Mike Gerwitz @mikegerwitz@mastodon.mikegerwitz.com

@civodul On top of the great summary, this has some excellent references for further reading. Well done.

Writing As a Means to Another End: https://mikegerwitz.com/2020/06/writing-as-a-means-to-another-end

On writing, exploration, and some personal experience with Imposter Syndrome.

(I feel like an imposter just claiming that I may have Imposter Syndrome; I don't want to offend anyone who may have it worse than me.)

When I'm bored and need to unwind, I apparently enjoy working with regular expressions. Here are some well-documented examples using sed (together with a script to animate them), including things like base 10 multiplication; a dynamic environment with assignment and retrieval; string comparison; and game-like animation resembling cellular automata:

https://mikegerwitz.com/projects/night/tree/regex

@sir I had to migrate to Mastodon from my years-old GNU Social instance because people stopped federating with OStatus. It didn't matter if ActivityPub was better or worse---I was cut off from the fediverse.

@sir Federation is one of the few times where popularity is actually important. To overtake the likes of Twitter, we need a sufficient number of users, and enough federated instances to accommodate them. A "perfect" spec is useless if it's not adopted.

Microsoft and Twitter are objectionable on moral grounds. Any replacement is infinitely better, just as a barely-working free/libre program is always superior to a non-free one.

@sir Regardless of technical merits, there is value in any protocol that gains sufficient traction. Consensus is the harder problem. You can't federate alone.

Some train of thought reminded me of an article I read many years ago about exploiting properties of ELF to create really tiny executables:

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

I remember printing out the resulting hex dump and marking every single byte and its purpose. That article was the first time I took the time to really explore ELF and understand at the lowest level what it is and how it works, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

To anyone who sees me posting on Mastodon and not doing the thing you're waiting for / expecting me to do: my very fussy newborn has made it nearly impossible to get into any sort of flow, and my productivity is at a near stand-still. So I fill much of my little free time with things that don't require much focus.

I hope that changes soon.

I thought 2020 would be something I'd be desperate to forget, and instead it's become a landmark year for common sense civil rights and human decency in the United States. And two of those things happened despite a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. And they're happening under (despite) a Trump presidency.

My thoughts go out to all of the people whose lives are so positively impacted by these changes, and to those who have suffered and still suffer so much from their absence.

@civodul Heh, and the tagline is:

> State-of-the-art technologies to protect your applications and IoT objects against attackers

I needn't explain the security through obscurity concept to you. All the work being done in Guix and Mes are the proper ways to protect systems against attackers.

Unless I'm to read "attackers" as "users", which I suspect is a large portion of their threat model.

A writeup on some of the obfuscation techniques used by Snapchat:

https://hot3eed.github.io/snap_part1_obfuscations.html

I just shake my head at how wasteful this all is. I'm a free software activist. I think of ways to make code more accessible to less technical users. I type this on a system that's full free/libre from the BIOS upward. And this article is about _one program_ that is more opaque than the entirety of my daily computing.

@adfeno I'm sorry to hear that, and it's good to hear how supportive you and your family are.

@janneke Inspiring work, as always.

@cwebber @janneke I also liked @mala's comment on HN about how Guix brings the GNU system together:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23531557

Everyone in and around Guix is doing amazing work, and I'm proud of that.