Sunday, December 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 December 2019

No News December Edition

Tech News

  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been cancelled by Netflix.  (Forbes)

    This marks the 27th time the show has been cancelled, but the first time it has been cancelled specifically by Netflix.

  • The replacement for SMS has been hacked even before it gets implemented, sort of.  (Vice)

    It's not that RCS is broken so much as telcos (or "telecos" as Vice would have it) are idiots.

  • Modern Javacript tooling is too complicated.  (Changelog)

    Or rather, it's a fractally horrifying can of Plutonian nightmare worms.

  • UPX is the ultimate packer for executables.  (GitHub)

    It reduces my 8.3MB binary to 3.2MB with the minor downside that it breaks exception tracebacks (even if I don't strip the binary) and randomly segfaults on WSL.

    So not great in development but for delivering a production binary on platforms other than WSL it's a useful option.  Not only can you run a UPX binary directly, you can uncompress it to get back the exact original file.

    The resulting files are a little smaller than zip/gzip and you don't need to unzip them.  Unless you're getting tracebacks in production, anyway.

  • Election polls aren't broken, they're just...  No, wait, they're broken after all.  (Ars Technica)
    It’s easy to write off the power of polls when they pick the wrong winner. But doing so misses the intended purpose (and acknowledged capability) of polling: to capture a snapshot of public opinion—not to make a prediction.
    But when it comes to an election, that snapshot of public opinion is a prediction.

  • Files are hard.  Use SQLite.

    This isn't the usual complaint like "threads are hard", but a proper examination of what is required to provide a correct filesystem abstraction under all circumstances up to and including unreliable hardware.

    The answer is - if you want local ACID-compliant storage - just use SQLite.


Disclaimer: Plutonian nightmare worms are the worst kind of nightmare worms.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 321 words, total size 3 kb.

1 "You don’t want to miss this excellent debate/discussion all about JS tooling complexity."
That's where you're wrong, mate.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 02 2019 03:30 AM (Iwkd4)

2 You tried that UPX in WSL2 yet?  My understanding is that most problems with WSL are due to the way it implements Linux low-level calls by forwarding them to Windows, or something like that, but WSL2 isn't going to do that, so should improve compatibility.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried rewriting that program in C, to see how much (if any) better the linker shrinks the executable?  I mean, if you really wanna go down that rabbit hole you could recompile all your libraries that it uses, and rip out all the code that it doesn't actually use, so it's not there for the linker to not exclude.  (I suppose, in theory, you could do that in Crystal, too.)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 02 2019 03:33 AM (Iwkd4)

3 The curl binary, for example, is 220K, which is an order of magintude smaller than even the dynamically-linked binary produced by Crystal.  But we don't have any C programmers on staff other than myself, while they've all picked up Python without problems and could handle Crystal just fine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 02 2019 08:26 AM (PiXy!)

4 The way they are used by the US media, Polls are designed to be self-fulfilling predictions.

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, December 03 2019 02:59 PM (Ix1l6)

5 Yes indeed.  Hence the shrieking when they failed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 03 2019 08:39 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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