~so then how does one even understand this post? you have a person who appears to have done some sort of expert-level thing; however, their approach doesn't even make sense...?~

edit: GPU discussed here https://cognition.com/blog/factoring-rsa-260

I imagine you can perform operations on query plans to transform them and determine equivalence?

I feel like this is always the best design whenever possible.

> 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.

> Are people saying that there's an ideology of pushing rust for things without concern for quality?

Yes, there is. There are people who genuinely think quality does not matter as log as it is written in Rust as Rust is memory safe.

> There are people who genuinely think quality does not matter as log as it is written in Rust as Rust is memory safe.

Is this hyperbolic? Such people are in leadership places?

The original authors of uutils do not particularly care about licensing, and the Rust ecosystem defaults to MIT/Apache2. So they chose that.

Many people have decided that this decision supposedly specifically about licensing ideology.

You can make up your mind about which of the two you believe.

See also, for Ubuntu's take on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707948

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.

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...

> To the extent of considering other choices "immoral".

This is literally an /r/pcj meme.

What is /r/pcj? In any case, memes start due to real world examples.

Rewrite it in anything that isn't GPL.

With the motivation of then being able to use it in closed or non-GPL products down the line?

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.

> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.

Why not?

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.

I see- your interpretation may be the correct one.

It is immoral to treat another human being as too stupid to be exposed to others and worthy of your protection because you view them as primitive.

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.

That's a decision for them to make. If they don't want it by all means don't force it. But to say you shouldn't talk to them is unfathomably cruel.

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.

I agree the application of the logic doesn't end with isolated populations. The relevant difference is that those brought up in the modern world have/had the potential to engage with knowledge of addiction and other vices, and decide for themselves how to steer their lives in an informed way. We draw a somewhat arbitrary line for being responsible for oneself as the best way to structure society given the tradeoffs. There's just no sense in which these isolated populations as a whole can be sufficiently informed about the modern world to suitably navigate its complexities to lead to their prospering in it.

But on the other hand you are assuming the modern world is bad and so therefore exposure to it is a dangerous and negative thing. I'm here to tell you that having access to medicine and playing sports and whatever is pretty great too. It's not all bad. I think you're taking a little bit of this Star Trek version of "leave them alone to develop on their own" but if the shoe were reversed and there was an alien species out there that could come down and talk to us and share knowledge and potentially harmful things as well, I'd like to make that choice for myself.

It's certainly a complicated subject, but I'd just challenge you to think of the positive version as well, not just the negative (addiction/vices/&c). It seems you have a default negative view of the world, some of us have a default positive view of the world. Modern life is pretty awesome!

My concern isn't mainly about addiction and vices, its more about a loss of meaning and being adrift in an alien world. The addiction/vices are just what one falls into when your life becomes devoid of meaning. I think the mental health crisis that most of the western world seems to be engulfed by, despite living in an age of endless wonders, goes to show that there is something deeply wrong with our modern way of living. My caution is against introducing this "sickness" (for lack of a better term) into populations even less able to defend and preserve personal meaning against an onslaught of technology and ideas that would evaporate their personal sources of meaning in an instant. That is no gift to anyone.

I just think you are super focused on the negatives. My life is great, I don't have a mental health crisis, most of my friends are doing well and having kids and enjoying their lives, and more.

There might be something deeply wrong with the modern world (which by the way includes other countries ranging from, idk, Iran, to Vietnam, to Korea) but there are a lot of things deeply right about it: opportunity, human rights, women's rights, independence, opportunities to build rocket ships or sail the world. That seems like one hell of a gift that I wouldn't want to deny anyone. If anything, providing opportunities and giving human minds the chance to flourish and be creative seems less of a sickness and more of a cure.

The danger when making decisions on behalf of other people is in imagining yourself in their position, rather than imagining them in their position. So you have a happy fulfilled life, you have the kinds of human relationships that provide deep meaning to you, you have the right kind of curiosity and wonder to be fulfilled by witnessing burgeoning technological progress, etc etc. Yes, being deprived of all that would be very bad for you.

Now imagine someone psychologically very average whose source of meaning is in the familiar environment where they have an acceptable amount of status, broad community support and much social engagement. They have a peculiar culture and social practices which gives them deep personal meaning. Now imagine all of that is swept away; no social status, no familiar environment, cultural practices gone, extended family scattered to the wind. What value does the wonders of the modern world have to someone who has lost everything they value?

Consumerism, technological marvels, and endless entertainment are the modern world's answers to the waning sources of personal meaning in modern life. Turns out that it's all a very poor replacement.

Missionaries aren't there to inform the locals but to persuade them. They are intellectually dishonest.

I don't think they even have electricity, let alone the internet.

Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go

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.

Did some quick maths, it’s roughly 10% for the bird (2W, approx. 4g/day of fat, over 10 days) so not negligible but doesn’t change the full story.

And you could argue the plane also has a baseline metabolism ;)

Haha thanks for the check, I am, tbh, pretty surprised. It's within the same order of magnitude, which is interesting too.

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!

And yet

> 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.