Great to see some 3letter guy into this. This might be one of those rando things which gets posted on HN (and which doesn't involve me in the slightest), but a decade later is taking over the world. Rust and Go were like that.
Previously there was that Rust in APT discussion. A lot of this middle-aged linux infrastructure stuff is considered feature-complete and "done". Not many young people are coming in, so you either attract them with "heyy rewrite in rust" or maybe the best thing is to bottle it up and run in a VM.
Despite the cool shit the guy has done, keep in mind that "venerate" is not the word to use here. djb is very much not a shorthand used in any positive messaging pretty much ever by any cryptographer. He did it to himself, sadly.
... if he thinks some WG is making a mistake and he's not welcome there (everyone else seems to be okay with what's happening based on the quoted email on the first link), then - CoC or not - he should then leave, and publicly post distance himself from the outcome.
(Obviously he was never the one to back down from a just fight, but it's important to find the right hill to die on. And allies! And him not following RFC 2026 [from 1996, hardly the peak of Internet bureaucracy] is not a CoC thing anyway.)
The IETF is a global standards-setting organization, intentionally created without a membership structure so that anyone with the technical competency can participate in an individual capacity. This lack of membership ensures its position as the primary neutral standards body because participants cannot exert influence as they could in a pay-to-play organization where members, companies, or governments pay fees to set the direction. IETF standards are reached by rough consensus, allowing the ideas with the strongest technical merit to rise to the surface.
Further, these standards that advance technology, increase security, and further connect individuals on a global scale are freely available, ensuring small-to-midsize companies and entrepreneurs anywhere in the world are on equal footing with the large technology companies.
With a community from around the world, and an increased focus on diversity in all its forms, IETF seeks to ensure that the global Internet has input from the global community, and represents the realities of all who use it.
There is only one IETF, and telling dissenters to leave is like telling a dissenting citizen to go to another country. I don't think that people (apart from real spammers) were banned in 1996. The CoC discussion and power grab has reached the IETF around 2020 and it continues.
"Posting too many messages" has been deemed a CoC violation by for example the PSF and its henchmen, and functionally the IETF is using the same selective enforcement no matter what the official rationale is. They won't go after the "director" Wouters, even though his message was threatening and rude.
If not then let the WG work. If no one except djb feels this strongly about hybrid vs. pure post-quantum stuff then it's okay.
(And I haven't read the threads but this is a clear security trade-off. Involving complexity, processing power and bandwidth and RAM and so on, right? And the best and brightest cryptographers checked the PQ algorithms, and the closer we get to them getting anywhere near standardized in a pure form the more scrutiny they'll receive.
And someone being an NSA lackey is not a technical merit argument. Especially if it's true, because in this case the obvious thing is to start coalition building to have some more independent org up and running, because arguing with a bad faith actor is not going to end well.)
Not to trivialise but being a 3 letter guy means being old. So, it's at best a celebration of achieving longevity and at worst a celebration of creaky joints and a short temper.
Mate, we're not talking about the future, but about 3 letter guys now. I'm one, I've carried it with me for 40+ years as have the ten or twenty peers of mine I know by their tla. I got it at pobox.com when the door opened, the guy at the desk next door got a one letter name. I set up campus email for the entire uni in 1989 and gave myself the tla with my superuser rights before that. I'd done the same at ucl-cs in 85, and before that in Leeds and York.
My point here is we're not famous we're just old enough to have a tla from the time before HR demanded everyone get given.surname.
Every Unix system used to ship with a dmr account. It doesn't mean we all knew Dennis Ritchie, it means the account was in the release tape.
There are 17,000 odd of us. Ekr, Kre and Djb are famous but the other 17,573 of us exist.
I'm not sure what your point is here. OP was clearly using "three letter guy" in the sense "so famous people know them by their initials". This is hardly unread of, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterPerson
It was the "Great to see _some_ 3letter guy into this" underlined some that.
It felt bit like s/some/random/g perhaps would apply when reading it. Intentional or not by writer. It made me long and write my comment. There are many 3letter user accounts, which some are more famous than others. To my generation not because they were early users, but great things what they have done. I'm early user too and done things then still quite widely being used with many distributions, but wouldn't compare my achievements to those who became famous and known widely by their account, short or long.
Anyhow I thought that "djb" ring bell anyone having been around for while. Not just those who have been around early 90 or so when he was held renegade opinions he expressed programming style (qmail, dj dns, etc.), dragged to court of ITAR issues etc.
But because of his latter work with cryptography and running cr.yp.to site for quite long time.
Is this because they're that famous though or simply because there weren't as many people in the scene back then? We just don't do the initials thing anymore.
Yes: the fame is the subtext. It's akin to mononyms; they'd be referring to famous people like Shakira, Madonna, or Beyoncé. A lot of us have first names, but the point isn't that one's family calls them "Dave" without ambiguity.
There were many unix instances, and likely multiple djb logins around the world, but there's only one considered to be the djb, and it's dur to fame.
The internet assures me there are loads of these underemployed Unix/networking experts just sitting around waiting to set up your infrastructure. But in my experience, these people are actually really difficult to hire, and not at all cheap. (Possibly the sharp ones have 'sold out' and gone the SRE route and are now one of those '3000' people.)
So I wonder if there's a certain amount of wishful thinking on both sides here, like "I wish a 'clueful' company would hire me to be their head sysadmin...", while companies who have tried to do this on the cheap usually just have terrible ops. ("Whoops, the backups haven't worked in 2 years...")
Yeah I'm one of them. Started as an on-site Linux sysadmin. Moved to cloud SRE because remote is plentiful and it pays better.
I get crap recruiters in my inbox and LinkedIn every other week with the worst offers to go back to on-site bare metal admin. 30% less pay, on-site requirements, and it's a contracted position?
I need that Futurama "oh you're serious, let me laugh harder" gif
If companies want to whine that good Linux datacenter ops doesn't exist anymore, laugh in their faces.
IMO everyone should at least try Zork I. It was the first and the greatest, there's plenty of places to go, and much of it is pretty easy. Plus all these games constantly reference it in oblique ways. You should at least try your hand at Zork first.
> do not start with infocom games
Yeah, the filfre.net historian described how most Infocom games sold in tiny numbers to their fanbase. They are text adventures for the hard-core text-adventure enthusiast. (And that includes Zork II and III.)
> Plundered Hearts
> Hitchhikers Guide
Both these seemed super-linear. If you can't solve a puzzle, you are stuck and you die. Not recommended for newbies imo. (Plundered Hearts is a 'romance novel' rather than the usual d&d shit.)
It is the first, but Zork as a game and quality of entertainment is pretty bad. If you do not have infinite time your time might be spent better elsewhere.
Courses for horses, I guess. I find spending the time to solve a text adventure (ideally without hints) to be more enjoyable than most forms of gaming, but then I like crossword puzzles too.
Agree that everyone should play Zork to get an appreciation of the original genre and history. IIRC, the three Zorks were actually all part of the original Zork on the PDP and it had to be chopped into three parts to make it fit on the 8-bit micros of the 1970s-1980s.
Yep, the original Zork was a big sprawling game. I originally played the (pirate?) pdp version when I was like 6 years old. A few years ago I took one of the c versions (this one one was run through f2c and then cleaned up by Ian Lance Taylor) and ported it to wasm. I also added in a mapping system using my favorite dungeon map. You can play it at https://dungeo.org/
True, I just think they cut the 'less good' parts out of the micro Zork I and then put them in the sequels. (Although the balloon part was cool.) You may or may not like the game's aesthetic, but 75% of Zork I is pretty accessible.
The basic idea was by Douglas, and I added some refinements (like the Upper-Half-Of-The-Room Cleaning Robot). More interesting is how close the puzzle came to being removed from the game; most of Infocom’s testing group thought it was too hard. I was going into a meeting with them just as Douglas was leaving for the airport at the end of his final trip to Infocom, and I asked him, “What should I tell them about the Babel fish puzzle?” He said, “What should you tell them? Tell them to fuck off!” So the puzzle stayed… and its very hardness became a cult thing. Infocom even sold T-shirts that said “I got the Babel fish.”
I actually solved the babelfish way back when, and then got stuck somewhere else. At that point I realized the game was a railroad. A lot of people's first and last text adventure experience.
True. And HR is not necessarily this intelligent diabolical force "protecting the company". They are often the biggest source of company gossip! If they see you on their level, they'll say all kinds of stuff. They probably assumed this manager would have some sense and stop getting drunk and touching abs, and then went into ass-covering mode when she went on the warpath.
When you have a division between salary and wage workers, HR has a certain role. Between managers, its all politics.
When I was a young guy way back when, I was sexually harassed at my first two office jobs by women managers. One of them framed it as "payback". Not fun to be on the receiving end of this!
I'm having trouble imagining a company folding in a year because one (even essential) backend employee left. Perhaps they started to micromanage you because they were going down the tubes while you were happily 'doing your own thing'? Or did you have more of a 'face' role?
It's pretty clear they're implying that the company did not value seniority or talent and ended up losing atleast one senior person with valuable knowledge-without being able to realize what exactly the person contributed. Never a good sign.
Sometimes all it takes is that one key engineer leaving to kick off the domino of "how do we fix this issue/make something with our software stack?" glitches across the org
Yeah, I'm running the Martingale simulator in OP, and getting frequent outcomes where I was able to gamble 10+ days starting with $10000. I suspect that's what gamblers really like about it -- not more money, but more gameplay.
(There's also the gambler's calculus that while they're losing money playing, they're being comped drinks/rooms/meals/shows/etc at a resort.)
Agreed. When I was a teenager, everyone knew it was easier to buy marijuana than any sort of liquor, because there was basically no underground market for the latter. All the knee-jerk stoners in here spamming the same point are probably oblivious that regulated sales and minimum age is actually somewhat effective.
Myspace was a malware playground. Stuff like Apple QuickTime didn't have a decent updater back then, so it was script-kiddy galore. End of the line for the anything-goes web.
Previously there was that Rust in APT discussion. A lot of this middle-aged linux infrastructure stuff is considered feature-complete and "done". Not many young people are coming in, so you either attract them with "heyy rewrite in rust" or maybe the best thing is to bottle it up and run in a VM.