cesarb (u/cesarb) - Readit News

cesarb commented on RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

Joker_vD · a day ago

Seriously, please don't use C0 (except for LF and, I cede grudgingly, HT) and C1 characters in your plain text files. I understand that you may want to store some "ANSI coloring markup" (it's not "VT100 colors" — the VT series was monochrome until VT525 of 1994), sure, but it's then, arguably, not a plain text anymore, is it? It's in a text markup format of sorts, not unlike Markdown, only the one that uses a different encoding that dips into the C0 range. Just because your favourite output device can display it prettily when you cat your data into it doesn't really mean it's a plain text.

Yes, I do realize that there is a lot of text markup formats that encode into plain text, for better interoperability.

cesarb · 20 hours ago

> Seriously, please don't use C0 (except for LF and, I cede grudgingly, HT) and C1 characters in your plain text files.

It is (or, at least, used to be) common to have FF characters on plain text files, as a signal for your (dot matrix) printer to advance to the next page. So I'd add at least FF to that list.

cesarb commented on Left to Right Programming graic.net/p/left-to-right... · Posted by u/graic

sriku · 6 days ago

This is almost FP vs OOP religious war in disguise. Similar to vim-vs-emacs ... where op comes first in vim but selection comes first in emacs.

If you design something to "read like English", you'll likely get verb-first structure - as embodied in Lisp/Scheme. Other languages like German, Tamil use verbs at the end, which aligns well with OOP-like "noun first" syntax. (It is "water drink" word for word in Tamil but "drink water" in English.) So Forth reads better than Scheme if you tend to verbalize in Tamil. Perhaps why I feel comfy using vim than emacs.

Neither is particularly better or worse than the other and tools can be built appropriately. More so with language models these days.

cesarb · 5 days ago

> Other languages like German, Tamil use verbs at the end

Doesn't German have the main verb on the second position? (For a simple example, "I drink water" would be "Ich trinke Wasser")

cesarb commented on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

Eddy_Viscosity2 · 8 days ago

> Today’s versions of Windows seem less respectful of the user.

This is a massive understatement. These days Microsoft is openly and aggressively hostile to the user and its getting worse every update. This is yet another of the curses of monopoly, the monopolists will eventually hold those under its sway with utter contempt. They are going to do things their way, and you are going to take it.

cesarb · 8 days ago

> > Windows 2000 was peak Windows to me.

> These days Microsoft is openly and aggressively hostile to the user and its getting worse every update.

In my opinion, the moment at which Microsoft started being actively hostile to the user was when they added WGA in the Windows XP era. Its existence meant that the owner of the computer would no longer be considered a trusted party; that piece of code was actively working against the computer owner. That led Microsoft to gradually adopt a mindset in which the owner of the computer is no longer supposed to be in control of the computer. That mindset got even stronger with the addition of DRM (which treats computer owners as if they were actively malicious), and with malware protection measures like Secure Boot and Kernel Patch Protection (which treat only code explicitly authorized by Microsoft as reliable).

cesarb commented on The future of large files in Git is Git tylercipriani.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/thcipriani

alchemist1e9 · 9 days ago

Was looking for a mention of git-annex and I completely agree. I’ve used it extensively and have found it works really well.

Any ideas why it isn’t more popular and more well known?

cesarb · 8 days ago

> Any ideas why it isn’t more popular and more well known?

While git-annex works very well on Unix-style systems with Unix-style filesystems, it heavily depends on symbolic links, which do not exist on filesystems like exFAT, and are problematic on Windows (AFAIK, you have to be an administrator, or enable an obscure group policy). It has a degraded mode for these filesystems, but uses twice the disk space in that mode, and AFAIK loses some features.

cesarb commented on The future of large files in Git is Git tylercipriani.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/thcipriani

spyrja · 9 days ago

Doing a bit of digging seems to confirm that, considering that git actually does remove a lot of redundant files during the garbage collection phase. It does however store complete files (unlike a VCS like mercurial which stores deltas) so nonetheless it still might benefit from a download-the-current-snapshot-first approach.

cesarb · 8 days ago

> It does however store complete files (unlike a VCS like mercurial which stores deltas)

The logical model of git is that it stores complete files. The physical model of git is that these complete files are stored as deltas within pack files (except for new files which haven't been packed yet; by default git automatically packs once there are too many of these loose files, and they're always packed in its network protocol when sending or receiving).

cesarb commented on Blurry rendering of games on Mac colincornaby.me/2025/08/y... · Posted by u/bangonkeyboard

shermantanktop · 10 days ago

They could do what Windows has done, and build OS code that checks if the running application is a known-legacy game, and lie to the game about various capabilities so that the game runs well and looks good.

Not sure how much of that is still around but it was rampant for many years and likely a key to Windows success in gaming.

cesarb · 10 days ago

> They could do what Windows has done, and build OS code that checks if the running application is a known-legacy game, and lie to the game about various capabilities so that the game runs well and looks good.

Or, even simpler (and AFAIK modern Windows does that too): if the running application doesn't say in its application manifest "I'm a modern application which understands the new things from operating system versions A, B, C and features X, Y, Z", you know it's a legacy application and you can activate the relevant compatibility shims.

cesarb commented on StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/pabs3

cesarb · 12 days ago

> OK, so you have the username and password. But what about where to use the credentials? Is that also copy-pasted from somewhere?

At least keepassxc has IIRC a field for the website, and a button to copy it to the clipboard, right next to the buttons to copy the username and password. It's a great way to make sure you're opening the correct site, and not a typosquatted counterfeit.

cesarb commented on StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/pabs3

sugarpimpdorsey · 12 days ago

> In response, Xiao pointed out that the package description can be read by any user who chooses to install the software, and it does mention the scan feature.

Wouldn't be the first (or last) time a Debian maintainer has pulled the "you should read the descriptions of all (hundreds) of your packages (most installed as dependencies)" card in response to a bug report.

If someone started reading all the package descriptions and READMEs we're meant to be thoroughly familiar with when Trixie was released a few days ago, they'd still be reading them.

cesarb · 12 days ago

> If someone started reading all the package descriptions and READMEs we're meant to be thoroughly familiar with when Trixie was released a few days ago, they'd still be reading them.

That used to be viable back in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I first used Debian. It would take an afternoon of going through all the packages in dselect (does anyone here still remember dselect?) and marking the ones you wanted to install, and around the same amount of time going through every option on the kernel's menuconfig to precisely tailor the kernel to your specific hardware configuration (things were much less dynamic back then).

Nowadays, there are simply too many packages and kernel configuration options to go through (also, does anyone still use dselect?).

cesarb commented on AWS European Sovereign Cloud to be operated by EU citizens aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/a... · Posted by u/pulisse

fimdomeio · 20 days ago

This sounds so weird. Is there a legal requirement for this? Does this offer any type of real protection? Or is there a code of conduct that that intelligence agencies never hire people with foreign nationalities?

cesarb · 20 days ago

The article does not explicitly say it, but it's clearly a defense against the CLOUD Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act); it all makes sense once you add that missing puzzle piece.

The CLOUD Act conflicts with EU laws like the GDPR (AFAIK, this has been confirmed more than once in EU courts already), which means that EU organizations (which have to follow the GDPR) might not be allowed to use USA-owned cloud services, even when the data is completely hosted within the EU, because the cloud service sysadmins might be forced through the CLOUD Act to break the GDPR. Requiring that all employees with a high level of access have EU citizenship and residency makes it much harder for a USA court to pressure them into breaking these EU laws.

cesarb commented on A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages nytimes.com/2025/07/31/te... · Posted by u/jrwan

HarHarVeryFunny · 21 days ago

I don't think that framing really gives enough credit to how novel the iPhone was, and how it shook up the market when it was introduced.

Yes, PDAs had already been a thing for a long time (Psion Organizer), and Apple themselves had experimented with this category too with the Newton, before the Palm Pilot then became so dominant.

What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box. The large touch screen, with gesture-based UI, was also quite novel, and a large part of what made it successful and generic.

It's easy to look in the rear view mirror and say that most inventions/innovations were inevitable and just a product of their times, but the iPhone was quite shocking when first launched and did shake up the industry - nobody was expecting it, or expecting how popular such a device would be. Steve Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone after it's launch and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).. and then of course went on to try unsuccessfully to copy it.

cesarb · 21 days ago

> What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box.

I used a Palm PDA back in the pre-iPhone days. Its functionality was not "limited to what you got out of the box", you could install applications on it. I have fond memories of exchanging Palm applications with my friends through its infrared port. I used it as a PDA, MP3 player, camera, to play games, and even as a handheld web browser (it didn't come with a web browser, it was one of the applications I installed), using a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone for the network access. The only thing it couldn't do, was making phone calls; for that, I used that cell phone on my other pocket. That's the defining characteristic of a smartphone: being a phone which can do all the things a PDA could already do.

> and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).

That Palm PDA also lacked a keyboard. It was designed to be used without a keyboard, and worked pretty well, with either the stylus or the on-screen keyboard (which was usable even without the stylus). So it was not a given that the lack of a keyboard would be a deficit.