dietr1ch (u/dietr1ch)

dietr1ch commented on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight karpathy.bearblog.dev/aut... · Posted by u/__rito__

shpx · 4 days ago

In my experience from the couple of times I clicked an IPFS link years ago, it loaded for a long time and never actually loaded anything, failing the first "I wish we could serve static content" part.

If you make it possible for people to donate bandwidth you might just discover no one wants to.

dietr1ch · 3 days ago

I think that many are able to toss a almost permanently online raspberry pi in their homes and that's probably enough for sustaining a decently good distributed CAS network that shares small text files.

The wanting to is in my mind harder. How do you convince people that having the network is valuable enough? It's easy to compare it with the web backed by few feuds that offer for the most part really good performance, availability and somewhat good discovery.

dietr1ch commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lr0 · 3 days ago

> Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`

You just made my argument. Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

Every cost you listed [distro packages, configs, scripts, docs, domain] exists whether you rename to something descriptive OR another random word. The migration pain is identical. "Fish" → "decent-shell" costs the same as "fish" → "zephyr." My argument was that this renaming won't be necessary if you started by picking up the proper name at the first place, and it's very unlikely to have the need to rename it. We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming. That's trading a rare maintenance event for permanent cognitive overhead.

dietr1ch · 3 days ago

> Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

No, it's just because the goddamn string Id appears in way too many places and you can't sed-replace the entire world at once. It doesn't matter if the string was cute, fancy, or you found it to be a good name.

dietr1ch commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lr0 · 3 days ago

"purpose will change" argument actually proves the opposite point. When a tool's scope expands beyond its name, the descriptive name tells you something went wrong. But even if so, if you have to rename "login-page-config-service" to "auth-config-service" it is not really a big deal, renaming will be much cheaper if you're renaming to descriptive names. Most importantly though, I wouldn't optimize to avoid renaming (happens once, maybe twice in a project's lifetime) by making discovery hard (happens every single time someone encounters the tool).

dietr1ch · 3 days ago

> renaming will be much cheaper if you're renaming to descriptive names

Idk, renaming things that shipped is a PITA.

Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`. - Packages in all distros would need to be renamed. - Configuration for all systems using/having fish would need to change. - Scripts would need to change, from the shebang to the contents if necessary. - Users would need to understand that they now need to search documentation using the new name. - Documentation would need to be migrated to new domains, sed-replaced, and reviewed.

All this migration would require some synchronized, multi-step process across multiple distros and deployments.

I'd rather have a name that works as an Id.

dietr1ch commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

marifjeren · 3 days ago

There is actually a good reason not mentioned, not to name tools by their purpose:

- the purpose will change

Your "silicon-valley-bank-integrator" tool will eventually need to be updated to do something else.

Or your "login-page-config-service" tool may eventually do more than just logins.

Using gibberish or mythological names gives a nice memorable name that doesn't lead (or mislead) you to believe it does a particular thing which may or may not be correct anymore.

dietr1ch · 3 days ago

Also, being too precise and succinct about what the tool does ends up in a race for the name in competing implementations.

Project names should be unique enough to allow them becoming their Id,

- It allows to find the project.

- It allows the project to change, extend it's scope or narrow it.

Having an Id is really important, making that Id related to the project's original intention is nice, but secondary. (as long as it doesn't change enough that it becomes misleading).

dietr1ch commented on Deprecate like you mean it entropicthoughts.com/depr... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

jkubicek · 3 days ago

> just include in the warning that it is not maintained.

I'm convinced this isn't possible in practice. It doesn't matter how often you declare that something isn't maintained, the second it causes an issue with a [bigger|more important|business critical] team it suddenly needs become maintained again.

dietr1ch · 3 days ago

It also keeps slowing down development as getting a green global compile will make you still update "deprecated" functions that face breaking API changes.

dietr1ch commented on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight karpathy.bearblog.dev/aut... · Posted by u/__rito__

moultano · 4 days ago

Notable how this is only possible because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. They contain a whole conversation. You don't have to log in to see anything. The value of old proper websites increases with our ability to process them.

dietr1ch · 4 days ago

> because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade.

It's a shame that maintaining the web is so hard that only a few websites are "good citizens". I wish the web was a -bit- way more like git. It should be easier to crawl the web and serve it.

Say, you browse and get things cached and shared, but only your "local bookmarks" persist. I guess it's like pinning in IPFS.

dietr1ch commented on Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e eamonnsullivan.co.uk/post... · Posted by u/eamonnsullivan

abbefaria27 · 4 days ago

I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.

dietr1ch · 4 days ago

> Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays

This is the reason I haven't tried all the email tools that seem fun to play with, but not worth it :/

dietr1ch commented on Canada's US Travel Boycott Is Backfiring in the Most Unexpected Way at US Border thetravel.com/canadas-us-... · Posted by u/wahnfrieden

dietr1ch · 5 days ago

How is this backfiring? I don't feel it's the CBP retaliating, but just staying busy as Canadian tourism plummets

dietr1ch commented on It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change help.openai.com/en/articl... · Posted by u/amukbils

nrhrjrjrjtntbt · 6 days ago

Create table account (email varchar(255) primary ....

dietr1ch · 6 days ago

But ChatGPT told me to run that, so I did.

dietr1ch commented on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-... · Posted by u/doener

myaccountonhn · 7 days ago

I agree, but it also feels like it would be so difficult. It requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so people are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks to be a big blocker when adopting open source tech) and finally Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against it. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to actively sabotage any adoption.

dietr1ch · 7 days ago

> - It requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so people are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks to be a big blocker when adopting open source tech), and finally Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against it.

I think everyone agrees the costs are high, especially beyond monetary ones, but this stance on avoiding these costs is slowly pushing everyone into finding out how expensive is not having sovereignty.

Through its tech industry the US has over time acquired too much power over critical digital infrastructure that has already compromised governments. We know of Presidents/PMs/Legislators spied upon through their phones and computers, and also Microsoft itself involved in revoking email access to the ICC's chief prosecutor as retaliation/defense against investigations.

Sovereignty is too important for government, and since everyone needs to do it and get security right going for open-source with funded development and constant auditing is in my mind the only way.