Also, the author has a standalone blog post on the topic from 2011, Expression Parsing Made Easy.

Put a rescue distro on a USB stick. When you first boot the laptop, use the rescue distro. Write down the USB IDs (lsusb) and PCI IDs (lspci). Read through the kernel boot log (sudo dmesg | less) and write down the names of any kernel drivers that might matter; WiFi, GPUs, USB bridges, and keyboard layouts are important in particular. For laptops, look up manufacturer-specific drivers for keyboards, fans, and power management.

Linux requires about 8MiB of RAM to boot. The entire netbook movement relied on machines with 2GiB or less; I remember putting Linux onto a 2GiB Sony VAIO that had struggled to boot Windows. Your laptops aren’t too small, but you may be choosing distros with poor hardware support or large monolithic packages. I bet that one of Debian, Gentoo, or NixOS would boot on those machines that still work; of those, Debian is probably easiest.

Old laptops sucks. Windows use to be very efficient. XP and 7 has held up very well after all these years. And most importantly Linux isn’t a one size fits all solution.

Nah, Windows sucked back then too. If a machine boots Windows XP or Windows 7, then it can easily be made to boot an out-of-the-box Linux distro. The Asus machine you listed might have some boot issues, but the Acer and Dell do not appear different from any of the Acers or Dells that I’ve put Linux on in the past decade. My daily driver is a $150 refurbished Dell Latitude 5390 running NixOS.

It’s not even an analogy; pointers and reference mechanics are the same concept in programming and linguistics. See the page on referents for an example blend of viewpoints.

Why not? What tone would you take if you wanted folks to regret posting unpaid advertisements?

I would rather use Magic Wormhole if I have to have an intermediate server operated by somebody else.

Your protocol isn’t documented enough to allow interoperability. It is important for folks to be able to develop their own clients and frontends; the ecosystem becomes richer and more resilient to attacks when there are many different implementations.

I’m not sensing an awareness of capabilities. Access to a file is one of the classic examples of a capability and a file-sharing system should be oriented around ensuring that references to files are unforgeable and copyable.

The terms of service are unacceptable and I won’t be trying out the product. I can point at exactly what’s wrong; talk to your attorney for details.

Users are expected to respect the intellectual property rights of others when using the app.

You don’t understand what file-sharing technology is used for.

We reserve the right to introduce tools and technologies for monitoring the performance of the app and improving its functionality. By using the app, you acknowledge and agree to this potential monitoring.

Ah yes, because telemetry has never been met with user backlash.

The company does not collect user data, apart from what is needed for monitoring tools to ensure the app’s stability and to make improvements.

You don’t need user data for that. Y’know what’s a lot easier? Just don’t collect user data!

We may also use Sentry.io for error monitoring and NLevel Software for analytics.

I block those.

The app may include functionality to report users, and we reserve the right for this functionality to send necessary details for any investigation.

Ah yes, completely fair that somebody accused of misbehavior gets their local data exfiltrated too.

Meanwhile Magic Wormhole merely tells us that it is MIT licensed and we can do whatever we like with it.

The author would do well to look up SGML; Markdown is fundamentally about sugaring the syntax for tag-oriented markup and is defined as a superset of HTML, so mistaking it for something like TeX or Word really demonstrates a failure to engage with Markdown per se. I suppose that the author can be forgiven somewhat, considering that they are talking to writers, but it’s yet another example of how writers really only do research up to the point where they can emit a plausible article and get paid.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft bought PowerPoint, GitHub, LinkedIn, and many other things—but it did in fact create Word and Excel. Microsoft is, in essence, a sales company. It’s not too great at designing software.

So close to a real insight! The correct lesson is that Microsoft, like Blizzard, is skilled at imitating what’s popular in the market; like magpies, they don’t need to have a culture of software design as long as they have a culture of software sales. In particular, Microsoft didn’t create Word or Excel, but ripped off WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

Forget about your job for a moment. In general, why are you willing to set a threshold on how accessible your work is? I urge you to forget about how callous your employer wants you to be.

across the Internet … doesn’t require storing data twice

A flavor of the CAP theorem applies here; if you want your data to be available even during network partitions (and those are going to happen on the Internet!) then it has to be duplicated somehow. For example, I still have a soft spot for Tahoe-LAFS, which allows users to control how much duplication will be used and typically is configured to have some redundancy. Typical cloud providers build redundancy into their storage products; for example, it’s known that Google’s Colossus storage system uses Reed-Solomon to trade space for durability.

Nah, just use direnv instead, comrade.

Shit, I didn’t realize you were so young. Back in the 90s, before 9/11, none of these disclosure requirements existed; only a customs declaration was required to enter the country, and the naturalization process consisted of paying a fee, taking a test, and swearing an oath. We used to associate this sort of disclosure requirement with petty kingdoms like Bahrain or Thailand, where there are laws against insulting the monarch and therefore a justification for thought police. We shouldn’t let any of the four presidents who have slid us into fascism avoid the blame.

For what it’s worth, most of your comments aren’t eligible for copyright; they aren’t sufficiently original or information-packed. Just like @[email protected] and their licensing efforts, it’s mostly a vanity to attach a license to unoriginal one-line throwaway jokes. I wouldn’t say that it’s arrogant so much as lacking in self-awareness; a one-liner must be deeply insightful, contain a pun or paraprosdokian, address the current zeitgeist, or otherwise be memorable above and beyond the time and place that contextualized it.

Become a kernel contributor first. I don’t think it’s acceptable to stand outside a community and ask how you can control it by throwing money at it.

Well, here is a very funny one-off commit, but my biggest effort was probably substantial parts of a couple AMD/ATI GPU drivers, well-summarized here. As usual, that was a team effort, with particular credit to Deucher (AMD), Glisse (radeon maintainer), and Airlie (DRM/DRI maintainer). So, put up or shut up. Or, to paraphrase the sentiment that you seem to not grok: talk is cheap; show us your code.

Let me make it clear. I call out brigading because it is useless noise that distorts and obfuscates the kernel development process. I don’t care that you’re salty that I’m pointing out that your “absolute crickets” comment is not only incorrect, but empty in the sense that your lack of perception is not a substitute for the actual process of kernel development. Additionally, in this case, it seems like you’re still focused on personalities rather than the underlying computer science; I expect “absolute crickets” when asking you about the topic of memory safety.

I expect you to have zero kernel commits to your name.

Why does your opinion matter? You’re a chicken, not a pig.

Be less of a TERF.

That’s not a real apology. Be contrite – what will you change in your life, going forward, to be less hateful?

Your argument is completely specious. Re-read that list. Assembly is a second language in the kernel already, and really it’s multiple languages, one per supported ISA. Perl and Python scripts are used to generate data tables; there are multiple build-time languages. eBPF is evaluated at runtime; the kernel contains bytecode loaders, JIT compilers, and capability management for it. The kernel has already paid the initial cost of setting up a chimeric build process which evaluates many different languages at many different stages.

Martin’s already in the list of maintainers for another subsystem; this is a territorial play by Hellwig. Any kernel developer would recognize this; you don’t seem especially familiar with kernel social dynamics either! Also please fix your formatting if you’re going to copy-and-paste rather than linking.

Whose arguments are you apologizing for? Read the thread backwards. Your claims about C and kernel policy were wrong, therefore @[email protected]’s point about multiple languages was right, therefore your main defense of Hellwig acting in good faith is unevidenced. So, are you still so ready to insist that Hellwig is arguing in good faith? Would you say that this thread has adequately discussed the technical details and is ready to return to the overarching political point?

I would recommend looking at English WP’s style guide on weasel words. Rather than matching evidence and countering claims, you’ve set up a nest of strongly-held opinions with words like “basically”, “personal experience”, “I believe”, “an opinion of course”, “it isn’t just me”, and refused to actually directly engage with the evidence scrutinized. Given that it takes maybe five minutes to find even just one piece of assembly that has no justification for not being written in C, I think that it’s fair to characterize your position as inconsistent with actual kernel-hacking practices at best.