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Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

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Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#261

Post by binkHN »

nzoschke wrote: post #45

I feel the swing of the pendulum here. I own mostly but Apple gear right now but I’m being pulled back towards more open and extensible hardware and software. The GPU is a big one. Nvidia hardware unlocks a lot of gaming, graphics, video and machine learning stuff. Open vs closed is another one. Android development unlocks so much more hardware and software and peripheral and protocol support. For the first time in a…

> Android development unlocks so much more hardware and software and peripheral and protocol support.

Seconded. However, with each release of Android, Google tends to lock things down further.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#262

Post by muyuu »

binkHN wrote: post #254
kjhughes wrote: post #30

For those who might prefer text over video: Q: What's your operating system of choice, today? A: I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run Apple. Right now, recently, meaning within the last five years, I’ve become more and more and more depressed and [Laughter] what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious, but they are taking a lot of space and time to d…

> ...what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious... This is exactly how I feel about Microsoft Windows.

yep I think it about both, which is why I stopped using Windows many years ago and MacOS more recently

it's becoming more and more unbearable to use them even just part-time for testing purposes, etc

recently I'm more concerned about the lack of real alternatives for mobile

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#263

Post by stametseater »

Jasper_ wrote: post #244
stametseater wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The idea of flatpack is to change desktop linux culture by normalizing the installation of 3rd party software, particularly proprietary software that people otherwise wouldn't trust without some form of sandboxing. Who does this benefit? I can think of two groups of people. 1. Commercial software vendors who want more Linux users to install their proprietary software. 2. 'Transplants', new Linux users who are…

for 6 years you could get root on Debian with the "beep" command

In those 6 years, how many programs packaged and distributed by Debian were exploiting that?

If you can run the "beep" command, you can also edit the user's environment and from their easily escalate to root anyway. In modern desktop linux, the user is almost always the admin as well, a single person using their personal computer, so getting root is merely a matter of waiting until the next time that user uses sudo/etc. Windows tries to mitigate this sort of attack using secure UAC prompts that are apparently difficult for attackers to emulate, or so I've been lead to believe. But common desktop Linux distros don't require anything like that. Instead, the user has to be cognizant of such possibilities and not run programs from people and organizations they don't trust.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#264

Post by bitwize »

philistine wrote: post #208
speedgoose wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the people against touchscreen on MacOS finally retired or gave up the fight, so Apple is slowly preparing what Microsoft did years ago with Windows 8.

What Microsoft did, and still hasn’t finished. System preferences still contain massive amount of details contained in Windows 7 (and older!) style windows. At least Apple managed to move all their settings from one paradigm to the next in one year. I’m looking forward to the improvements they make to the app in the future.

They didn't finish it because they went hard, all in one go, and suffered consumer backlash as a result. From this Apple learned that you have to boil the frog slowly.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#266

Post by dcow »

lapcat wrote: post #163
dcow wrote: post #158

As a lazy developer I also dislike what’s slowly happening to macOS. Apple wants you to switch to sandboxed apps but they don't provide a way for you to do even half the things a traditional app can (because they can’t imagine them all up front). That’s just frustrating and lazy on their part and makes the developer UX shitty. But, as an end user, what Apple is doing (bringing sandboxed apps and better security to th…

Developers vs. users is a false dichotomy. Users need software. Without software, there's nothing to use. The native Mac software ecosystem is slowly dying. Eventually everything on the Mac will just be a cross-platform afterthought.

Developers are really lazy. We have terms like DX and UX. It’s not a false dichotomy at all.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#267

Post by kitsunesoba »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #234
kitsunesoba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

These permission systems in practice don't really do as much to shield users as many think though. People often just drop the word “sandbox” and say “applications are sandboxed” and that that means that they're safe but it's really not that simple in practice. What often happens is that such applications still need to communicate over some socket with some server that was never designed for such a sandbox, say PulseA…

Of course, but that just means that said daemons need to be reworked to not have access to everything either.

This is why there's a push to do as much as feasibly possible in userland in both macOS and Linux, so even when a bad actor tries to route through system components the blast radius is limited. Realistically, they should be sandboxed too — an audio daemon for instance has no business directly accessing storage or network facilities for example.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#268

Post by agent281 »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #77

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the…

Agreed!

I have to say I was disappointed by the question at 59:23. They seemed to expect a retrospective on Ken’s career or some grand philosophical statement on software or open source. To be honest, I was pretty surprised by the direction of the talk myself, but I ultimately enjoyed it.

You see, Ken decided to talk about his 75 year project: his music collection. He talked about audio formats, collecting music from different groups, sourcing metadata, building hardware to play music and more. He was deeply interested in the topic and honestly probably a bit obsessive for multiple decades. This was very humanizing. And to be completely honest he reminded me a lot of my girlfriend’s father who we think is undiagnosed autistic.

Ultimately, I think the reason why Ken was so prolific over such a long time is his ability to be deeply interested in problems. He was not too fussy about tools. He didn’t push Go or Linux or UNIX. He wasn’t self aggrandizing. He just wanted to tell people about his project that he’s been working on. Honestly, I thought it was a great lesson that might have gone over a lot of people’s heads.

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This comment was copied from lobste.rs. https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprisi...

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#269

Post by mvanbaak »

wkat4242 wrote: post #148
kitsunesoba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

"Random third party binaries" are not something Linux users really use, generally. Most of it is open source and comes through the repository.

every package system (apt/yum/pkg/whatever) is distributing binaries. So yeah, the upstream project can be open source, but there is 0 guarantees that the binary I install on my system is the exact same binary as I would get if I build the source myself (and this does not even touch on the subject that compilers can add weird stuff as well)

Sure, it's better than closed source, because at least you have the possibility to check all this. In practice though, we outsource this responsibility to the package maintainer of the package system we use.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#270

Post by artificial »

amelius wrote: post #217
hedora wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better headline: “Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and Cabinets of old CD’s” Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.

A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.

Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.
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