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Hyperspace

hypercritical.co

491–500 of 503 posts

Re: Hyperspace

#491
post #441
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experimented with a similar, "hardlink farm"-style approach for deduplicated, browseable snapshots. It resulted in a small bash script which did the following: - compute SHA256 hashes for each file on the source side - copy files which are not already known to a "canonical copies" folder on the destination (this step uses the hash itself as the file name, which makes it easy to check if I had a copy from the same f…

Hard links are not a suitable alternative here. When you deduplicate files, you typically want copy-on-write: if an app writes to one file, it should not change the other. Because of this, I would be extremely scared to use anything based on hard links. In any case, a good design is to ask the kernel to do the dedupe step after user space has found duplicates. The kernel can double-check for you that they are really…

It was for me. I was using rsync with "--link-dest" earlier for this purpose, but that only works if the file is present in consecutive backups. I wanted to have the option of seeing a potentially different subset of files for each backup and saving disk space at the same time.

Restic and Borg can do this at the block level, which is more effective but requires the tool to be installed when I want to check out something.

Re: Hyperspace

#492
post #489
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the meta-characteristics of a user base. By allowing anyone to create issues, you are creating additional noise. Even if the signal to noise ratio were to be higher, you're still increasing total noise. There are limits to how practical it is to allow for more and more feedback and that threshold for a solo developer is quite low. Restricting your user base by charging for your work means that there is…

At any given time when I'm at a restaurant or grocery store, there's more food around and on the menu than the threshold for how much food that I as a single person can eat.

At a grocery store or restaurant, there’s no expectation that I examine every item individually, nor am I responsible for organizing the options categorically. Those are already handled for me by the establishment. My only responsibility is to navigate the choices and make a selection, and even then, there’s no 'wrong' choice, per se.

An issue tracker, on the other hand, requires active engagement from the developer. Every issue, even low quality ones, require some form of processing, be that responding, closing, or categorizing. While tools can assist a person in these tasks, the developer is ultimately still responsible for it.

I'm not saying people should only create closed-sourced paid software, but I strongly disagree with the idea that it's negatively affecting the quality of the software because there's no open issue tracker for people to post to.

It's not just github. It's every single issue tracker where users can submit feedback, some of which are almost entirely opaque, like Apple's feedback system. Look at Mozilla's issue tracker, or look at the mailing lists for linux. It's a lot of effort which simply is not worth it for a lot of people in a lot of cases.

Re: Hyperspace

#493
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he doesn't want to deal with thousands of support requests when making his apps open source and free. Who says you have to deal with support requests if you open source something? > All his apps are personal itches he scratched and he sells them not to make a profit but to make the barrier of entry high enough to make user feedback manageable. That makes no sense

> Who says you have to deal with support requests if you open source something? Almost anyone who has ever maintained popular open-source software, even if dealing with them means putting up a notice that says "Don't ask support questions" and having to delete angrily posted issues. My understanding from listening to his explanation is he wants to be able to support users and have an income stream to incentivize that…

This is my understanding as well.

There's a lot of merit to Open Source. But there's also a lot of spam, politics and drama that comes with opening up. That negativity is invisible to people who haven't encountered it, or are simply guilty of causing it.

Maintainer burnout is real; more power to John for choosing whatever keeps him focused on building good software.

Re: Hyperspace

#494
post #492
post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any given time when I'm at a restaurant or grocery store, there's more food around and on the menu than the threshold for how much food that I as a single person can eat.

At a grocery store or restaurant, there’s no expectation that I examine every item individually, nor am I responsible for organizing the options categorically. Those are already handled for me by the establishment. My only responsibility is to navigate the choices and make a selection, and even then, there’s no 'wrong' choice, per se. An issue tracker, on the other hand, requires active engagement from the developer.…

> An issue tracker, on the other hand, requires active engagement from the developer. Every issue, even low quality ones, require some form of processing

Nope.

Re: Hyperspace

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I have not actually had a chance to run it as a test yet

Best upload the source code somewhere, before you do. Otherwise, we'll never know why you lost all your files.

I had to do additional work on it, and it’s slower than the posted app, but it works

Re: Hyperspace

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you trust Claude with your hard drive?

Trust, but verify. We should always read and understand what gets spit out anyways. When doing something with any risk potential I first ask the model for potential risks with the output, and then I manually read the code. I also "recreated" this tool with Sonnet 3.7. The initial bash script worked (but was slow), and after a few iterations we landed on an fclones one-liner. I hadn't heard of fclones before, but work…

wow, just learned about fclones, does this also work with OS X’s CoW cloning?

Re: Hyperspace

#497

On Windows there is "Dev Drive" which I believe does a similar "copy-on-write" -thing. If it works it's a no-brainer so why isn't it the default? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/#dev-dri...

requires refs, which still isnt supported on the system drive on windows, iirc

Good to know. It is interesting to think how much electricity is wasted when most people don't have Copy-on-Write, all over the world.

Re: Hyperspace

#498
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, from listening to the podcast, a better summary is that if it becomes popular, he wants it to be worthwhile for him to keep working on. Apps like this can easily bit rot, and more users does often mean more work e.g. answering or filtering emails, finding more edge cases, etc. From his perspective that means having a income to dedicate time to this. I don't think he's interested in being an "infra…

> As someone who maintains critical open-source software, I can strongly empathize, even if it’s not an approach I would take. Pretty strange thing to say in the context of a closed source app.

> Pretty strange thing to say in the context of a closed source app.

My intent was to express sympathy to making a closed source app instead of an open source one.

Something must have got lost in translation because it fits the context exactly.

Re: Hyperspace

#499
post #494
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a grocery store or restaurant, there’s no expectation that I examine every item individually, nor am I responsible for organizing the options categorically. Those are already handled for me by the establishment. My only responsibility is to navigate the choices and make a selection, and even then, there’s no 'wrong' choice, per se. An issue tracker, on the other hand, requires active engagement from the developer.…

> An issue tracker, on the other hand, requires active engagement from the developer. Every issue, even low quality ones, require some form of processing Nope.

Yes, it does. The only way it doesn't is by not looking at the issue tracker at all. How do you figure it doesn't?

Re: Hyperspace

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust, but verify. We should always read and understand what gets spit out anyways. When doing something with any risk potential I first ask the model for potential risks with the output, and then I manually read the code. I also "recreated" this tool with Sonnet 3.7. The initial bash script worked (but was slow), and after a few iterations we landed on an fclones one-liner. I hadn't heard of fclones before, but work…

wow, just learned about fclones, does this also work with OS X’s CoW cloning?

Yes.
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