undecisive (u/undecisive)

undecisive commented on Ruby core team takes ownership of RubyGems and Bundler ruby-lang.org/en/news/202... · Posted by u/sebiw

TheCraiggers · 2 months ago

> I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks.

I think a lot of this is due to how so much is a scandal these days, for better and worse. (I'm obviously going to keep politics as much out of my response as possible.)

A few decades ago, people could have political views without ostracizing roughly 50% of the global population, or generally causing a ruckus at the holiday family dinner. (Obviously politics + holiday dinners has been an issue for a long time, but back then it was just something people tried to sweep under the rug. Now? Holiday dinners are getting cancelled or families are splitting up.)

It used to be that a scandal in the OSS community required you killing your wife (thinking back to ReiserFS). Now, a remark on Twitter is all it takes.

Again, I am absolutely not taking sides here. I'm just noticing a difference in the times, and agreeing that it is indeed interesting to watch.

undecisive · 2 months ago

No, I agree. That said, I think a lot of that particular shift is down to a) increased individualism b) an emphasis on the healing power of personal boundaries and c) the rejection of unity as an overriding good.

People are far more happy to cling to the tribe they choose, and the tribe that has their back, over the tribe they were born to. Then, there are those who see that trend as dangerous to society (where, in many cases, society is really just a proxy for their own power or social status - ironically as viewed through their own chosen tribes more than the tribe they were born to)

That is to say, I don't think it's the political views that are splitting the families. Individuals have decided that care for each other should come secondary to those political views. I feel like there used to be a certain amount of care in the "sweeping under the rug" - it was the tribe against the world, it was protecting the family image as much as it was protecting the individual from society. These days, being a thing "in private" means being a thing alone, and that's no longer a compelling thought when external tribes are willing to embrace you.

Which probably applies to software tribes just as much as family ones.

undecisive commented on Ruby core team takes ownership of RubyGems and Bundler ruby-lang.org/en/news/202... · Posted by u/sebiw

elliotec · 2 months ago

This is a fascinating and seemingly unusual development that will look obvious in history.

I find “BDFLs” and open source communities so incredibly interesting. Especially in the context of geopolitics and state entities. Linux!

This stuff is PHD material for sociology and polisci post-grads and I’m so interested in following the progression of history with these types of things.

undecisive · 2 months ago

Yeah, certainly tickles a few neurons.

I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks. That's probably dependant on their leadership style - the hard headed (Linus, DHH) vs the grandfatherly (Matz, Van Rossum).

Which, going back to your note on geopolitics, leads me to wonder: Is it just that more power corrupts more, or is it that (modern-day definitions of) democracy require a desire for power? I guess as the "FL" part of "BDFL" comes to bite more of the communities, we'll see better how different succession styles have different effects. I also wonder if the analytical nature of the individuals within the "populations", and inability to police defectors will mean uprisings will be more successful, either in causing BDFL attitude adjustments, or just overturning the community completely (for example, there's already a lot of momentum for a complete fork of Rails)

(Edit: having submitted this, I now see others have had very similar thoughts! Definitely an excellent conversation topic)

undecisive commented on We Need to Talk About Docker Hub linuxserver.io/blog/we-ne... · Posted by u/darthShadow

concerndc1tizen · a year ago

> if you genuinely would like a discussion about the pitfalls of the funding models of open source

That is absolutely what I want, and I appreciate your contribution to the debate.

> you're forced to use words like "smear", "parasite"

I'm just trying to use fewer words, because people's attention spans are really short these days, which naturally requires the words to have more dense and intense meaning.

> it's so much easier to lambast someone

It's not easy, it's hard. People are refusing to accept that corporations are not your friends. Have you ever tried criticizing Apple?

My critique is specifically that the article:

1) presumes that Docker Hub should provide the service, despite clearly not responding to their application for free service.

2) then uses an article that invites peer pressure onto the company to get what they want.

Instead, I argue that it would be healthier if they:

1) explained why relying on Docker Hub is dangerous

2) what the alternatives are, and why they're not good enough

3) what needs to change, which may include consumer behavior - things that we control, because we really don't have control over Docker Hub.

> indentured servitude

By collectively perpetuating our dependence on them, we are engaged in self-enslavement.

And I think this type of article is a form of begging that our masters haven't given us enough breadcrumbs lately.

undecisive · a year ago

> 1) explained why relying on Docker Hub is dangerous

I mean, that's the other 770 words of the article. Except they're just giving their experience, and allowing you to come to your own decisions - because otherwise people might legitimately call them out for "smear" tactics.

> 2) what the alternatives are, and why they're not good enough

"as we grew we started mirroring our images to Gitlab and Quay.io," <= Alternatives (that they are using)

"Docker Hub is the de facto standard Docker registry, literally, if you don't specify a registry when pulling an image Docker will invisibly prepend docker.io/ to it." <= Why they're not good enough (extra config step)

> 3) what needs to change, which may include consumer behavior - things that we control, because we really don't have control over Docker Hub.

"but it does feel like we need to do something. Whatever we decide, we'll keep you informed." <= They're not there yet, but they're open and honest about it

> use fewer words, because people's attention spans are really short these days,

I can see that you have a short attention span.

> which naturally requires the words to have more dense and intense meaning

You are a belligerent, self important ignoramus who incorrectly believes the world needs his opinion. <= genuinely, do you like this style of discourse? Why are you treating shock language as a status quo worth maintaining, but trust and expecting decency from a corporation as some kind of unacceptable failing?

undecisive commented on We Need to Talk About Docker Hub linuxserver.io/blog/we-ne... · Posted by u/darthShadow

concerndc1tizen · a year ago

> If you're reading this and you work for Docker in some relevant capacity, give us a hint as to what we're supposed to do here, we'd really appreciate it.

It sounds to me like their ultimate goal is to get more free stuff.

And I'm saying: open source should not rely on benevolent corporations.

And writing articles to beg for services is not a healthy strategy in the long term.

Instead: use open standards, don't rely on centralized infrastructure, create a marketplace for providers, and create a better future. Stop maintaining the status quo of indentured servitude.

undecisive · a year ago

I love how you intentionally cropped off the first two words of that sentence, try to make out that their 30 word side note was actually the whole point of the 800 word article, and you STILL didn't manage to make them sound as malicious as you wanted to.

"give us a hint" - "Stop begging!"

As I say, you're clearly coming into this with a strong unjustifiable bias, I can tell because you're forced to use words like "smear", "parasite", "exploiting", "beg", "indentured servitude" - it's a cover for the cognitive dissonance.

But if you genuinely would like a discussion about the pitfalls of the funding models of open source, yeah it's a reasonable question that has never been satisfactorily answered. There are whole PHD projects on the subject, and nobody's cracked it. Giving money to open source projects is difficult for many reasons - ranging from tax treatment to geography even to legality. Providing services is somewhat easier, but in many companies in some countries even that comes with geopolitical legal issues. Marketplaces only work if you have something to barter, and if you would like to contribute to the freedoms you enjoyed, it's hard to make that work in a marketplace model, not to mention that even providing people the option of donating money for a product comes with overhead (legal / technological / service / financial network / server etc).

If you would like a discussion about ensuring abstractions over the services you use, sure, I'm here for it. Of course, it's hampered by a lack of consistent interfaces, and in some cases interfaces that ensure they can never be smoothed over. But that sounds like a cool open source project - in this case, I guess it would be an anyhub kind of deal that can serve images for different use cases, paired with a DSL for defining a resource (that can generate a dockerfile / docker compose file, in docker's case). Of course, serving images isn't free, but you've cracked the problem of funding models of open source, right? Right?

And you mention indentured servitude, loaded though that phrase is, it's also a poor analogy. Tax would be a closer match. You depend on open source and make money off it? Great. Giving open source a cut of that pie in some way seems the morally right thing to do. How you do that is up to you, but telling people they can use your service then pulling the rug while simultaneously ghosting them? That sounds kind.

You know what, I think you're right - it's so much easier to lambast someone for daring trust or daring to express concern than it is to do anything meaningful to improve the landscape.

undecisive commented on We Need to Talk About Docker Hub linuxserver.io/blog/we-ne... · Posted by u/darthShadow

concerndc1tizen · a year ago

If you don't like it, then why don't you use a different provider?

If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?

Storage, compute, and traffic, isn't free. You've been the beneficiary of charity for years.

Yes, the open source community has relied on this implicit charity as a parasite, by exploiting whatever free services they could. And now we're paying the price, as you say, by having DockerHub as the default provider.

My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.

undecisive · a year ago

Here's a tiny bit of missing context.

This blog is for LinuxServer.io, who build repositories that produce free docker images, for free, paid for by donations, for a bunch of open source software. By the looks of things, they are literally a charity.

Conversely, their complaint is not "aren't docker rubbish? Let's mob 'em" - it's "heads up, something seems to be wrong and docker are not responding to anything, chances are there's trouble brewing - we're gonna start looking around and if you're depending on this, you should too"

I would say calling "the open source community" a "parasite" because they're using free services from companies that have benefited greatly and earned a lot of money from things given freely by the open source community seems weird.

Seems like a lot of people on here very concerned about those poor struggling corporations, and their exploitation by those evil open source charities. Feels like an evil political wind is blowing, wonder where that's coming from?

undecisive commented on g1: Using Llama-3.1 70B on Groq to create o1-like reasoning chains github.com/bklieger-groq/... · Posted by u/gfortaine

arnaudsm · a year ago

You should also try phi-3-small 7B, seems much better at reasoning according to https://livebench.ai

undecisive · a year ago

I just tried it with phi3.5:3.8b-mini-instruct-fp16 - it didn't work with the base question, though interestingly the reasoning decided that strawberry was spelt s-t-r-a-w-b-e-r - which explains why the AIs have such a hard time with this question. I also tried it with my current favourite programming question too - What programming language is this whole line of code using? `def obfuscated_fibonacci(x)` - and like all the AIs, it was convinced the answer was python (the correct answer is ruby - python needs a trailing colon - but most LLMs will swear blind that it's python). It didn't even consider ruby as a possibility. Nobody uses ruby anyway :D

Thanks for the fork and the suggestions though - looks like I'll be having fun with this over the week!

undecisive commented on Automate Project Environments with Devbox and Direnv (2023) jetify.com/blog/automated... · Posted by u/jljljl

zamalek · a year ago

I do use Nix and direnv for my work Ubuntu machine. The glibc issue rings true, it was crashing my file manager for quite a long time (I suspect for thumbnail generation). I learned to become better at cli file management ;).

Apart from glibc, I have never had issues with two sets of binaries vying for superiority. Nix binaries take preference with my "vanilla" setup. I think that might be Devbox doing something strange with $PATH?

undecisive · a year ago

Yeah, it was paper cuts - for example, if you don't have git installed inside your devbox, it wouldn't work because of different glibc versions. Which would be fine, but my shell prompt uses git. So there has to be a nix version of git installed for every project for my machine, despite almost no projects technically needing it.

There were a couple of other libraries, can't remember which ones. I remember once having a fun chain of a library that depended on a library that depended on two libraries that in turn depended on glibc, and for some reason the last link of the chain, only one of the libraries was hitting the system libc incorrectly - that was a fun one to debug. I think I ditched that dependency in the end, it was the only solution (and was clearly badly written).

One of my projects used an older version of ruby. In that case, there was a gem to connect to the database, and that gem links to the db client library, but the db is new and the ruby is old and guess what? Two different versions of glibc, both being used within the nix ecosystem.

I worked around a lot of it with LD_LIBRARY_PATH (I think? from memory) which I had to unset for everything in devbox, and used aliases to set it to a backup of that env whenever I found a binary that needed it - and then they tried to fix that, but it just seemed to stop my workarounds from working, so I had to come up with new ones.

But yeah, it was a wild ride. Most of it came back to glibc or environment variables or both, and probably me doing something I really ought not to do (like support old projects). Alas, for me, it wasn't worth the effort - but I sure learned a lot.

undecisive commented on Automate Project Environments with Devbox and Direnv (2023) jetify.com/blog/automated... · Posted by u/jljljl

undecisive · a year ago

My experience of Devbox on Linux has been highly disappointing. I gave it a good go, had it running on my main project from February to May.

In case you hadn't realised, the very concept of having two sets of binary distributions on one machine, vying for superiority and the correct version of glibc... is fraught.

Most of my use was with rails projects, and I can't recommend it.

Coupled with an abstraction that tries to save you from Nix, but almost entirely fails, you end up with a bloated hellscape where every time you load your project it will unnecessarily reinstall your packages and several times an hour it will have forgotten curl exists and so you have to manually reinstall curl (not-so-slowly increasing your /nix folder's size), every week or two a new version of devbox completely changes the workarounds you need to do, and don't try to garbage collect nix or it will delete vital files, and you end up scrubbing it all and starting again.

In python, it overrode the path so I couldn't get it to reliably use the binaries in the venv. Pip and Python were using packages in different places and I couldn't get them to converge for love nor money.

The devbox team were great and really tried to get things working, but in the end I couldn't get it to work with enough stability to properly recommend it to my team, and if I wanted it to half-work for any substantial length of time I had to lock to a version of devbox.

Obviously, ymmv, please do give it a try, it's an impressive project. But my view is that it's trying to do something that is very very hard, and for that you need a very clever solution. And this is a very clever solution, with very clever bugs, and so it's not something I'd recommend jumping into with both feet.

undecisive commented on Convert an existing wired doorbell into a smart doorbell using ESPHome frenck.dev/diy-smart-door... · Posted by u/saberhagen

LeifCarrotson · a year ago

There's some DRMed video that shows how to do it, and some text explaining why:

https://i.imgur.com/nNMMdhF.png

undecisive · a year ago

Yeah, somehow I completely misread that sentence.

undecisive commented on Convert an existing wired doorbell into a smart doorbell using ESPHome frenck.dev/diy-smart-door... · Posted by u/saberhagen

Waterluvian · a year ago

Let me take a swing at this: the chip itself has two GPIO. The dev board the chip is soldered to already uses up one of them for the reset system, allowing the chip to programmatically reset the whole board. You’re basically undoing that so you can use it. I’m guessing the consequence is you can no-longer have the software reset the whole device anymore.

And now if this is wrong, hopefully I’ll be corrected and we’ll learn more. :)

undecisive · a year ago

Cunningham's law baiting - I love it!

So yeah, turns out it's nothing to do with the 8266's board, and everything to do with the chosen relay module. Since it has nothing to do with driving the relay, it doesn't need to be connected. But if it were connected, whenever it is high, the relay board connects it to the reset, so the chip gets reset.

So you are bending it simply to ensure that pin can't be plugged in to the relay