tame3902 (u/tame3902)

tame3902 commented on After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up e360.yale.edu/features/ir... · Posted by u/YaleE360

registeredcorn · 7 days ago

Regarding

> We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.

Can you explain what you mean by Turkey having issues "of it's own doing"? Do you mean something like corruption, or some other factor? I know very little about Turkey or the issues it faces, other than some cataclysmic earthquakes.

tame3902 · 7 days ago

I don't know much about Turkey, but I assume they are referring to Erdogan. Turkey was a pretty solid democracy and he turned it into an authoritarian regime.

Erdogan also has some interesting ideas about the economy. A quote from his Wikipedia article: "He has pushed the theory that inflation is caused by high interest rates, an idea universally rejected by economists. This, along with other factors such as excessive current account deficit and foreign-currency debt, in combination with Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism, caused an economic crisis starting from 2018, leading to large depreciation of the Turkish lira and very high inflation."

The resulting crisis has its own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_economic_crisis_(2018%...

tame3902 commented on Uv: Running a script with dependencies docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/... · Posted by u/Bluestein

alkh · 5 months ago

Interesting, I guess it is indeed a BSD thing, cause this works for me with or without '-S' on Mac

tame3902 · 5 months ago

There currently is a patch for adding '-S' to OpenBSD and in the discussion, the one who came originally up with it commented on how he added it to FreeBSD:

"IIRC, the catalyst for it was that early FreeBSD (1990's?) did split up the words on the '#!' line because that seemed convenient. Years later, someone else noticed that this behavior did not match '#!' processing on any other unix, so they changed the behavior so it would match. Someone else then thought that was a bug, because they had scripts which depended on the earlier behavior. I forget how many times the behavior of '#!' processing bounced back and forth, but I had some scripts which ran on multiple versions of Unix and one of these commits broke one of those scripts.

I read up on all the commit-log history, and fixed '#!' processing one more time so that it matched how other unixes do it, and I think I also left comments in the code for that processing to document that "Yes, '#!'-parsing is really supposed to work this way".

And then in an effort to help those people who depended on the earlier behavior, I implemented '-S' to the 'env' command.

I have no idea how much '-S' is used, but it's been in FreeBSD since June 2005, and somewhere along the line those changes were picked up by MacOS 10. The only linux I work on is RHEL, and it looks like Redhat added '-S' between RHEL7 and RHEL8." [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=175307781323403&w=2]

tame3902 commented on Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia derflounder.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/zdw

blueflow · 9 months ago

I think you got unlucky with unzip because you noticed. Distributions heavily patching software is rather the norm than the exception.

As an example, look how Debian patches the Linux kernel: https://udd.debian.org/patches.cgi?src=linux&version=6.12.21... . And the kernel is a very active project.

Funnily, this makes recoding the version number for a SBOM pretty useless.

tame3902 · 9 months ago

I agree completely. I also know that distros patch packages.

But for unzip the situation is particularly bad because it has no maintainer. Normally, you would raise feature requests for basic functionality upstream and once added, the maintainer would cut a new release. So software with the same version number generally, but not always, behaves similarly across distros.

But for unzip, because upstream is unmaintained, distro maintainers started to add features while keeping the version number. So in the end you end up with different behavior for what looks like the same release.

tame3902 commented on Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia derflounder.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/zdw

blueflow · 9 months ago

I maintain a huge number of git mirror of git repositories and i have some overview of activity there. Many open source projects have stopped activity and/or do not make any new releases. Like syslinux, which seems to be in a similar situation as unzip. And some projects like Quagga went completely awol and don't even have a functional git remote.

So unzip is not really that special, its a mode general problem with waning interest.

tame3902 · 9 months ago

I wasn't trying to imply that unzip is the only one.

But the way I learned that unzip is unmaintained was pretty horrible. I found an old zip file I created ages ago on Windows. Extracting it on Arch caused no problem. But on FreeBSD, filenames containing non-ASCII characters were not decoded correctly. Well, they probably use different projects for unzip, this happens. Wrong, they use the same upstream, but each decided to apply different patches to add features. And some of the patches address nasty bugs.

For something as basic as unzip, my experience as a user is that when it has so many issues, it either gets removed completely or it gets forked. The most reliable way I found to unzip a zip archive consists of a few lines of python.

tame3902 commented on Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia derflounder.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/zdw

thrdbndndn · 9 months ago

As a relatively new Linux user, I often find the "versioning" of bundled system utilities also to be a bit of a mess, for lack of a better word.

A classic example, at least from my experience, is `unzip`. On two of my servers (one running Debian and the other an older Ubuntu), neither of their bundled `unzip` versions can handle AES-256 encrypted ZIP files. But apparently, according to some Stack Overflow posts, some distributions have updated theirs to support it.

So here is what I ran into:

1. I couldn't easily find an "updated" version of `unzip`, even though I assume it exists and is open source.

2. To make things more confusing, they all claim to be "version 6.00", even though they obviously behave differently.

3. Even if I did find the right version, I'm not sure if replacing the system-bundled one is safe or a good idea.

So the end result is that some developer out there (probably volunteering their time) added a great feature to a widely used utility, and yet I still can’t use it. So in a sense, being a core system utility makes `unzip` harder to update than if it were just a third-party tool.

I get that it's probably just as bad if not worse on Windows or macOS when it comes to system utilities. But I honestly expected Linux to handle this kind of thing better.

(Please feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood anything or if there’s a better way to approach this.)

tame3902 · 9 months ago

unzip is a special case: upstream development has basically stopped. The last release was in 2009[0]. (That's the version 6.0.) Since then there were multiple issues discovered and it lacks some features. So everybody patches the hell out of that release[1]. The end result is that you have very different executables with the same version number.

[0]: https://infozip.sourceforge.net/UnZip.html

[1]: here the build recipe from Arch, where you can see the number of patches that are applied: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/un...

tame3902 commented on No One Lives Forever (NOLF) Revival Edition nolfrevival.tk/... · Posted by u/Lammy

archagon · 10 months ago

Heh. Well, I guess whoever sues this site has to be the rightful owner!

tame3902 · 10 months ago

Somebody once tried to clarify the situation with a similar stunt, but failed spectacularly. From the NOLF Wikipedia page:

In May 2014, Nightdive Studios, a publisher of classic PC titles, filed trademarks for "No One Lives Forever", "The Operative", "A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way", and "Contract J.A.C.K.", Nightdive had also been able to acquire the source code for the games, which would enable them to remaster them for modern computer systems. However, Nightdive had yet to comment on the situation regarding who owned the rights to the game. At this point, the rights to the series were unclear, as the property may have been owned solely or in part by 20th Century Fox (which owned Fox Interactive at the time of the game's release), Activision (which acquired and merged with Vivendi Games, which in turn was the parent to Sierra Entertainment, the publisher of No One Lives Forever 2, and had acquired Fox Interactive in 2003), and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (which acquired Monolith Productions). Warner Bros. did file opposition to Nightdive's trademark, leading Nightdive to try to seek a license arrangement. However, Warner Bros. representatives were concerned that if either Fox or Activision had a part of the ownership, that they would also need their approval. Nightdive attempted to work with Fox and Activision to search their archives, but as these transitions pre-dated computerized records, neither company wanted to do so. Nightdive's efforts were further stalled when they were told by Warner Bros. that they had no interest in partnering or licensing the IP, leading Nightdive to abandon their efforts to acquire the rights.

tame3902 commented on Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature standardebooks.org/blog/p... · Posted by u/WithinReason

apetresc · a year ago

How does this work? Asking legitimately. If an American author produces a work in America, with presumably an American copyright, don't USA laws decide when they enter the public domain?

Like, could some country just decide global copyright ends after 1 year after publication in their jurisdiction, and start printing their own copies of Harry Potter or whatever?

tame3902 · a year ago

There was a court case about this. Project Gutenberg got sued by a German publishing house for hosting works still copyrighted in Germany.

"Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany." [1]

Project Gutenberg lost repeatedly in court but the whole saga ended with a settlement.

"Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires." [1]

So if you have a German IP you can't access the ebooks, but if don't you can read them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg#Copyright

tame3902 commented on 30% drop in O1-preview accuracy when Putnam problems are slightly variated openreview.net/forum?id=Y... · Posted by u/optimalsolver

gus_massa · a year ago

I didn't downvote it, but short comments are a very big risk. People may misinterpret it, or think it's crackpot theory or a joke and then downvote.

When in doubt, add more info, like:

But the complete equation is E=sqrt(m^2c^4+p^2) that is reduced to E=mc^2 when the momentum p is 0. More info in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc...

tame3902 · a year ago

What I learnt is that there is a rest mass and a relativistic mass. The m in your formula is the rest mass. But when you use the relativistic mass E=mc² still holds. And for the rest mass I always used m_0 to make clear what it is.

tame3902 commented on 65% of employees bypass cybersecurity measures, new study finds forbes.com/sites/larsdani... · Posted by u/botanicals6

turbojet1321 · a year ago

Sorry, I meant in an actual corporate (ie, Windows) environment, not conceptually.

tame3902 · a year ago

In my company the official policy is that nobody but the admins gets administrator privileges. If you need them the workflow is that you go to IT and they do what is necessary. Or they just might say no. People had to complain that makes work impossible for them and will cost the company a lot of money so that they got exceptions -- but only after escalation to upper management.

I think this was a security directive that came from the top.

tame3902 commented on Microsoft is first to get HBM-juiced AMD CPUs nextplatform.com/2024/11/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

Guzba · a year ago

Does absolute power consumption matter or would it not be better to focus on per-core power consumption? Eg running 6 32-core CPUs seems unlikely to be better than 1 192-core.

tame3902 · a year ago

Yes, per core power consumption or better performance per Watt is usually more relevant than the total power consumption. And 1 high-core CPU is usually better than the same number of cores on multiple CPUs. (That is unless you are trying to maximize memory bandwidth per Watt.)

What I wanted to get at is that the pure core count can be misleading if you care about power consumption. If you don't and just look at performance, the current CPU generations are monsters. But if you care about performance/Watt, the improvement isn't that large. The Zen1 CPU I was talking about had a TDP of 180 W. So you get 6x as many cores, but the power consumption increases by 2.7x.