Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
- Parade du Grotesque ( @ParadeDuGrotesque@lemmy.sdf.org ) 188•1 month ago
There is a guy named Arthur David Olson who maintains a small database of all the time zones in the world, including things like leap seconds and such. It’s used by everybody and it is updated several times a year. See here:
If we could all just stop making changes to time zones, that would make my job very slightly easier.
- onlinepersona ( @onlinepersona@programming.dev ) 24•1 month ago
I bet he’s paid nothing to do it. Then one day, when a timing attack happens that can be traced to the DB, some knobhead CTOs and tech influencers will start talking about “securing the supply chain”. They’ll want other such bullshit and responsibilities to be shoved unto volunteers.
Two quotes come to mind “Fuck you, pay me” and “Open source maintainers owe you nothing”.
- rothaine ( @rothaine@beehaw.org ) English7•1 month ago
It’s also worth pointing out that this was sued in a copyright lawsuit some time ago. The wikipedia article mentions it, but here’s the slashdot discussion if you want to feel like stepping into a time machine: https://m.slashdot.org/story/158778
It caused a momentary panic when everyone realized that this thing runs the system clocks for everything everywhere, and if it got taken down by a copyright suit it would be disastrous for, well, everybody.
- Piece_Maker ( @Piece_Maker@feddit.uk ) English3•1 month ago
Wasn’t there also very recently a whole thing about the single guy who maintains the NTP spec threatened to retire so he could get a “real” job, which caused a gigantic internet-wide panic as pretty much everything we do relies on computer’s clocks being perfectly synced?
- dosse91 ( @dosse91@lemmy.trippy.pizza ) 93•1 month ago
I’d say ffmpeg is a good example, it’s used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.
- Fred ( @Fred@programming.dev ) English49•1 month ago
And Fabrice Bellard, the original author of ffmpeg, went on to create qemu which pretty much made open-source virtualization possible. Also TCC (even if I don’t think that one is widely used), he established a world record for computing decimals of Pi using a single machine that had ~2000× less FLOPS than the previous record, and so much more…
- grozzle ( @grozzle@lemm.ee ) 18•1 month ago
Fabric Bellard’s body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.
Or just genius.
- Godort ( @Godort@lemm.ee ) 81•1 month ago
NTP is the one that comes to mind for me.
Basically every device uses it and until fairly recently was maintained by a single person
- radix ( @radix@lemm.ee ) 14•1 month ago
Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!
- MonkderVierte ( @MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ) 7•1 month ago
Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you’re on Systemd, are usually better suited.
- blindbunny ( @blindbunny@lemmy.ml ) English3•1 month ago
So they have a donation/support page?
- zygo_histo_morpheus ( @zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev ) 68•1 month ago
I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
- beveradb ( @beveradb@lemm.ee ) 20•1 month ago
Eh, bagder is more than “just some guy” to a lot of people! To me he’s kinda been my tech idol for 20 years lol, he also was a core part of building Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) which was the first open source project I got seriously involved in as a kid ☺️
- Cethin ( @Cethin@lemmy.zip ) English20•1 month ago
“Just some guy” doesn’t mean they aren’t amazing. I would argue the opposite. It just means they didn’t use their abilities to become rich and famous like some other assholes. They’re almost certainly more capable than them, not less.
- andioop ( @andioop@programming.dev ) English7•1 month ago
I think that would be a great situation to be in.
You have created a cool thing a lot of people use, by being good at something. You’ve done something.
Also, people have no idea who you are. Nobody is digging through your trash, harassing the people you love, taking pictures of you wherever you go including on your bad hair days, etc. You’re just some guy.
- beveradb ( @beveradb@lemm.ee ) 7•1 month ago
Fair point! I think that’s part of why I admire him, humble greatness
- Sparky ( @Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 60•1 month ago
Idk who needs to know this, but in Norwegian “runke” means to jerk off. “runk” is the word you add a prefix to in conjugation to get the different inflections
- runke - jerk off
- runker - jerking off
- runket - jerked off
Etc…
- Swedneck ( @Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ) 14•1 month ago
also the swedish meme subreddit is called r/unket
- FiskFisk33 ( @FiskFisk33@startrek.website ) 4•1 month ago
and runket translates to “the jerk”, as in a noun referring the act of (and/or the result of…) rubbing one out.
- 0xDREADBEEF ( @0xDREADBEEF@programming.dev ) English5•1 month ago
ie a Swedish circlejerk subreddit?
- FiskFisk33 ( @FiskFisk33@startrek.website ) 2•1 month ago
precisely
- Bezier ( @Bezier@suppo.fi ) 11•1 month ago
Hi, I’m a Finn. We also have a variation of this.
Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter sounds like someone did it on purpose.
- Echo Dot ( @echodot@feddit.uk ) 7•1 month ago
There’s a lot of that in the software world. I’m thinking of gimp.
Graphics Image Manipulation Program, yeah right
- baltakatei ( @baltakatei@sopuli.xyz ) English58•1 month ago
Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don’t believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.
- ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ ( @yournamehere@lemm.ee ) 1•1 month ago
remember heartbleed?
- Mossy Feathers (They/Them) ( @MossyFeathers@pawb.social ) 56•1 month ago
Furthermore, “RUNK” was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s. Finally, it’s missing some important functions that the original 60s program had because "RUNK"s developer doesn’t see the purpose of those functions and refuses to add them; and no one has publically released a fork of “RUNK” that adds those functions back in, so you have to do it yourself. Thank God it’s open source.
Edit: oh yeah, and back in 2005 there was an effort to make a GUI for it, but “RUNK’s” sole developer got mad because “back in the 80s we didn’t need GUIs; command line is infinitely faster” and kept intentionally breaking support for the GUI with each bug fix, leading to the project eventually being abandoned.
- 14th_cylon ( @14th_cylon@lemm.ee ) 19•1 month ago
that really sounds like a case where someone ultimately says “fuck you, runk’s developer”. why didn’t that happen?
- Corbin ( @Corbin@programming.dev ) English20•1 month ago
Because frankly, Ronald (the current maintainer, not the original author) is very competent. I say this as somebody who has personally been yelled at by Ronald at a kernel summit; I didn’t deserve it, but none of his technical points were wrong. I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?) Not to excuse his conduct, just to explain why he’s not been replaced yet.
- Ms. ArmoredThirteen ( @ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml ) 14•1 month ago
Wait if it stands for Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter, does that mean both the creator and current maintainer are named Ronald? Is it a dread pirate kinda deal where whoever holds the hat takes the name?
- dbilitated ( @dbilitated@aussie.zone ) 8•1 month ago
it’s a case where he knows a guy just like Ronald but he’s not naming him, so he’s just talking about “Ronald”
- Corbin ( @Corbin@programming.dev ) English2•1 month ago
I’d love to link you to their Wikipedia pages, but both of them are redlinked. As far as I can tell, Dr. V. Ronald was an educator who moved from Canada to the USA as part of the whole Xerox PARC thing and probably was valued for mainframe experience; does anybody have a full bio? The current maintainer is Ron Sunk, who did a full run at MIT up through postdoc before going to Red Hat. The names are a coincidence;
runk
implements what we now call Sunk summation, after Sunk’s thesis. (As you might guess, that’s an instance of Stigler’s law, since clearly Dr. Ronald discovered Sunk summation first!)Also, as long as we’re here, I want to empathize a little with Sunk. The GUIs that folks have placed on
runk
, like GNOME’s Gunk or Enlightenment’senk
, look very cool, and there’s rumors of an upcoming unified number-counting protocol that will put them all on equal ground. But @MossyFeathers@pawb.social wasn’t joking; Dr. Arnold’s code literally only reads punch cards, and there’s a façade to make it work on modern Linux and BSD transparently. It predates X11, if that’s any help. The tech debt is real.Fun fact, there was actually a man named Ronald Numbers.
- Aatube ( @Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ) 52•1 month ago
- Pyro ( @Pyro@programming.dev ) 30•1 month ago
The
core-js
story always makes me sad. Sure, he’s developing an open source project and no one HAS to pay him. But the meager amount of donations and the tons of hate he receives isn’t justifiable.- Aatube ( @Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ) 17•1 month ago
It’s especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
- Thomrade ( @Thomrade@lemm.ee ) 5•1 month ago
I had seen the hate before and foolishly just assumed he was deserving of it. Its a horrible situation he’s in and he is being cast in a bad light because he reached out for help.
- mox ( @mox@lemmy.sdf.org ) 46•1 month ago
I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.
Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.
- JackbyDev ( @JackbyDev@programming.dev ) English2•1 month ago
When the US came close to going on permanent daylight savings time there were interesting discussions there.
- runeko ( @runeko@programming.dev ) 39•1 month ago
Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.
- Riskable ( @riskable@programming.dev ) English20•1 month ago
The modern man uses
ripgrep
👍- Dave. ( @dgriffith@aussie.zone ) 17•1 month ago
But it’s three more letters. No deal.
- sudo ( @sudo@programming.dev ) 17•1 month ago
Its going installed binary is
rg
.- Dave. ( @dgriffith@aussie.zone ) 3•1 month ago
I shall begrudgingly consider it then, with much begrudgement.
- blindbunny ( @blindbunny@lemmy.ml ) English7•1 month ago
You joke but this is facts
- ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English5•1 month ago
Alias. To
gr
, even!
- hddsx ( @hddsx@lemmy.ca ) 10•1 month ago
What does that offer offer grep/egrep
- Riskable ( @riskable@programming.dev ) English16•1 month ago
Speed and memory efficiency, mostly. If you ever have to grep for something in a large number of files ripgrep will be done while regular grep will only be reaching the 25% mark.
- Angel Mountain ( @angelmountain@feddit.nl ) 35•1 month ago
Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?
- Echo Dot ( @echodot@feddit.uk ) 20•1 month ago
It’s really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn’t been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.
Yet the vast majority of the world probably don’t even know what it is, and wouldn’t even understand it if it was explained to them.
- NotAnOnionAtAll ( @NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.org ) 10•1 month ago
It’s not like there was nothing at all in that space before git came along, e.g. we had svn before, and mercurial more or less in parallel.
- phoenixz ( @phoenixz@lemmy.ca ) 3•1 month ago
And it all happened because botbicket decided to become greedy, to which Linus responded with taking a month break from Linux to make his own basic versioning tool, and here we are.
Without bitbuckets decisions, wer all still be stuck with SVn shudder
- JackbyDev ( @JackbyDev@programming.dev ) English4•1 month ago
Git has tons of contributors though.
- Moah ( @Moah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 34•1 month ago
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here’s the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
- oldfart ( @oldfart@lemm.ee ) 2•1 month ago
The curl author writes a lot about his struggles, but he’s also employed to maintain curl, so not really a good example
- frezik ( @frezik@midwest.social ) 33•1 month ago
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the classic example. Jobs has some technical skill, but not a lot. He’s the “ideas guy” that all other “ideas guy” try to be. I don’t have a lot of respect for the “idea guy”; Jobs was a manipulative narcissist, and he should not be emulated.
Woz, OTOH, is an absolute genius, and one of the most genuinely nice people you’ll ever meet. Apple made him enough money that he can do whatever he wanted with his life, and what he wanted was to do cool things with computers and pull harmless pranks.
Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. That was more of a collaboration. They all had some level of technical and business skill mixed together. It wasn’t quite the complementary skillset we see with Jobs and Woz. A lot of Microsoft’s success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
- JeffKerman1999 ( @JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz ) 19•1 month ago
A lot of Microsoft’s success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
It was also having friends on the IBM board that signed a contract that didn’t make any commercial sense…
- Vilian ( @Vilian@lemmy.ca ) 4•1 month ago
Friends?, bill gates mother worked there
- CameronDev ( @CameronDev@programming.dev ) 30•1 month ago
Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
- magic_lobster_party ( @magic_lobster_party@kbin.run ) 21•1 month ago
The popularity of these two packages shows that something is very wrong with JavaScript.
- undefined ( @undefined@links.hackliberty.org ) 7•1 month ago
I would love this even more if one depended on the other and just did a “not even” for example.
- CameronDev ( @CameronDev@programming.dev ) 15•1 month ago
I thought that was the case tbh, has it changed?
Edit: is-even depends on is-odd.
- biscuitswalrus ( @biscuitswalrus@aussie.zone ) 3•1 month ago
Well good news! Time to let yourself love again!
- IceHouse ( @IceHouse@lemmy.zip ) 26•1 month ago
Mark Russanovich was just some guy who had trouble fixing Windows computers so he wrote systernals from scratch including widely used psexec and other required tools if you are forced to be a windows admin. He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.
- loweffortname ( @loweffortname@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English9•1 month ago
“He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.”
Thanks for this. Really brightened my day.