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.
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?
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!
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).
I cannot for the life of me find what you’re referencing. I only remember the
sqlite/etilqsfiasco with McAfee.https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/a009acaca1fe25d909d8b5180c0120af1abc2b82/src/os.h#L56-L79
curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can’t even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.
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.
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
That’s actually the video I was retelling from memory.
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.
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.
If he hadn’t written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it’s a brilliant piece of software xD
And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd
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!
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
NTP is the one that comes to mind for me.
Basically every device uses it and until fairly recently was maintained by a single person
Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!
Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you’re on Systemd, are usually better suited.
So they have a donation/support page?
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.
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.
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.
I ain’t gotta laud that transphobic fascist for shit
In other words, the Scene is Dead
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.
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.
Idk who needs to know this, but in Norwegian “runke” means to jerk off. “runk” is the word you add a prefix to in conjugation to get the different inflections
- runke - jerk off
- runker - jerking off
- runket - jerked off
Etc…
We all needed to know this, especially on a day like today. Thank you 🥹
also the swedish meme subreddit is called r/unket
and runket translates to “the jerk”, as in a noun referring the act of (and/or the result of…) rubbing one out.
ie a Swedish circlejerk subreddit?
precisely
You meant suffix, not prefix. But this is pretty funny regardless
Runke is the verb form. Runk is the noun form. You can say “en runk”.
Runk means masturbation in Icelandic so that adds another layer of hilarity to this
Same in Swedish
I’m from the west coast of Canada, a euphemism for jerking off where/when I grew up is “pulling the pud.” Moving to the UK had some funny bits…like Christmas Pud…as in pudding(dessert). Pronounced slightly different, but my inner 6 year old had a laugh anyway.
I’ve heard “shaking hands with the unemployed”.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/pudendum
It’s a more general English phrase. Could come up with a good insult for transphobes with this though. “Pud CHUDs?”
Well…that’s kinda disappointing 😞.
I think we can workshop something out of Pud for transphobes. But it’s going to have to be tomorrow for me.
Well, what is it?
If I’m remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There’s a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” that’s just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: “As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there’s a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you.”
Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn’t think I’ve listened to that album since the 90’s. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.
God…Primus is such a great band. I’ll have to dig out my albums and have a listen again.
Wasn’t the phrase supposed to be “Primus sucks”? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.
That does ring a bell. I wouldn’t say I was a fan, I bought a few of their albums, and enjoyed them, but idk if I’d be able to name one of their albums or songs…
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The guy that runs Rufus.
Paul Eggart is the primary maintainer for tzdb, and has been for the past 20 years.
Tzdb is the database that maintains all of the information about timezones, timezone changes, leap whatever’s and everything else. It’s present on just about every computer on the planet and plays an important role in making sure all of the things do time correctly.If he gets hit by a bus, ICANN is responsible for finding someone else to maintain the list.
Sqlite is the most widely used database engine, and is primarily developed by a small handful of people.
ImageMagick is probably the most iconic example. Primarily developed by John Cristy since 1987, it’s used in a hilarious number of places for basic image operations. When a security bug was found in it a bit ago, basically every server needed to be patched because they all do something with images.
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.
I think this probably applies…
So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.
In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc…) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).
There are still updates regularly released for it too!
I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.
You might like the dark mod if you haven’t heard of it
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here’s the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
The curl author writes a lot about his struggles, but he’s also employed to maintain curl, so not really a good example
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Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the classic example. Jobs has some technical skill, but not a lot. He’s the “ideas guy” that all other “ideas guy” try to be. I don’t have a lot of respect for the “idea guy”; Jobs was a manipulative narcissist, and he should not be emulated.
Woz, OTOH, is an absolute genius, and one of the most genuinely nice people you’ll ever meet. Apple made him enough money that he can do whatever he wanted with his life, and what he wanted was to do cool things with computers and pull harmless pranks.
Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. That was more of a collaboration. They all had some level of technical and business skill mixed together. It wasn’t quite the complementary skillset we see with Jobs and Woz. A lot of Microsoft’s success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
And Woz wasn’t the only genius who worked at Apple at the time. Pretty much everyone who worked on the original Macintosh was brilliant.
Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.
The modern man uses
ripgrep👍What does that offer offer grep/egrep
-
much faster
-
proper unicode (and other encodings) support
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automatic recursion (no extra flags needed)
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can search inside compressed files/archives like gz/xz/zip (also see ripgrep-all) for even more archive support)
-
honors
.gitignoreand ignores binary/hidden files
probably a lot more things too
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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.
