Our eyes are not perfect organs so why pretend like they are? Our eyes fail us:

• when it’s too dark
• when it’s too bright
• when there’s fog
• when there’s too much rain and snow
• when there’s glare from the sun
• when there’s obstructions
• when there’s sensory overload
• when there’s something covering our eyes like dirt and mud
• when we can only see on the visible spectrum

Why wouldn’t we want more incoming data to account for these shortcomings? Optical-only vision-based solutions are incomplete because our eyes are incomplete. I can’t see that a car is stopped dead in the road 10 feet ahead of me in thick fog, but an advanced set of telemetry sensors can. My eyes are not better than the scores of technology we’ve built over the past few decades and I’ve been practicing with them for 46 years. Give me a helmet that includes LIDAR and infrared and night vision and sonar and telemetry from a satellite and GPS and weather tracking and god knows what else and I’ll be much less likely to rear end that car in the fog. We humans invent technology to make up for our shortcomings, so why go with the idea of “if it’s good enough for biological evolution it’s good enough for these multi-ton contraptions we have hurtling down highways next to each other several metres apart at 100 km per hour every second of every day?” It sounds ludicrous on its face. We can choke on a peanut because our swallow tube is the next to the breathing tube ffs. We can do better.

If Mercurial were as popular as Git I would presume that it would be rewritten in C or Rust, but who can say.

Also Subsurface, a scuba diving log program, but that one is not quite as well known.

https://subsurface-divelog.org/

Dev: “Boss, we need additional storage on the database cluster to handle the latest clients we signed up.”

Boss: “First see if AI can do it.”

Grok has said disparaging things about Elon Musk so I’m assuming it’s going to be disappeared to El Salvador soon.

GitHub Copilot about to be clocking some overtime on COBOL conversions.

Edited to elaborate that yes he announced his resignation on January 6 and today was his last half day.

There really is no way to back to where we were. We can only go forward from here. This is a bell that can’t be unrung.

“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

The code directly below:

function getPathToUploadDirectory() {
  return config.tmp_path
}

See Zed ‘Em?

She was also part of the team that discovered and coined the term “bug” in relation to a computer defect. She didn’t invent the term herself directly, but she was part of the team that did.

One other thing you may have to do if you have contributors who have also committed code is to get their permission to change the license as well, as the code they committed may still be under their copyright and not yours, and they can choose to allow their code to be relicensed or not. Some projects use a contributor release to reassign copyright for contributions for reasons like this, for instance. This is partly the reason why the Linux kernel has never changed to GPLv3 and still uses GPLv2 (and also because Linus just doesn’t like some provisions of the GPLv3) — it would be pretty much impossible to get everyone who contributed code to a project as large as the kernel to agree to a license change. Any code that couldn’t be changed would need to be extracted and rewritten, and that’s not going to happen given the sheer size of the code base.

If you don’t have other contributors then you’re home free. You can’t retroactively change licenses to existing copies of the code that have been distributed, but you can change it going forward.

macOS has something to this effect where if it detects too many kernel panics in a row on boot it will disable all kernel extensions on the next reboot and it pops up a message explaining this. I’ve had this happen to me when my GPU was slowly dying. It eventually did bite the dust on me, but it did let me get into the system a few times to get what I needed before it was kaput.

Bought a new computer, threw the old one out.

Use etc-keeper, saves everything in a git repo and integrates with a bunch of package managers. Been using it for decades it feels like now.

Ligature, not lineature.

Exit codes from processes are damage points that you take against your HP. When your HP runs out, the distro reformats itself to a clean state.

I wouldn’t say quite the same root cause — the xz back door was clearly intentional, but I don’t recall the Heartbleed bug having been intentional, and developer responsible has denied allegations to that effect. There can be no doubt in the xz case of malicious intent.