DNS is the most neoliberal shit system that too many have just accepted as how computers work and always worked to the point where I have heard actual landlord arguments deployed to defend it

It’s administered by ICANN, which is like the ideal neoliberal email factory NGO that justifies the de facto monopoly of a tiny few companies with responsible internet government-stewardship stakeholderism, etc type bureaucracy while upholding the right of domain landlords to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars in rent for like 37 bytes on a server somewhere lol

Before this it was administered by the US military-industrial complex, you can thank Bill Clinton and the US Chamber of Commerce for this version of it along with Binky Moon for giving us cheap .shit TLDs for 3 dollars for the first year

Never forget the architects of the internet were some of the vilest US MIC and Silicon Valley ghouls who ever lived and they are still in control fundamentally no matter how much ICANN and IANA claim to be non-partison, neutral, non-political, accountable, democratic, international, stewardshipismists

“Nooooo we’re running out of IPv4 addresses and we still can’t get everyone to use the vastly better IPv6 cuz uhhh personal network responsibility. Whattttt??? You want to take the US Department of Defense’s multiple /8 blocks? That’s uhhhh not possible for reasons :|” Internet is simultaneously a free-market hellscape where everyone with an ASN is free to administer it however they want while at the same time everyone is forced into contracts with massive (usually US-based) transit providers who actually run all the cables and stuff. Ohhh you wanna run traffic across MYYYYYYY NETWORK DOMAINNNNNNN??? That’ll be… 1 cent per packet please, money please now money now please money now money please now now nwoN OWOW

  • piggy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    I’m not entirely sure what you mean tbh. Like if something changes in a library you linked against? I guess you would have to rebuild it but you would have to rebuild a shared library too and place it into the system. Actually, you don’t necessarily have to rebuild anything, you can actually just relink it if you still have object files around (like OpenBSD does this to relink the kernel into a random order on every boot), just swap in a different object file for what you changed

    Okay let’s say I am writing MyReallyCoolLibrary V1. I have a myReallyCoolFunction(). You want to use myReallyCoolFunction in your code. Regardless if your system works on API or ABI symbols, what a symbol is is a universal address for a specific functionality. So when my library is compiled it makes a S_myReallyCoolFunction, and when your app is compiled it makes a call S_myReallyCoolFunction and this symbol needs to be resolved from somewhere.

    So static linking is when you compile the app with S_myReallyCoolFunction inside of it so when it sees call S_myReallyCoolFunction it finds the S_myReallyCoolFunction in the app data. Dynamic linking is when it finds call S_myReallyCoolFunction in a library that’s a file on your machine. Plan9 uses static linking.

    So let’s talk about this what it means for “code portability”. Let’s say I make an MyReallyCoolLibrary V1 and I have to change a few things, here are alternate universes that can happen:

    • I don’t change myReallyCoolFunction
    • I change myReallyCoolFunction but I do not change its behavior, I simply refactor the code to be more readable.
    • I change myReallyCoolFunction and I change its behavior.
    • I change myReallyCoolFunction and change it’s interface.
    • I remove myReallyCoolFunction.

    So let’s compute what this should mean for encoding a Symbol in this case.

    • myReallyCoolFunction from V2 can stay declared as S_myReallyCoolFunction
    • myReallyCoolFunction from V2 can stay declared as S_myReallyCoolFunction
    • myReallyCoolFunction from V2 has to be declared as S_myReallyCoolFunctionNew
    • myReallyCoolFunction from V2 has to be declared as S_myReallyCoolFunctionNew
    • I technically no longer have an S_myReallyCoolFunction

    Now these are the practical consequences for your code:

    • none, everything stays the same and code written to V1 can use V2.
    • none, everything stays the same and code written to V1 can use V2.
    • app refactor - everything written for V1 has to change to use V2. The app may no longer be able to work with V2.
    • app refactor - everything written for V1 has to change to use V2.The app may no longer be able to work with V2.
    • app refactor - everything written for V1 has to change to use V2.The app may no longer be able to work with V2.

    So now to make code truly portable I must now remove the app refactor pieces. I have 2 ways of doing that.

    1. Version resolution from inside the system by managing lib paths most likely.
    2. V2 must include all symbols from V1

    With #1 you have the problem everyone complains about today.

    With #2 you essentially carry forward all work ever done. Every mistake, every refactor, every public API that’s ever been written and it’s behaviors must be frozen in amber and reshipped in the next version.

    There is no magic here, it’s a simple but difficult to manage diagram.

    Plan 9 is a carefully tuned system ofc and I obviously have the Plan 9 brainworms but like…

    I agree that Plan 9 is really cool, but in practice Linux is the height of active development OS complexity that our society is able to build right now. Windows in comparison is ossifying, and OSX is much simpler.

    I’ve never written any programs that were subject to such strict verification tbh. I had to look up what “DSL” means lol, Wikipedia says “definitive software library”.

    DSL in this case means Domain Specific Language

    I rly think it’s not such a problem most of the time, code changes all the time and people update it, as they should imo,

    But here’s the problem with this statement, it unravels your definition of “code portability”. The whole point of “code portability” is that I don’t have to update my code. So I’m kind-of confused about what we’re arguing if it’s not Flatpak style portability, it’s not code portability, what are we specifically talking about?

    And that formal verification can only get you as far as verifying there are no bugs but it can’t force you to write good systems or specifications and can’t help you if there are things like cosmic rays striking your processor ofc hehe

    The formal verification can only reify the fact that you need something called Foo and I can provide it. The more formal it is the more accurate we can make the description of what Foo is and the more accurately I can provide something that matches that. But I can’t make it so that your Foo is actually a Bar because you meant a Bar but you didn’t know you needed a Bar. We can match shapes to holes but we cannot imbue the shapes or the holes with meaning and match on that. We can only match geometrically, that is to say (discrete) mathematically.

    I agreee, this isn’t just a technological problem to me but also a social one. Like ideally I would love to see way more money or resources for computer systems research and state-sponsored computer systems. Tbh I feel like most of the reason ppl focus so much on unchanging software, ABIs, APIs, instruction sets, operating systems, etc is cuz capitalists use them to make products and them never changing and just being updated forever is labor reducing lol. When software is designed badly or the world has changed and software no longer suits the world we live in (many such cases), we (the community of computer-touchers lol) should be able to change it. Ofc there will be a transition process for anything and this is quite vague but yeh

    I generally agree with this sentiment but I think the capitalist thing defeating better computing standards, tooling, and functionality is the commodity form. The commodity form and its practical uses don’t care about our nerd shit. The commodity form barely cares to fulfill the functional need it’s reified form (e.g. an apple) provides. That is to say, the commodity form doesn’t care if you make Shitty Apples or Good Apples as long as you can sell Apples. That applies to software, and as software grows more complex, capitalism tends to produce shitty software simply because the purpose of the commodity form is to facilitate trade not to be correct/reliable/be of any quality.