Tech

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Programmers. All programmers. Discuss on Hacker News and Reddit. Epistemic Status: Confident with few doubts. Minor mistakes may exist, though. Corrections welcome. If you want to skip to the actual material, use this link. This post is meant to be informative, but it does have an ad at the end, which will be clearly marked. You have been warned! Introduction I used to think that my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science was useless, that I didn’t learn much that would help me in programming....

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Programmers and anyone who has used a build system. Discuss on Hacker News and Reddit. Epistemic Status: Confident. This post is meant to be informative, but it does have an ad at the end, which will be clearly marked. You have been warned! Introduction First there was nothing… …then there was make. As the legend goes, Stuart Feldman was working at Bell Labs, and he had a problem....

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers and anyone interested in Yzena’s software. Epistemic Status: Confident because it’s my choice anyway. Introduction Yzena is my business. It’s a software business, obviously. In July 2022, I wrote about how Yzena will version software. I have made a few tweaks since then, so I am writing an update. I do repeat information in this post so that it stands alone and remains a reference document for Yzena versioning....

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Anyone with any opinion about “AI,” especially LLM’s. Discuss on Hacker News. Epistemic Status: Satisfied. So OpenAI recently revealed info about its spider. That information included its bot name (GPTBot) and its user agent string. But even more importantly, they revealed the IP address blocks that they would use. So I blocked them all. I also blocked their spider with robots.txt and my server; they’ve already added IP blocks, and this is a good backup....

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers and anyone interested in Yzena’s software. Epistemic Status: Confident because it’s my choice anyway. This post has been superseded by this one. Introduction Yzena is my business. It’s a software business, obviously. I have long wondered what versioning system I should use for that software. SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is okay, but not great. It is standard, though. But there are other ways....

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers, Git users, code archeologists, and anyone who would need to do forensics on Yzena repositories. Epistemic Status: Not confident; I don’t have perfect memory of what I did, but this is the best I’ve got. Five months ago, I wrote about how I re-signed a few entire Git repos. One of the requirements for my process was this: It has to deal with a repo that is a bunch of combined repos....

Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers, Git users, code archeologists, and anyone who would need to do forensics on Yzena repositories. Epistemic Status: Very sorry and repentant. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I had to create a new GPG key, separate from my personal one, and I had to re-sign every single commit in a few repos with the new key. This is rebase on a whole new level....

Please see the disclaimer. Introduction I don’t know how to introduce this post other than the question in the title: is it even worth working on Free and Open Source Software anymore? I have been asking myself this for the past week or two, and it’s uncomfortable for me; I believe in the power of Open Source to empower users and to give them control over their machines. Exploited FOSS But that belief of mine has been severely shaken by several things happened this week, things which also made me reconsider things that happened further in the past as well....

Please see the disclaimer. In July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for whitepapers about the “philosophical and legal questions” around GitHub’s Copilot. I wanted to write one, but decided not to until encouraged to do so by an employee of the FSF. By that time, I only had five days to write it, so the paper ended being subpar, but I got it in. As to be expected, my paper was not chosen for publication, and I don’t blame them....

Please see the disclaimer. Introduction I’ve mentioned before that I have ideas for an operating system. Well, beyond that, I have a few other things in the pipeline. These are listed in the order I plan to do them (right now). Yao Yao is my programming language. Plenty has been said about it already, but you can also peruse the documentation I already have for it. Name I have already written an explanation of Yao’s name....