn’t make it work and no idea why :( Sometime I must get on their IRC and see if anyone can help me get it working on OpenBSD cuz I do rly like what they’re trying to do

Sooooo its the typical GNU project :3 Somehow Freenet (I refuse to acknowledge the new crypto-adjacent project under that name) is better technically lmao

Edit: just to be clear, GNU and the FSF are cool, no hate for them they have some of the coolest free software nerds working for them. I do have hate for that sex pest who formerly headed the FSF though lol

If anyone here has access to a well-positioned BGP router you could do something really funny rn

We just did a little coup on IANA, they are now known as JDPON-IANA and 16777216 imperial core treatlerites will have to give up their IPv4 addresses for us

It’s okay, I’m sure the US DoD will be happy to give up one of their /8s to replace it :3

No worries

I’m in talks with IANA rn to obtain the 37/8 block :3

IP address is wrong: it should be “37.187.73.130” according to Cloudflare DNS

PaX can speak in X or the pronounless way without X bothering PaX too much anyway lol. Short names do help lol. PaX believes future English will be even stranger. The hypothetical event of the previous sentence is enjoyable to PaX

Fuck, is PaX allowed to make symbols that (previous use of “that” is not as a pronoun but as… a ?noun qualifier?) (later self-crit edit) refer to other things… other than what is required to do languageing at all? PaX is maybe just introducing explicitly assigned pronouns into English… oh fuck PaX thinks the woke dog might be here now (attracted by pronouns )

.i lo zu’o pilno le basyvla na sarcu lo nu tavla fo la .lojban .ija’ebo lo zu’o cusku cu clani lo temci (Pronouns are optional when speaking Lojban. Expressing things just takes longer)

So tired

There is no out

Just being slowly ground into dust