Superficial comment regarding the catgirl, I don't get why some people are so adamant and enthusiastic for others to see it, but if you like me find it distasteful and annoying, consider copying these uBlock rules: https://sdf.org/~pkal/src+etc/anubis-ublock.txt. Brings me joy to know what I am not seeing whenever I get stopped by this page :)
Readit Newspkal commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso
pkal commented on Vibe coding the MIT course catalog stackdiver.com/posts/vibe... · Posted by u/low_tech_punk
I have to say that https://student.mit.edu/catalog/index.cgi looks like a great site! It is all public, and when you open a category (a static site), all the information appears all at once and you can Ctrl-F for keywords. It might not solve that "unknown unknown" problem that the author mentions, but it is certainly much preferable to the solution that our university used (https://www.his.de/hisinone; one example: all courses are displayed in a tree and if you click to unfold a node, the server generates verbose HTML and sends it to the client. This takes at least 10 seconds on good days).
pkal commented on Serving a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI jacob.gold/posts/serving-... · Posted by u/feep
How do you protect against concurrency bugs when two visitors make guestbook entries at the same time? With a lockfile? Are you sure you won't write an empty guestbook if the machine gets unexpectedly powered down during a write? To me, that's one of the biggest benefits of using something like SQLite.
That is exactly what I do, and it works well enough because if the power-loss were to happen, I wouldn't have lost anything of crucial value. But that is admittedly a very instance-specific advantage I have.
pkal commented on Serving a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI jacob.gold/posts/serving-... · Posted by u/feep
I have recently been writing CGI scripts for the web server of our universities computer lab in Go, and it has been a nice experience. In my case, the Guestbook doesn't use SQLite but I just encode the list of entries using Go's native https://pkg.go.dev/encoding/gob format, and it worked out well -- and critically frees me from using CGO to use SQLite!
But in the end efficiency isn't my concern, as I have almost not visitors, what turns out to be more important is that Go has a lot of useful stuff in the standard library, especially the HTML templates, that allow me to write safe code easily. To test the statement, I'll even provide the link and invite anyone to try and break it: https://wwwcip.cs.fau.de/~oj14ozun/guestbook.cgi (the worst I anticipate happening is that someone could use up my storage quota, but even that should take a while).
See also previous Chief Mousers to the Cabinet Office, going back approx 100 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilberforce_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peta_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_III_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_II_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_(cat)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Mouser
I like how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Mouser_to_the_Cabinet_Of... has a timeline and highlights if the Chief Mouser was under a Conservative or Labour government.
Can you explain the nondeterminism part of your comment more?
From automata theory, you might know that nondeterministic automata are represented by a set of states. Deterministic automata are always in a specific state, while nondeterministic ones are in multiple at once. Lists are used for non-determinism in Haskell the same way as a set, mainly because they are easier to implement. But the total order that a list induces over a set is not that relevant.
pkal commented on The British sitcom that swept through the Balkans (2023) blog.samizdata.co/p/how-a... · Posted by u/mellosouls
I expected this to be about Allo Allo.
pkal commented on Man pages are great, man readers are the problem whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/WhyNotHugo
I'm not a fan of Drew's political grandstanding (or views, in some cases) but scdoc is good and packaged in many distros. There's no foundation for him to abuse with it, so it's safe.
The IRC bouncer Soju uses scdoc and this has been personally annoying, as I refuse to install it just to build semantically less expressive documentation than when using the very well documented (https://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/mdoc.7.html) mdoc format. I asked the maintainer if they were interested in a contribution to translate it, and they just dismissed it out of the box.
pkal commented on Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf] cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/ar... · Posted by u/swatson741
FYI for everyone: This is not about Machine Learning. It is about a programming language called Standard ML where ML stands for Meta Language[1].
Not everyone; I'm the kind of person who wishes posts about machine learning would be prefixed with these kinds of clarifications ("watch out, this is not related to the programming language but a family of stochastic algorithms referred to as 'machine learning'"), because I consistently fall for it.
I cannot claim that I understand it well, but my best guess is that these are images that represent a kind of culture that I have encountered both in real-life and online that I never felt comfortable around. It doesn't seem unreasonable that this uneasiness around people with identity-constituting interests in anime, Furries, MLP, medieval LARP, etc. transfers back onto their imagery. And to be clear, it is not like I inherently hate anime as a medium or the idea of anthropomorphism in art. There is some kind of social ineptitude around propagating these _kinds_ of interests that bugs me.
I cannot claim that I am satisfies with this explanation. I know that the dislike I feel for this is very similar to that I feel when visiting a hacker space where I don't know anyone. But I hope that I could at least give a feeling for why some people don't like seeing catgirls every time I open a repository and that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with advocating for a "corporate soulless web".