> The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical.
which ideology? Are people saying that there's an ideology of pushing rust for things without concern for quality? Sincere question, because I'm seeing that on this thread and I wasn't aware that that was a thing beyond the "re-write it in Rust" meme.
Beside the license thing mentioned, rust folks are obsessed with an idea of memory safety to an extent of discarding every other value in programming. To the extent of considering other choices "immoral". This manifests in their disproportionate initiatives of rewriting otherwise fine programs. Of course this doesn't include copious amounts of unsafe in popular libraries because can't leave any benchmarks defeated. But somehow Go is sinful because multiword data races are theoretically memory unsafe (a property which has led to zero (0) CVEs). This may also be the result of jealousy that something plebian like Go became more popular than their perfectly designed language.
Let's not mention other aspects of security, such as the recent supply chain issue, or the old story of the serde maintainer shipping a binary blob just because...
As I have told the authors privately, I find it quite difficult to take their claim that they "don't care about licensing" seriously. 13/14 of the projects under uutils are relicensing GNU or GPL'd software. The other one, shadow-rs, is totally vibe-coded, and the README mistakenly says the original shadow is GNU software under the GPL, which is neither true. If 14/14 are relicensing, or in that one case, what is thought to be relicensing, the simple explanation is that it is an explicit goal of the project.
Cargo culting is still a thing, the power imbalance is still real here. Kicking people out is generally much trickier than letting them in, these aren't simple things. Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
These missionaries don't come in with an army. Its more often small families or a couple of individual vs entire villages of natives and the "conversion" is done via talking, persistence and kindness rather than by force.
> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
Shouldn't that be a good thing according to your logic? Its not like the global ideas mart is less different from their own society than what the missionaries bring and it would be quite presumptuous to say that your beliefs or those that you consider "global ideas" are better for as yet untouched tribes than those of christian missionaries.
At the risk of taking the bait, what percentage of PNG highland villagers living in grass thatched huts do you think have 24x7 electricity and broadband Internet and intermediate to advanced level literacy in one of the Internet's major languages?
It’s not bait. I don’t think the OP that I responded to was speaking about the mechanics of introducing these populations to the Internet (they’re welcome to correct me) but that they shouldn’t be introduced to such things or that the introduction would be tantamount to exploitation of some sort.
I read it more as that a remote highlands PNG villager is not "innoculated" against the concept of, and is not aware of the methodologies that will be used by odd foreigners who have a well thought out plan to convert people to their specific ideology.
Like, if you're out shopping and some person starts up a weirdly friendly conversation with you that leads to a MLM sales pitch, you already know that's a thing which exists and why you're almost certainly not interested in participating even before the pitch arrives.
It's also immoral to expose isolated populations to all manner of the modern world's vices, optimized to be maximally addictive and maximally extractive, for which they have zero defense or even knowledge of their dangers.
But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not. It's like offering drugs to children saying they can choose if they want it. Children simply aren't equipped to make that decision, neither are people in these populations. I don't think we should keep them isolated, but contact should be limited initially. The technology we introduce them should be limited, enough to increase their quality of life and eliminate disease and so on without being utterly disruptive. Over time more technology and information can be introduced.
No population should be kept living a life we would consider extreme poverty out of some noble ideal. But we also shouldn't completely disrupt their way of life out of a different noble ideal. Wealth as we understand it isn't the only thing of value. Human connection, meaning anchored in community and deep roots, a sense of belonging and so on, are what really matter. Introducing modernity to such populations will sweep all of that away in one motion. These people would be left adrift in an alien world devoid of personal meaning, their only solace whatever addiction appeals to them most.
> But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not.
Why can't you say that about, idk, folks on welfare in the United States? How are they in a position to decide whether buying pop on food stamps is what they want or not? Maybe a woman doesn't really have the tools she needs to decide whether she wants to keep a pregnancy until she's had some counseling and time to cool off?
Obviously I'm not comparing these situations directly, and frankly I'm not sure you're wrong, but the point of view you are expressing here leads us to all of those scenarios and I think we should reconcile that.
I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds. Our flying machines combust jet fuel, birds can fly by ATP. Not to mention earth-destructing.
And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)
> I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds
This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds!
You have to look at the energy spent for moving a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits)
For a plane that’s roughly 80 tonnes of kerosene for 170 tonnes dry weight on a similar distance (787). Energy density of fat and kerosene are actually pretty close so you can just look at the kg of fuel burned per kg of payload for the trip. For a bird that’s 1kg of fuel per kg transported and for the plane that’s ~0.5kg per kg. So roughly twice as efficient.
So from a pure energy point of view it’d be more efficient to put all the migratory birds in a 787 than letting them fly on their own!
Fascinating! Though how much of that would be due to a birds baseline metabolism? Wouldn’t be a fair comparison if that includes the birds basic energy costs of living.
To be completely fair to the birds, I think a lot of this comes from the fact that what matters for flying efficiency gets better as you size up thanks to the square-cube law: the drag is reduced and the engine efficiency increases.
You could not scale down a plane to the size of a bird and match their efficiency. On the other hand you also couldn’t scale a bird to the size of a plane so I guess we can call it even!
> why cant people here just read this for face value?
Because that would be foolish.
What part of public good is stealing giant corpuses from their owners and selling them back to them? People who show contempt for laws do so pretty consistently usually.
It's really sad that people fall for this stuff over and over again.
Just cause something has already happened many times to other people doesn't mean it's not special or interesting when it happens to you. It's been extraordinary seeing this unfold before me.
And I think it's worth noting that the novel thing about what's happening now is that, unlike before, when physical labor was devalued and commodified, we are now seeing intellectual labor, even at its highest levels, suffering the same fate.
My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now.
I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
Hah, I think I agree with this, but from a cynical, dark perspective.
I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). But on the job I often get annoyed by folks who don't want to do the obviously correct thing, or want to fight against good refactoring or design feedback (usually not from me.. I'm like a 'B' tier programmer and in awe of the 'A' level I work with). People treat software as an art and while you want to be artful in execution, if you are a paid artist, it is a commission work. Honor the requirements of the company (business needs) and not just your personal feelings and desire to only make art.
> I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project.
The minute I also realized this, I moved out of software development into a different function. Pooping out lines of ugly code full of compromises was just not my thing. If I was still coding for work when AI came around, that would have definitely pushed me out of the career.
I dabbled in product management and then went over to project management. I figure at least here, making compromises and negotiating with people is a specific requirement of the job, and not a shortcut to being able to produce Moar Output Faster.
This is partially why my pride in my work is not around my code, but the product or output it creates. People care that the interfaces are good, the code style matches, and that it's maintainable. But they don't really care if it's clever or smart or creative. To me, the creativity is in the product, the tool, in what the code does. AI lets me be more creative in the tools I build because I can justify taking the time to build them. I can create more interesting products because I can get past the mundane.
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