DRY is critically important as it pertains to correctness. If DRY is hard to achieve for technical reasons then back-reference comments and whatnot can suffice, but you really do want only one owner for each meaningful fact in your codebase.
That's not to be confused with syntactic similarity. I largely don't care if you have ten different identical circular buffer implementations, so long as semantically it's correct that when one changes the others don't. Depending on the language maybe it would make sense to use type aliases or extract some common subcomponents or something, but duplication itself isn't a problem.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
This looks hopelessly naive now. Programmers need to eat. Cyberspace runs on physical electricity and data centers. Communication requires physical cables and/or physical transmitters and receivers. Chips are manufactured in a physical location. You need a physical place to live. Your kids need schools and playgrounds.
The past 10 years if not longer have driven home the physicality of “cyberspace”.
Art without human input is pretty meaningless. It's just pretty colors, even if well executed. I guess there are people that vibe purely on kitch aesthetics. They don't have good taste ofc, but I guess from a capitalist perspective that's a market.
People are confused because since the 1960s literally the CIA intervened to disrupt the transmission of meaning in art, because it was a field dominated by "subversives" who were opposed to capitalism and imperialism. They promoted meaningless post-modern art that was purely aesthetic. So decades later, starved of good examples, people have no idea what art is anymore.
> In closing, let me reiterate this point so it is crystal clear. If you are a maintainer of a libre software project and you refuse a community port to another architecture, you are doing a huge disservice to your community and to your software’s overall quality. As the Linux kernel has demonstrated, you can accept new ports, and deprecate old ports, as community demands and interest waxes and wanes.
Every feature has a cost and port to a different architecture has a huge cost in ongoing maintenance and testing.
This is open source. The maintainer isn’t refusing a port. The maintainer is refusing to accept being a maintainer for that port.
A person is always free to fork the open source project and maintain the port themselves as a fork.
In my experience, as someone who has gone through this as maintainer of two decent sized projects, that simply doesn't work.
The author of the 'port' probably doesn't know your whole codebase like you, so they are going to need help to get their code polished and merged.
For endian issues, the bugs are often subtle and can occur in strange places (it's hard to grep for 'someone somewhere made an endian assumption'), so you often get dragged into debugging.
Now let's imagine we get everything working, CI set up, I make a PR which breaks the big-endian build. My options are:
1) Start fixing endian bugs myself -- I have other stuff to do!
2) Wait for my 'endian maintainer' to find and fix the bug -- might take weeks, they have other stuff to do!
3) Just disable the endian tests in CI, eventually someone will come complain, maybe a debian packager.
At the end of the day I have finite hours on this earth, and there are just so few big endian users -- I often think there are more packagers who want to make software work on their machine in a kind of 'pokemon-style gotta catch em all', than actual users.
There are many, many users for every one of us packagers. We (at least the four I am aware of, including myself) are not doing 'gotta catch em all', we're doing "we have been notified by users that this package (is not|no longer) working". And it looks like 'gotta catch em all', because there are so many users, still.
There are new users asking how to get Raspberry Pis into aarch64be mode in the Gentoo Arm project channels. There are thousands and thousands of Power Macs. SPARC servers with ridiculous amounts of cores and computer power are super cheap on eBay because Oracle ended support for them - and this is a great way to get a huge thread count cheap, if your software actually runs on it.
Make the BE CI optional if you need to. That way, the maintainer has time to find and fix it, and you can still merge other changes while it runs. What binutils did was have the BE CI run separately and specifically ping the BE maintainers - that way, they know the build's failing, and no one else is bothered with it.
> Will my system believe me? And how about their system, whoever “they” are? If not, then what else will I need to do to prove my birth date and age? Who will check if root can’t be trusted? How will they check?
If they ever seize your computer, they can probably also tack on computer fraud charges
I believe the USPTO has said that ai generated works are not copyrightable. They would likely have to fight this in many jurisdictions with different rules about these things.
The follow on question is "if one cannot copyright, does the same apply to licensing?"
I’m not a hater. LLMs on search is the best research tool I’ve ever used because it’s read everything and can find minutia buried in places it would take me a long time to find.
But there’s a huge difference between using it to assist focus, or as a study aide, and offloading the whole act of thinking itself.
I swear to god, people heard the story about how Socrates was against books and reurgitate this as argument against any critical view on AI usage. If this is the level of reasoning people have, nothing will be lost when cognitive skills decline through AI usage anyway.
There's an irony to people repeating this claim without even having read the Phaedrus. If they had, they'd understand that the concern with writing was that it was not able to respond as a human in dialogue. One could think that LLMs are an improvement in this regard, but for the fact that LLMs are actually autonomous sophists.
Socrates would have been against LLMs, and for good reason. Writing isn't unequivocally bad, but it is simply not a substitution for real dialogue and thought. We use books as a means by which to have more things to discuss with humans. LLMs can supplant the desire to even have dialogue with others, which is perhaps the more insidious thing.
>I swear to god, people heard the story about how Socrates was against books and reurgitate this as argument against any critical view on AI usage.
It's something we all learn in freshman english class. But it comes up over and over again because the general idea is true. You have to temper the unbridled optimism that comes with any new technology by contemplation of what may be lost. Otherwise we're spinning in circles.
Many times it's fine to repeat yourself. Many times it's fine for a component to cross multiple concerns.