Linking is a huge topic: subtle nuances on the concept of topological sort represent the difference between success and failure for a build system that constructs an interesting link line. This is for lack of a better term “undergraduate link theory”.
But the real sweat equity starts at dynamic linking on a quasi-platform with all the best qualities of an identity crisis like an M Night Shyamalan story. Don’t take my word for it, some combination of Thompson and Pike and generally what’s left of the Labs legacy is a much better source than I am [1].
glibc is an amazing software artifact and has nonetheless become a liability in the default case. Everyone knows Drepper is an OG force of nature like they don’t make anymore, but copying the Win32 playbook has starved out musl and other strictly better ways to live. The consensus is to pour billions of good money after bad into the coffers of the Docker Industrial Complex to get a static link they had on a PDP-11.
For the first time in decades there’s a sane take on Python courtesy of the Astral folks and they have a whole page explaining the minimum viable technical debt risk landmine needed to use Torch with a better strategy than hope [2].
But really it’s the Nix people who have failed in their duty here: nix-ld is an awesome piece of software and it’s not the author’s fault, but crippling it on purpose via whitelisting rather than blacklisting eligible .so when they’re all already at the same privilege level could possibly kill Nix in the era of extreme performance vector compute via accelerator as the cover charge on being part of the software business [3]. I’m rolling Ubuntu boxes and patching it up with Homebrew when I don’t have a week and a PhD to get Triton taking to the driver these days and god damn I hate mutable state guess abd check and pray on my science.
I hate to rant with no actionable proposal, but the action item here is a very big ask. Almost all people are reasonable if they don’t fear for what they regard as essential and existential. Vi/Emacs wars were old when I was young but the idea that anyone would prosper or perish IRL who took this stuff seriously couldn’t even be spelled in the alphabet at that time, and it’s not AI or offshoring, or any of that. Wildly unique mathematicians and engineers and scientists were grateful for what little they had and exceedingly cautious of standing next to a dissident in the USSR for decades when the stakes wer3 nuclear hellfire.
That’s what central committees of insiders produce. You can call it communism or a16z. Unaccountable insiders who answer to no one but each other walks and talks and quacks like Thiel-world whatever you call it.
Google search is no longer up to the task of making it quick on a mobile phone to find this, but the first time I read it out well was on Steve Yegge’s OG blog. I’m paraphrasing here but he basically made the point that spending your life mastering software doesn’t leave much scope for horizontal career mobility, and that getting heavily wired into a given programming language or operating system or whatever makes it existential to see it succeed. If I talk shit about a certain programming language here it’ll mobbed by people who owe their paycheck to its adoption in under an hour, please don’t make me prove that.
I appreciate that I elided a lot of the conjectures on the way from “Drepper wants static glibc not to work” to “mafia capitalist RICO shit is the upstream cause”.
Scandal-ridden mafia capitalist shit is the upstream problem.
I mean, Unit 5 of Thiel’s startup 101 lectures at Stanford is titled “Competition is for Losers”. He leads off with making sure everyone is crystal clear that “attaining a monopoly” aka anti-trust fraud is his “idee fixé”.
This isn’t hosted on InfoWars. It’s hosted on YC’s YouTube channel.
For what it’s worth Gary, Khan’s FTC and Gensler’s SEC are looking pretty DOA in February, but a lot can happen before then and Google is under enough pressure that people are talking seriously about Chrome being broken off. The fine print about what constitutes a monopoly that damages consumer outcomes as narrowly construed bench legislating in Texas doesn’t matter to the optics.
Even if distancing YC from sama isn’t realistic on a dime, it wouldn’t hurt to step up to the same yard-line Nadella has on “we do business, we’re not married”.
And yanking the Thiel lectures and other “you will do nothing because you can do nothing” stuff from the official channel isn’t just ethically mandatory (IMHO), it’s also basic risk management.
You get to be a hothead on Twitter because you’re too big to fail, but I actually empathize because I lose my temper on a text sometimes too.
Any time doing the right thing is also +EV for the portfolio? That’s the move.
HN fails to see the intersectionality between corpo power complex politics and marshalling LUTs in firmware space. Shame, but that's life. Rob's point is bang on albeit from a technical stance. This is also ultimately why Rob failed, but with a deep groaning sigh and not a bequeathed resignation (a true nerd is at the end of the day only known by their yawp). Power junkies will try to convince you otherwise because they benefit from it. But you have to live to believe it. The life of a kernel driver maintainer of something that a large corpo entity is financially vested in is one of a diplomat saint. Newly minted VP wants to leave a mark and be goody two shoes. Good luck. The news you hear on the internet are superficial because the map is not the territory.
I’ve known a couple of people to write in this style and I still like it! Antonio had a bit of this style in ~2009, Ribbon Farm’s contributors have been throwing stuff like this off for at least a decade now, and Nikhil Suresh (The Rightful Emperor of Mecatol Rex, natch) is maybe the most anti-biotic resistant evolved form of SARS-COV-FSCK-TEH-MAN to emerge recently.
Of course it could be a modern GPT with a context longer than my dick stuffed more full of better men than my ex-wife, so maybe I’m taking to a bot, but if it gets me a Jumbotron with Ana de Armas asking if I like real girls I’m still happy to talk to a machine.
But the real sweat equity starts at dynamic linking on a quasi-platform with all the best qualities of an identity crisis like an M Night Shyamalan story. Don’t take my word for it, some combination of Thompson and Pike and generally what’s left of the Labs legacy is a much better source than I am [1].
glibc is an amazing software artifact and has nonetheless become a liability in the default case. Everyone knows Drepper is an OG force of nature like they don’t make anymore, but copying the Win32 playbook has starved out musl and other strictly better ways to live. The consensus is to pour billions of good money after bad into the coffers of the Docker Industrial Complex to get a static link they had on a PDP-11.
For the first time in decades there’s a sane take on Python courtesy of the Astral folks and they have a whole page explaining the minimum viable technical debt risk landmine needed to use Torch with a better strategy than hope [2].
But really it’s the Nix people who have failed in their duty here: nix-ld is an awesome piece of software and it’s not the author’s fault, but crippling it on purpose via whitelisting rather than blacklisting eligible .so when they’re all already at the same privilege level could possibly kill Nix in the era of extreme performance vector compute via accelerator as the cover charge on being part of the software business [3]. I’m rolling Ubuntu boxes and patching it up with Homebrew when I don’t have a week and a PhD to get Triton taking to the driver these days and god damn I hate mutable state guess abd check and pray on my science.
I hate to rant with no actionable proposal, but the action item here is a very big ask. Almost all people are reasonable if they don’t fear for what they regard as essential and existential. Vi/Emacs wars were old when I was young but the idea that anyone would prosper or perish IRL who took this stuff seriously couldn’t even be spelled in the alphabet at that time, and it’s not AI or offshoring, or any of that. Wildly unique mathematicians and engineers and scientists were grateful for what little they had and exceedingly cautious of standing next to a dissident in the USSR for decades when the stakes wer3 nuclear hellfire.
That’s what central committees of insiders produce. You can call it communism or a16z. Unaccountable insiders who answer to no one but each other walks and talks and quacks like Thiel-world whatever you call it.
[1] https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/
[2] https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/pytorch/
[3] https://github.com/nix-community/nix-ld