briansmith

Interesting clip from my long-ago boss on how Linkerd went from the edge of bankruptcy to profitability with a simple change to their open-source vs. paid maintenance model. Basically, pay-for-stability replaced stability-for-free, not unlike RHEL vs Fedora.

(Sorry about the website it is hosted on): @isaacrlevin@www.tiktok.com

I see LLMs adding difficulty for people to communicate in a non-primary (L2) language. The LLM helps them fix and clarify grammar. On the other hand, the more refining done, the more the output looks like AI output. Sometimes it’s too tempting to write in the native language & have the LLM translate; results are even more AI-ish. Often they lack most intuition of natural writing in L2, so the output looks fine to them. Now I often am not confident whether a thing is AI-proofed vs AI-produced.

One more thought about OpenSSL: For over 10 years, maintaining OpenSSL has been, AFAICT, a completely thankless task for the people who do it. It is admirable how much they improved things considering the environment they are working in. That environment naturally results in a process where only improvements that can be made are ones that are *fully* funded or near zero cost, because most non-financial incentives have been totally annihilated. COBOL is a tempting, though unfair, analog.

At Mozilla, I as given the task of building an app signing mechanism for packaged installable web apps on FirefoxOS (Android but HTML5 instead of Java). I literally had a week to design it. Then I would have to implement in the next few. So, even though I hated it, I just chose Java’s signed JAR mechanism. This way, our partners could reuse the same tools they used for Android, and I just needed to implement the signed JAR verifier, which was something I could do in the time provided.

Why does OpenSSL (and forks) use `int` when it could use `enum`? I think the main issue is with the ABI of `enum`. It could be inconsistent even between compilers that agree on the rest of the ABI; in fact, the representation of enums was sometimes a compiler flag. C23 provides a potential solution: the equivalent of Rust’s `#[repr(c_int)]`. Then the issue becomes more of a *source* backward compatibility issue with older versions of the library, and the desire to support ancient compilers.

@jwz@mastodon.social The password manager that runs on your phone/laptop isn’t the Go stuff. As for LoC, do you count dependencies?

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange congratulations. You probably know already, but the preordering process through the nostarch website is comically bad. I cannot remember the last time I went through such a 1999-ish purchase flow.