Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I can lend some systems expertise from my own tinkering if you need it! a lot of my designs never got out of the embarrassingly stupid stage (what if my init system was a Prolog runtime? what if it too was emacs?) but it’s all worth exploring
Not only can you describe the desired system state and have your init figure out dependencies, you can list just the dependencies and have your init set up all possible system states until you find one to your liking!
Emacs as pid 1 is a classic of the genre, but a prolog too? Wouldn’t a Kanren make more sense or is elisp not good for that?
Sounds like the real horseshoe theory is that nerds of all kinds of heterodox political stripes will eventually reinvent/discover Lisp and get freaky with it. A common thread connecting at least RMS, PG, Eich, Moldbug, suzuran, jart, Aphyr, self and me.
exactly! the way I imagined it, service definitions would be purely declarative Prolog, mutable system state would be asserts on the Prolog in-memory factbase (and flexible definitions could be written to tie system state sources like sysfs descriptors to asserts), and service manager commands would just be a special case of the system state assert system. I’m still tempted to do this, but I feel like ordinary developers have a weird aversion to Prolog that’d doom the thing.
this idea was usually separate from the Prolog init system, but it took a few forms — a cut-down emacs with a Lisp RPC connection to a session emacs (namely the one I use to manage my UI and as a window manager) (also, I made a lot of progress in using emacs as a weird but functional standalone app runtime) and elisp configuration, a declarative version of that implemented as an elisp miniKanren, and a few other weird iterations on the same theme.
the common thread might boil down to an obsession with lambda calculus, I think
I ask you this hoping it isn’t insulting, but how are you with os kernel level stuff?
it’s not insulting at all! I’m not a Linux kernel dev by any means, but I have what I consider a fair amount of knowledge in the general area — OS design and a selection of algorithm implementations from the Linux kernel were part of what I studied for my degree, and I’ve previously written assembly boot and both C and Rust OS kernel code for x86, ARM, and MIPS. most of my real expertise is in the deeper parts of userland, but I might be able to give you a push in the right direction for anything internal to the kernel.
great! I’ll show you something soon hopefully and see what you think
sounds good!