Drew DeVault

I write code

Natural language proficiency:
★★★★★ 🇺🇸
★★★☆☆ 🇯🇵
★★☆☆☆ 🇳🇱
★★☆☆☆ 🤟
★☆☆☆☆ 🇫🇷

Does not want to talk to you about cryptocurrency or AI

Website: https://drewdevault.com
Code: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn
Location: Amsterdam
Pronouns: he/him

Public Key

npub1d88002d7uxl3cg9pwtgsnpgxs7qrmrgetqara0p4kw7d3yy4r50qtz57ex

NIP-05 Address

drewdevault_at_fosstodon.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxnnhh4xlwr0cuyzsh95gfs5rg0qpa35v4sw37hs6m80xcjz2368sprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wdmksetjv5hxxmmd5we2hy

Publishing to

relay.noswhere.com

Author Public Key

npub1d88002d7uxl3cg9pwtgsnpgxs7qrmrgetqara0p4kw7d3yy4r50qtz57ex

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Last Notes

2024-10-14 16:37:05

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read this carefully.
Stallman does not defend relationships with small age gaps.
Stallman defends *all* sexual relationships between minors over the age of 12 or 13 and adults of any age.
Stallman frequently illustrates this with age gaps of 20, 30, even 50 years when making his points.
Read the appendix, then shut your mouth.
https://stallman-report.org/on-sex-with-minors/

2024-09-25 11:53:50

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he didn't actually meaningfully apologize, and, importantly, did not change his behavior

2024-09-05 18:24:16

Send some ehugs if you can spare them

2024-09-05 10:20:55

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standard European gender affirming healthcare experience

2024-09-05 07:11:21

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say "no"

2024-09-04 17:39:41

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my broader political program regarding intellectual property calls for the following reforms:
1. Guaranteed access to food, shelter, healthcare, education, and other basic human rights for all people on Earth, so art isn't subject to capitalism
2. The abolishment of intellectual property as a legal concept
3. The requirement for source code to be distributed with software
In the meantime FOSS licenses are an important tool for bending an unjust system in a more just direction

2024-09-04 17:15:44

Property is an illusion, intellectual property doubly so

2024-09-04 11:00:33

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evince crashes on it for me :S

2024-09-04 10:29:16

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yes, it doesn't work well

2024-09-04 10:22:02

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only one that consistently works for me is xpdf and I hate xpdf

2024-09-04 10:16:24

I have had it up to HERE with PDF readers that cannot handle the ARM manual

2024-08-31 17:32:29

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email me about it and I'll send you some patches when I can spare some time, maybe on my train monday

2024-08-31 17:31:10

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not sure if it's supposed to look like this (or if a screenshot is illustrative for you)
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/057/820/020/456/608/original/544cb102ac79c92d.png

2024-08-31 17:29:30

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if you want to spend some time improving this website the typography is distracting and awful (for a sighted user, maybe it works well for you?)

2024-08-31 17:28:12

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it's fine because you're making 2 or 3 requests max, in parallel. It's more problematic on complex websites where that latency stacks up fast on a bunch of requests happening in serial. There are downsides to CDNs, too, especially with respect to privacy

2024-08-31 17:26:35

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I think we should focus on areas of higher impact. If the website was heavier I might agree with you, but for this site it's perfectly fine. Most important qualities for equitable access has much less to do with latency and more to do with computational cost, energy use (draining old batteries with JS), etc

2024-08-31 17:15:40

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who cares? It could take a full three seconds to load and be fine

2024-08-31 17:12:11

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shaving 10ms off of latency for a 200K page isn't really that important

2024-08-31 17:11:48

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why do you really need a CDN here? That's important for, like, Netflix, not really for static content

2024-08-31 10:39:55

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thanks. I know I haven't always presented my best self and it's something I've been consciously working on. I appreciate that being acknowledged.

2024-08-31 10:38:12

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At the same time I understand that the community is riled up and grieving a major burnout and that's not about me. So whatever.

2024-08-31 10:38:07

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I think what I would want is a public apology from the moderators and leaders of the Rust community for creating an environment where this toxicity is enabled, an acknowledgement of the problem and a call for the community to do better, for the moderators to crack down on this stuff, for community members to call this behavior out when it happens, and for my arguments to be received in good faith.

2024-08-31 10:25:14

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I even think the odds of getting decent funding for it long-term are good

2024-08-31 10:23:26

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I don't even think the changes of it being used have to be very slim. I think that if the project I proposed got on its feet, it would be used. I think it'd have excellent chances for success. The chances of a research OS project going somewhere are much slimmer but if you're going in with compatibility with a proven design as a core goal then your odds are way better.

2024-08-31 10:22:09

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Finally, if you think that I fly with toxicity in the Linux community and see me as an enabler rather than an ally, then you don't know jack shit about me and I have fucking receipts.

2024-08-31 10:19:11

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Oh, and a necessary caveat for this post: I think that the Rust-for-Linux developers have been playing the political game as well as they can, they're meeting the kernel devs on their turf and at their level, and treating people with respect and making reasonable arguments and taking their needs seriously. I'm talking about a problem with the Rust community as a whole moreso than the Rust-for-Linux team.

2024-08-31 10:17:16

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And for the record, there's nothing wrong with the political game being a necessary challenge to overcome. The toxicity is wrong, but the politics is not necessarily bad on the face of it. The Rust community is not going to get anywhere with the presumption that they're always right and everyone needs to toe the party line about memory safety yesterday or else. The Rust community tends to be bad at politics and makes that everyone else's problem.

2024-08-31 10:15:04

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I very much dislike the assumption that any serious greenfield osdev work is a lost cause. It's not.

2024-08-31 10:14:50

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And honestly the idea that we *have* to do it in Linux to get anything useful done at a practical scale for kernels is a really fatalistic assumption that spits in the face of just about any serious osdev project and condemns us to live with the design issues of Linux forever -- and believe me Linux has a lot of design issues. Even making a new kernel based on its general design gives us an opportunity to make a ton of sorely needed improvements.

2024-08-31 10:13:52

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Yes, the road I propose is not necessarily the fastest way to getting secure kernels in the hands of users, and it would be faster and easier if we could get Rust in Linux without having to play the political game. But given that the political game isn't going away, we have to consider the other road as an *option*.

2024-08-31 10:11:40

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And it's entirely true that while the political environment of Linux is, on the whole, pretty toxic, that there are legitimate political challenges to overcome with respect to Rust-for-Linux and even absent the toxicity it's going to call for a lot of work which isn't material to the goals of getting Rust in kernel space.

2024-08-31 10:10:55

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Yes, a better solution than leaving the Linux community to make your own way in the face of toxicity would be to address that toxicity head-on. And believe me I condemn in no uncertain terms the toxic environment of the Linux kernel. But a complete answer to this problem would be distracting from the goals of Rust-for-Linux, which is to say getting Rust in Linux, and if people are already burnt out I'd rather care for their needs first than put them aside to address the causes right away.

2024-08-31 10:08:54

Finding the kernels of truth among the bullshit and doing my best to respond in good faith: regarding the scope of a Linux-compatible kernel written from scratch... yes, it's large. But there are exactly zero real-world programs that use that utilize the entire ABI surface of the Linux kernel. You implement the parts that you need to run the software you want and it's useful for that purpose right away. e.g. a kernel that can run nginx is useful even if it doesn't have GPU drivers, for instance.

2024-08-31 09:56:45

The thing is that I fucking empathize with people who believe in a language and are frustrated with the pace of its uptake. Obviously. But I don't use that discomfort and frustration as an excuse to attack anyone who criticizes my language. It's pretty hard not to, given how personal those attacks tend to be, but ultimately I respect people as engineers making the right decisions for themselves and if that means my work isn't applicable to their needs then so be it.

2024-08-31 08:07:17

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ah, but filthy car non-owners aren't contributing to the GDP by not buying a car and really in what sense are they even human if so?

2024-08-30 17:22:50

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Oh, and one last thing: I'm not a kernel maintainer, I've barely contributed to the kernel, and I certainly don't hold the keys to any of the gates.

2024-08-30 17:05:41

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Rust isn't my language of choice and it's not conducive to the way I design software BUT it's clearly a very useful language that I think is probably the right way to implement the Linux kernel design -- and while I would design my own kernel some other way, a way in which those tradeoffs may not make sense, and I have plenty of critiques of Linux upstream -- I'm literally using Linux to write this comment so I must find it useful.

2024-08-30 17:00:16

I would be genuinely excited about a Linux ABI-compatible kernel written in Rust. I think there's a lot of opportunities to do cool stuff there. And if anyone thinks my distaste for Rust is so virulent that I couldn't possibly genuinely feel this way, consider that I was excited about SerenityOS despite it being written in what I strongly hold to be the worst programming language of all time

2024-08-30 16:50:18

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I'm enthusiastic about Redox but it's a huge gamble and it will require a lot of highly specialized work and frequent revisions of fundamental design assumptions before it starts getting anywhere useful -- and once it gets there, it's not necessarily certain that anyone will use it for anything. It's a novel OS research project. Whereas using the Linux kernel design from the outset gives you a fixed scope and saves you all of the research work and we know it works when it's done.

2024-08-30 16:21:52

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tivoization

2024-08-30 16:19:52

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fuchsia is not really trying to do what I propose here

2024-08-30 13:55:44

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one of the most powerful laptops released last year*

2024-08-30 13:52:54

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on what hardware?

2024-08-30 13:17:17

Rust for Linux revisited
https://drewdevault.com/2024/08/30/2024-08-30-Rust-in-Linux-revisited.html

2024-08-30 11:47:47

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I'm not this AGPL maximalist where I believe we need to put it into everything. Licenses have use-cases. And for a kernel AGPL makes zero sense. EUPL is a slightly better argument but even then, I don't think that strong of copyleft is well-justified for a kernel project. My kernels are GPL.

2024-08-30 11:44:46

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no, GPL is the right choice. GPL 3 probably, but tbh I get Linus's preference for GPL 2.

2024-08-30 11:44:46

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no, GPL is the right choice. GPL 3 probably.

2024-08-30 11:43:11

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I'd like everyone to shut the hell up about driver compatibility. Seriously. It was incredibly fucking annoying when Linux didn't have a competitive driver suite, too, and somehow we still managed to get to the point where Linux does have great driver support.
Fuck's sake. You write the drivers you need and then use the hardware that's supported, and if you want to support new hardware you write new drivers, you do not need to implement every driver overnight.

2024-08-30 11:39:08

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I think this is a fool's errand to be honest. The kernel has too much churn for this to be realistic.

2024-08-30 11:21:21

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RiiR glibc is a separate concern from implementing the Linux ABI

2024-08-30 11:17:19

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Anyone coming in to @ me with bad-faith insults targeting Rust developers is cruisin' for a blockin'

2024-08-30 11:10:18

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yes

2024-08-30 11:00:27

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this is where thinking about your target audience is important. It would make a lot more sense to appeal to, say, a datacenter use-case first than a desktop user. Or a mobile use-case, where the vendor can ensure that all of the drivers they need for their device are present. General-purpose comes later.

2024-08-30 10:57:41

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Rust would be a really good fit for a big Linux-style monolithic kernel and they could realize a lot of gains very, very quickly IMO.

2024-08-30 10:57:19

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I think there needs to be some time to heal but the Rust-in-Linux folks should really rally around a new Linux-compatible kernel project from scratch. It'd be wild. It would probably actually work, whereas Rust-in-Linux is still a huge gamble and a burnout machine.

2024-08-30 10:55:20

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it depends on the roadmap and target audience. Rust-in-Linux is an attractive target because everyone already uses Linux and they can get Rust into everything by making their play there. But it's an uphill battle and I think it's overall a bad idea; I blogged about this before and my opinions have been refined a bit since (more thought + watching how it's developed).
Making a new OS which is Linux-compatible would be much, much easier and faster.

2024-08-30 10:50:06

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Making a novel OS design is hard (Redox is trying) but if you are aiming to match the design of an established system and maximize compatibility then it's much, much easier.

2024-08-30 10:49:15

A motivated group of Rust developers could build a production ready mostly Linux-compatible kernel from scratch within 5 years without doing any politics on LKML
Passionate 3-4 person hobby OSes have achieved impressive levels of Linux compatibility very quickly. Pour the level of enthusiasm that Rust-in-Linux has into a greenfield project to build a Linux-compatible kernel and you would have astonishing gains very quickly.

2024-08-30 10:46:49

What the fuck is this elastic announcement

2024-08-30 08:45:22

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The idea of said Karen championing "inclusion" is essentially one of these "by the grace of your betters, we include you" approaches, which is still just racist/etc but a very common form of "polite" bigoted bias

2024-08-30 08:40:21

Honestly kind of feel like the inevitable outcome of the white HR Karen approved "DEI" terminology was always that it would be appropriated by bigots.
Should have always been called anti-racism or similar.

2024-08-30 07:35:36

Systems programmer showing off all of their homemade debugging tools
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/049/813/453/400/767/original/c56291385992cf7f.jpg

2024-08-29 08:28:20

Deadpool and Wolverine was atrociously bad and astoundingly successful which means we can expect much more where that came from

2024-08-28 18:11:02

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wut

2024-08-28 08:40:45

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there is no such thing as the "official" mono

2024-08-28 08:18:23

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trans-exclusionary radical fuckwits

2024-08-28 08:18:00

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quoting from the HN headline
Better put in the actual article content for sure, though

2024-08-28 08:15:10

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if you want to know more about the specific details of the .NET ecosystem, I can sum up my opinion by saying that .NET under Linux was pretty good with Mono until Microsoft decided to care about other platforms (motivated by their failed entry into the mobile market) and turned it into a massive flustercluck

2024-08-28 08:13:40

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I'm aware of these details, that's not the question -- the point is to critique the presumption of ownership and what's actually happening or changing hands when it's "donated"

2024-08-28 08:06:56

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"Hare, a programming language created by Drew DeVault..."
Wrong, Hare is a programming language built by a community of over a hundred people, who collectively own its intellectual property, who are governed by a social contract that can be revised at any time by any person, including you, assuming you can build sufficient enough consensus to achieve your goals, consensus which can be built from within or without.
This is true of every FOSS project even if upstream believes otherwise.

2024-08-28 08:03:48

Daily reminder for FOSS participants to reject auteurs and embrace communal ownership
Especially if the auteur in question is a business

2024-08-28 08:02:11

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microsoft blessed wine's fork is the most charitable interpretation IMHO. No one needs anyone else's permission to put up a tree, establish governance, and merge patches.

2024-08-28 07:53:16

"Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team"
What does that even mean? FOSS projects don't belong to anyone. Was there a trademark that was handed over? Do they mean that Microsoft isn't going to maintain it anymore and Wine volunteered to? Or Microsoft is pulling their sponsorship of Mono?

2024-08-28 07:49:04

We should reclaim "gender critical". By all rights it should refer to a critique of social norms surrounding gender as a binary trait assigned at birth. The term for someone who enforces patriarchal gender roles and denies the existence of trans people is TERF, transphobe, or misogynist, whichever applies best to the situation.

2024-08-25 21:32:22

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I miss poutine so much

2024-08-25 21:25:52

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good but not really comparable?

2024-08-25 21:22:21

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you misunderstand me

2024-08-25 21:19:23

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when I was served a Scottish breakfast there was haggis on it so

2024-08-25 21:17:05

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I will hand it to the Brits regarding the full English breakfast though, well done

2024-08-25 21:12:37

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Also, chicken biscuit is easily one of the best breakfasts imaginable

2024-08-25 21:07:13

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Any offended Europeans can come have a biscuit at my place, I'll make you some and you'll understand

2024-08-25 21:04:43

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"You're supposed to put jam on it or something", listen here you little shit

2024-08-25 21:02:54

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Why would I want to choke to death on a lame ass scone when I could have a buttery flakey soft moist biscuit (with gravy please)

2024-08-25 20:59:20

Scones suck, biscuits are where it's at, get it together Brits

2024-08-13 10:45:45

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me: scrolls the scroll wheel one notch on the discrete dial
firefox, six seconds later: "shit sorry I got you here's the bottom of the page"

2024-08-13 08:52:58

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me: clicks a button on the page
firefox: okay hang on I just need to freeze the UI for a few seconds to figure this out

2024-08-13 08:50:37

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me: does nothing
firefox: lemme pin this CPU
me: switches tabs
firefox: that'll be ready in 30 seconds
me: opens xkcd.com
firefox: aight imma crash

2024-08-13 08:48:35

Firefox is being a piece of shit today

2024-08-05 14:41:08

The internet with ads is such total ass

2024-07-09 18:29:58

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right

2024-07-09 08:39:48

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lol he's such a snowflake

2024-07-05 04:24:50

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SourceHut has been investing in IRC but in the end something new may be required

2024-07-04 21:07:29

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I know for a fact he uses visual studio

2024-07-04 13:00:36

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see https://harelang.org/documentation/usage/freestanding.html

2024-07-04 12:57:36

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it does not really require a runtime any more than C requires a runtime. Works very well for kernels, bootloader, etc. The extent of the runtime components are things like some language features expecting a memcpy implementation to be available

2024-07-03 15:17:14

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my reading of the OSI is that it's "deploliticized" in the sense that of an appeal to commercial interests
As for ESR and the modern right-wing factions of FOSS, what I mean to say is that I don't think that ESR was (or even is) a leader in this domain, that the contemporary ring-wing factions emerged more from global right-wing sentiment moreso than a natural evolution from ESR et al's faction(s), and today ESR has joined the modern right factions rather than forming them

2024-07-03 15:03:53

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he's a toxic jerk. I suppose that it's been around for a long time -- perhaps what I feel more is that it's been changing forms. What we're seeing now is more of the global "culture war" dripping into FOSS spaces, which seems like more of a distinct cut-off from the classic sexism kind of deal with see from ESR et al

2024-07-03 13:16:39

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has been for a while, he's a real piece of work

2024-07-03 13:15:43

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maybe I just wasn't exposed to it but I don't feel like this has been much of a problem until the last few years

2024-07-03 13:11:10

Another threat to FOSS: a small but growing community of right-wing conspiracy theorists ala lunduke et al