Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
Mark Russanovich was just some guy who had trouble fixing Windows computers so he wrote systernals from scratch including widely used psexec and other required tools if you are forced to be a windows admin. He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.
“He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.”
Thanks for this. Really brightened my day.
TIL Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are half guys.
What are half guys anyway? Are they missing a ball? A few screws?
They prefer to be called Hobbits.
I saw a post earlier about Empress returning to game cracking. For modern video games that use Denuvo DRM, she’s the only person who can really crack it, as far as I know. Singlehandedly holding up the AAA game piracy scene.
She is kind of a shithead tbf and fwiw it’s more like she’s the only person who is willing to do it. granted cracking denuvo is something that is extremely difficult and only a small subset of people can do but it’s not like she’s literally the only person on the planet who can. There was that guy who would just release the yearly update of football manager, for one.
It’s far more likely the people who have that skill set just don’t really want to bother with cracking videogames and the potential legal issues that come with distributing them online.
In other words, the Scene is Dead
True, but being the only person willing to do something is kind of laudable in it’s own right. Like all of the open source projects relied upon by millions that are sometimes developed primarily by one person in their free time.
I ain’t gotta laud that transphobic fascist for shit
but my (not really my) conspiracy theory for this is the opposite of open source: when someone is good at cracking games companies like denuvo track them down and offer them jobs to harden their product and take another cracker out of the scene. like I bet denuvo is just filled with nerds that spent their teenage years in sketchy irc rooms with handles like -DooMSlAyEr- and used to actually be members of razor1911 before they realized they could get game companies to pay them 200k a year
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s exactly what Malus did and why it’s harder to root iPhones nowadays (but the EU is seeing to that by forcing them to start opening up their walled garden).
Can’t remember where I read it, but I think it’s the dude who started AsahiLinux that shared part of his story in the scene. And a few dudes were tracked down and had the choice between a lawsuit and employment. Makes the decision pretty easy.
Doesn’t help that they did their thing on Github and other public platforms instead of I2P or something.
It was somewhat weird waiting for the HP release on her TG channel.
Like I’ve seen my fair share of terf transphobes, but she’s honestly best described as a hater.
There were so many rants.
But like with Harry Potter, I like to separate the artist from the art.
I can’t help but laugh at how batshit crazy she is. Didn’t she write a rap at some point??
I’ll never not be convinced that she’s on a fair amount of meth and/or crack.
Writing poetry => meth + crack???
Not for most people no, but Empress? I will believe it straight away.
You should read the rap lol.
runk is the thomas ladder of our era
I agree
xz seems like another good example
I’d put the deflate algorithm over the LZMA algorithm just because deflate is used by both windows (zip) and Unix (gzip). Windows I don’t think has added LZMA/xz support until recently if at all.
I agree but windows does come with a version of tar preinstalled installed. I’m not sure if it uses xz though.
The reason I named xz though is the xz-utils backdoor that was such a big deal.
Is-even 😤
And isUneven which just calls isEven and returns the opposite lmao
I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
Eh, bagder is more than “just some guy” to a lot of people! To me he’s kinda been my tech idol for 20 years lol, he also was a core part of building Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) which was the first open source project I got seriously involved in as a kid ☺️
I second Rockbox here, it’s fucking great.
Holy shit, I remember Rockbox… Big time nostalgia on that one!
“Just some guy” doesn’t mean they aren’t amazing. I would argue the opposite. It just means they didn’t use their abilities to become rich and famous like some other assholes. They’re almost certainly more capable than them, not less.
I think that would be a great situation to be in.
You have created a cool thing a lot of people use, by being good at something. You’ve done something.
Also, people have no idea who you are. Nobody is digging through your trash, harassing the people you love, taking pictures of you wherever you go including on your bad hair days, etc. You’re just some guy.
Fair point! I think that’s part of why I admire him, humble greatness
Holy shit Rockbox was amazing. I might still be subscribed to the mailing list. I used that on a few different MP3 players as a kid. I had no idea. Fuck I am old.
Edit: For a list of what he has worked on - https://daniel.haxx.se/opensource.html
A few libraries come to mind immediately: fftw (I think the most widely used fft library) or GMP (I think the most used multi precision library).
Seconded. https://www.fftw.org/
I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn’t fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I’m telling this story from memory). It’s designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.
If he hadn’t written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd
but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it’s a brilliant piece of software xD
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
That’s actually the video I was retelling from memory.
Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.
I’m telling this story from memory
pun intended? ;D
It’s also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.
Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server
I don’t know, rm being short for “remove” is very verbaceous.
Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "
Ah, pshaw, I don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s such a thing as “not a word.” Why bother having a system of root words, prefixes and suffixes if we’re not allowed to use that system to build the words we need? Especially for the fun of it. Verbaceous is adjectivacular.
Oh go fsck yourself (maybe that works better written…).
Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don’t remember). That’s why it’s called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.
TIL
I believe you’re thinking of ed, and yes, grep was made out of ed. I remember reading about a university professor who, if memory serves, gave his students the code for ed and told them to turn it into (basically) grep. Said that no one ever managed, despite having more time than the original took in total. That’s not to say I think this was fair or cool of the professor, it’s just an interesting tale.
Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.
The modern man uses
ripgrep
👍deleted by creator
What does that offer offer grep/egrep
Speed and memory efficiency, mostly. If you ever have to grep for something in a large number of files ripgrep will be done while regular grep will only be reaching the 25% mark.
-
much faster
-
proper unicode (and other encodings) support
-
automatic recursion (no extra flags needed)
-
can search inside compressed files/archives like gz/xz/zip (also see ripgrep-all) for even more archive support)
-
honors
.gitignore
and ignores binary/hidden files
probably a lot more things too
-
But it’s three more letters. No deal.
Alias. To
gr
, even!You joke but this is facts
Its going installed binary is
rg
.I shall begrudgingly consider it then, with much begrudgement.
Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
And their website is quirky
As is their code of ethics.
Have something to share?
Jesus Christ
I see you like the first rule.
Lmao yo wtf
- Be a stranger to the world’s ways.
one out of 72 isn’t bad
“be not drowsy”
SQLite devs are trolls to their suppliers that’s great 😂
They said they’re quite serious about it, actually. While it’s quirky, I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s… weirdly charming? I’d never use anything like it, but it’s fun to see something different amidst a world of copy-pasted contributor covenants.
I mean, to make such a point that the only point of the page was simply to satisfy a requirement of someone else’s volition and yet creating that page and apparently saying what you’re saying—seems like there’s something misaligning here :P
Also I no doubt that they hate people who talk too much and hate making jokes — there’s some seriously unserious stuff inside of the rules they posted. They are serious folks who have zero tolerance for laughter apparently :D
My headcanon is they’re a bunch of people who have a super religious supplier with strict checkbox rules and they are fucking with them.
It looks pretty decent to me, at least on mobile. Definitely better than 95% of websites.
Damn, I wanted to mention sqlite.
It’s not too late. Mention it!
Huh… My dad is a software engineer and his name is Ronald. He also secured several software patents when he worked for a big chip wafer manufacturer. He might actually be the Ronald in this meme… 🤔
GNU readline is a library that handles text input
Although it’s now a larger organization, Redis was started and maintained by some guy that just wanted to make his website faster. It’s very widely deployed.
Isn’t that something that was basically taken over by corporate people?
Yup… IIRC they basically started a company with a similar name when they didn’t really have any association with the project then slowly consumed it.
Until very recently the whole Resident Evil modding community relied solely on a Maya 3DS script that a Chinese dude named Maliwei777 created in 2012. The community cherished that script but it got harder and harder to get the correct 3DS version to run it.