It's really pretty

Thanks for posting

Programmers can trust language security features too much...

Of course, they're nice to have and really can make things easier to implement securely but it's still very easy to introduce security problems or bugs into any code. This is just an unsolvable problem of writing imperative code. All imperative code will reliably have memory leaks (even in Java!) and security holes because no compiler can check to see if you thought of everything.

And large and complex compilers/interpreters with these security features can end up introducing their own security problems or bugs in the process of implementing them.

I'm just tired of people entirely dismissing languages like C because they don't have these features. Especially when the operating systems their code runs on and their languages may even be implemented in C!

Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.

True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool's built-in usage information.

Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.

The difference is grep is a simple tool that can take in text, transform it, and output it to a console. It operates in a powerful and easy to understand way by default (take in text and print lines in the text containing the search parameters). This vmalert tool is just an interface to another, even more complicated piece of software.

Claims to have a Unix background, doesn't RTFM.

Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don't even come close...

Translation: Author does not understand APIs.

The point is that these abstractions do not mesh with the rest of the system. HTTP and REST are very strange ways to accomplish IPC or networked communication on Unix when someone would normally accomplish the same thing with signals, POSIX IPC, a simpler protocol over TCP with BSD sockets, or any other thing already in the base system. It does make sense to develop things this way, though, if you're a corpo web company trying to manage ad-hoc grids of Linux systems for your own profit rather than trying to further the development of the base system.

Ok. Now give me high availability

I would hope the filesystems you use are "high availability" lol

atomic writes to sets of keys

You're right, that would be nice. Someone should put together a Plan 9 fileserver that can do that or something.

caching, access control

Plan 9 is capable of handling distributed access controls and caching (even of remote fileservers!). There's probably some Linux filesystems that can do that too.

In the end, it's not so much about specific tools that can accomplish this but that there are alternatives to the dominant way of doing things and that the humble file metaphor can still represent these concepts in a simpler and more robust way.

This reads as "I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There's nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken".

This is the maybe the worst way of interpreting what they said. They can come and correct me if I'm wrong but I read that as: they have a particular ideological objection to this "cloud" ecosystem and the way it does things. It's not a lack of skill as your comment implies but rather a rejection of this way of doing things.

Or maybe terminal emulation needs to be brought up to speed with modern computing. New terminal specs and all that.

Yeah, I agree. I should have been more clear lol. See my other comment.

Satire or not, it's still correct lol. Terminals and terminal emulation need to be destroyed. Modern systems with graphics and windowing systems are not VT100s and that's a good thing.

megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He's put in a lot of work and he's pretty active in the matrix chats, but he's not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn't even release the code... this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html

I think he might be doing a bit of "making himself necessary" in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can't entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.

Thanks for the article! That 500k line diff from mainline is scary...

Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I'm starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about

Highly recommend this video to help you get around the UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3Dr3jUPjo

Hope you have fun if you decide to try!

Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard!It wasn't bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn't totally destroyed like the ones I've seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.

Glad you got it fixed!

Agreed on pine64's approach. I'm fine if they don't want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that's actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn't release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products.

Yeahh fr

What's up with the kernel from the guy in Czechia? I knew most of the distros aren't shipping mainline kernels but it's so hard to find info online on this topic lol.

and the distro situation isn't better, pretty sure the "official" ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol

lol. Yeahh, even the official distro for most of the other Pine hardware is the most -pilled and mismanaged Linux project out there relative to how popular it is (Manjaro).

But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it's cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it'd be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it

Yeah, stuff like the web requires infrastructure like web browsers that is not very portable and on the order of millions of lines of code in size. A web browser is basically like an operating system of its own these days. That being said there is a Netsurf port to 9front and virtualization support on PCs in 9front (so you can run Linux). It's a very different system and radically simpler than modern Unix or Windows. But it was designed by the people who made Unix with modern networking in mind and with the knowledge that everyone has a computer now (the word everyone used loosely). A lot of people (including me) just find it very easy and pleasing to write software for and use. You can accomplish a lot more with a lot less code. It's extremely portable too, which makes it appealing as an official OS for a new hardware platform.