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5 posts total
Zack Weinberg

@jwildeboer I would like to suggest that the specific medium used for communication (e.g. a mailing list) is not essential to "that simple approach"; what's essential is

1. The things every project should have are: a website, a source code archive, a bug tracker, and a small number (only the biggest projects will need more than one) of discussion groups.

2. All of these are *asynchronous* communication media. There can be official synchronous communication media as well (e.g. an IRC channel) but they are strictly secondary. In particular, final decisions are never made via a synchronous meeting, and participation in synchronous communication is never required.

3. All of these are implemented using open protocols for which fully capital-F Free Software clients exist. (Use of non-free server-side software is discouraged but not completely forbidden.)

@jwildeboer I would like to suggest that the specific medium used for communication (e.g. a mailing list) is not essential to "that simple approach"; what's essential is

1. The things every project should have are: a website, a source code archive, a bug tracker, and a small number (only the biggest projects will need more than one) of discussion groups.

3 October at 19:42 | Open on hackers.town
Zack Weinberg

@jwildeboer To me, the most important aspects of this, that have gotten lost, are: _small_ number of _asynchronous_ discussion groups. Open protocols and FLOSS clients are important, but not nearly as urgent as consolidating discussion and decision-making authority in a strictly limited number of places, and making sure that all those places are asynchronous. These are what make a project accessible to newcomers with limited time and social energy.

3 October at 19:47 | Open on hackers.town
Zack Weinberg
Zack Weinberg

oh wow they found place cells in zebrafish thetransmitter.org/spatial-cog

fish brains don't have any obvious _structural_ analogue of the mammalian hippocampus, but this suggests that the _functional_ analogue evolved very, very early in vertebrates; maybe even earlier than vertebrates (we know octopuses have excellent spatial memory, after all)

also they had to invent a robotic microscope that chases the fish larvae around, that's nifty in itself

oh wow they found place cells in zebrafish thetransmitter.org/spatial-cog

fish brains don't have any obvious _structural_ analogue of the mammalian hippocampus, but this suggests that the _functional_ analogue evolved very, very early in vertebrates; maybe even earlier than vertebrates (we know octopuses have excellent spatial memory, after all)

28 August at 15:19 | Open on hackers.town
Zack Weinberg

It's late enough to be hacker hours, if you're as old as I am. Gonna write down a bunch of rambly thoughts about #xz and #autoconf and capital-F Free Software sustainability and all that jazz. Plan is to edit it into a Proper Blog Post™ tomorrow. Rest of the thread will be unlisted but boosts and responses are encouraged.

2 April at 0:51 | Open on hackers.town
Zack Weinberg

Starting with the very specific: I do not think it was an accident that the xz backdoor's exploit chain started with a modified version of a third party .m4 file to be compiled into xz's configure script.

It's possible to write incomprehensible, underhanded code in any programming language. There's competitions for it, even. But when you have a programming language, or perhaps a mashup of two languages, that everyone *expects* not to be able to understand — no matter how careful the author is — well, then you have what we might call an attractive nuisance. And when blobs of code in that language are passed around in copy-and-paste fashion without much review or testing or version control, that makes it an even easier target.

So, in my capacity as one of the last few people still keeping autoconf limping along, I'm thinking pretty hard about what could be done to replace its implementation language, and concurrently what could be done to improve development practice for both autoconf and its extensions (the macro archive, gnulib, etc.)

Starting with the very specific: I do not think it was an accident that the xz backdoor's exploit chain started with a modified version of a third party .m4 file to be compiled into xz's configure script.

It's possible to write incomprehensible, underhanded code in any programming language. There's competitions for it, even. But when you have a programming language, or perhaps a mashup of two languages, that everyone *expects* not to be able to understand — no matter how careful the author is — well,...

2 April at 1:05 | Open on hackers.town
Zack Weinberg

@marcan this is a serious question: what (besides developer hours) would stand in the way of decoupling the Wayland *interfaces* from the Wayland *display server*, and making that display server implement all of the X11 interfaces as well as all the Wayland interfaces?

I ask this question because it seems like this refactoring might be the path of least resistance toward implementing the missing accessibility features in Wayland-the-display-server.

15 May 2023 at 22:05 | Open on hackers.town
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