There is a logical goal, but first one thing to address:
There was a lot of dog-piling by culture-war peddlers. They try to ragebait people so they can pull you into their spheres of influence to sell you their supplements, placebos and political ads.
They rely only on appeals to emotion (specifically knee-jerk reactions to any change).
So they can be ignored.
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But now to the actual logical goal.
The goal is to prevent mistraining.
"Master" didn't really make sense. It was supposed to mean one thing that controls another thing (the slave), but nothing ever works out that way in reality.
For example:
- Written records/logs: A master record would sometimes be overridden by a slave record. Also, adding a third record for fault-tolerance to tie-break inconsistencies breaks the master/slave metaphor.
- Storage media: "Master" records didn't make sense since you'd also have a "gold master", again breaking the metaphor.
- Storage media devices: The master/slave pins in ATA/PATA devices (and similar) didn't actually do what they said on the tin.
- Distributed Version Control Systems (e.g. git): It's distributed by design, there is no master. It didn't make sense in the git flow context, the trunk-based development context, the forked project context, the merged project context, the upstream/downstream context, etc...
- ... and practically everywhere else you would run into a master/slave metaphor.
Every system worked differently, and treated the metaphor differently too.
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The whole problem with a bad metaphor/analogy is that things don't work how the metaphor suggests they work. People are not sure where responsibility lies. Multiple people work under the same information and end up with incompatible understandings of how things actually work.
If you're not familiar with ATA, you're going to come across the terms Secondary Master, and Primary Slave.
Then you're going to run into questions like: How can there be more than one master? Does a primary master control a secondary master? What happens when they disagree? Does a primary slave control a secondary slave, or a secondary master? etc...
Or worse, you're not going to ask the question and work under an assumption without realising it.
Removing the possibility of that happening as much as possible makes everything better.
It's always better to replace a confusing term with a less confusing term.
That's why people stopped recommending "master" in git workflows.
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TL;DR: "main" reduces confusion in the git-flow context, "trunk" reduces confusion in the trunk-based development context.
> "Master" didn't really make sense. It was supposed to mean one thing that controls another thing (the slave), but nothing ever works out that way in reality.
I always thought it took, pretty directly, the 1st meaning in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master_copy, which does fit the ultimate definition as it's the copy all of the edits follow from until they are merged at which point they become the new master edit and the following edits become based off of it. Same of branches, just on a large scale of edits.
That's why one is called the golden master and the other is a master, not much to confuse. The "golden" is what signifies the unique meaning, i.e. the final, that both are masters is an accurate takeaway.
Main (or most any other common primary branch name) can have equally trivial confusions that are not actual problems. The endless debates about branch names didn't come about because people were so confused we needed something else to stop the madness, they came about because people were convinced they could find a problem to need to fix. Any of these branch names work equally fine, it really doesn't matter and there is no deeper logic needed to justify why we switched.
Changing master to main just adds confusion because I now have 3 git repos I use weekly and they all have different names for the primary branch that I have to remember. Master is just a symbol for something like all language, you'd have to be an obsessive to think that hard about minor language choices to the point of forcing a change on tens of millions of people after-the-fact.
> Changing master to main just adds confusion because I now have 3 git repos I use weekly and they all have different names for the primary branch that I have to remember.
Yes, switching standards is confusing and taxing.
Although, using bad standards is also confusing and taxing.
Usually those taxes are internalised somewhere and forgotten, becoming a hidden tax. They become apparent once pointed out, like when trying to fix a standard or switching to a new standard, but they exist nonetheless.
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> you'd have to be an obsessive to think that hard about minor language choices to the point of forcing a change on tens of millions of people after-the-fact.
No, it's not mis-managers throwing their weight around, it's not culture war, it's not etymological one-up-man-ship, it's not politics, it's just systems theory.
Every time someone gets stung by a hidden tax in a system, and the cause of the sting can't/won't be addressed, it builds up pressure.
If the pressure can't be relieved, it continues building to the point that the system starts to strain. Eventually the system reaches the point where the strain has to be released and there's a sudden change.
> "Master" didn't really make sense. It was supposed to mean one thing that controls another thing (the slave), but nothing ever works out that way in reality.
I really hate how people pretend to be stupid and not know that master means a lot of different things: "animal owner", "an expert", "a tradesman", "postgraduate degree", "original", and many others (including dated definitions). Wiktionary lists 21 definitions, only one of which is slave owner.
> Wiktionary lists 21 definitions, only one of which is slave owner.
It lists two which references "slave".
Definition 2 references slave owning, but that's irrelevant to the actual discussion here.
This thread is talking about definition 17:
> (engineering, computing) A device that is controlling other devices or is an authoritative source.
>
> Synonyms: coordinator, primary
> Antonyms: secondary, slave, worker
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> I really hate how people pretend to be stupid and not know that master means a lot of different things
"Master" meaning different things is exactly the problem.
Even if we limit ourselves specifically to definition 17, it still means too many things. It's overloaded to the point that it doesn't accurately describe the systems where it's used.
I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character).
As for iOS 26, no reasonable person would have let it ship. From one source (John Gruber -> "Bad Dye Job") the previous head of Apple's UI design team who lead the UI team was just not a UX designer, he was just a visual designer or something. I think it shows.
As much of a snob that Jobs was it's nonsensical to say that he would've knowingly insisted on changes that locked users out from their devices. That's just nonsense. At the very least there would've been a prompt to change the password phrase or some such in upgrade. And if it did happen as an oversight, it would've been patched on the first report and some heads would've rolled.
But that's the difference. Jobs might've done something like this for a reason. That's not what happened here. He probably wouldn't have tolerated it as a bug.
I knew the speculation on him being involved in some capacity, but as the wiki page states, this was never confirmed in any substantial way.
More importantly, if development seized with no public comment, that would be one thing and may strengthen the "he got arrested" theory. However, there was some final communication, specific recommendations to rely on Bitlocker of all things, a new version of Truecrypt was released solely for decrypting existing disks and then the web page was removed, including a flag set on robots.txt to ensure it wouldn't appear on archive.org. All this concurrent to a crowd funded source code audit that, in the end, did not find any server issues or backdoors (I recall some speculation back in the day, that either known code quality issues or an intentional backdoor could have caused the exodus).
That all makes it hard to link this to an arrest of the main developer, though I dislike speculation without any hard evidence and if there is no new information, I'll keep this filed under "there is no answer".
I always believed that rather than publicly stating that they were about to be arrested or worse, which may alert regular, non-tech-savy people, he sent a hidden message in the arguably horrendous recommendation of replacing his tool with BitLocker.
I think he was trying to scream “Run!” without actually screaming “run”.
Developer also recommended (tongue-in-cheek) to use Microsoft's built-in encryption services (easily defeated) in his outgoing blogpost — perhaps because he was barred from explaining the real reason for project's cancelation.
According to Wikipedia, the DEA gave him immunity on additional charges in return for pleading guilty and running a sting against his associates, but before the DEA knew about the murders.
Seems weird that the DEA can even give him immunity unknown crimes, especially ones that might not be directly related to the case and even weirder that they would offer that. Makes you wonder what kind of leverage/information you have to have to get that kind of plea deal.
I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore.
I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.
Weird, I'm French and most people I know are rather delighted to hear foreigners speak French. We have quite a few English pensioners living around where my family lives, and I live myself along the Flanders/Wallonia border in Belgium so we're quite accustomed to hearing "bad French" speakers I guess, but the popularity of foreign speakers singing in French seems to indicate that foreign accents isn't really a problem for many French speakers.
People being annoyed at bad French is stereotypically Parisian to me.
I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.
P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.
The Himalayan Blackberry produces untold numbers of very large fruits and it's still so aggressive you have to ruthlessly clear it before it grows under your foundations and into your driveway and walls. It takes over every patch of ground it gets access to and it will send runners down 20 or 30 foot concrete walls from the top of the freeway. I once saw it grow a runner up to the top of a 40-foot tree and then back down to the ground 10 feet away. The thorns are so thick it will penetrate everything but duck cotton. I have to wear welding gloves when I'm clearing it because it can go right through gardening gloves. It is a hell plant sent to torment us for our hubris.
If you've ever bought or eaten "marionberry" this plant is where it grows.
Kudzu's threat has been long overstated. It thrives especially near forest edgelands which are always visible on highways, so concern of prevalence was partially based on individual sampling error. In reality, its presence in southern forests is higher than desired but still not disastrous (~0.1% of southern forestland), which is a fraction of worse invasives: Japanese honeysuckle (4.4%) and Asian privet (1.4%).
> ~0.1% of southern forestland), which is a fraction of worse invasives: Japanese honeysuckle (4.4%) and Asian privet (1.4%).
Sample size of 1 here (I know), but I've spent a meaningful portion of my life outdoors in the south and I have _never_ seen swaths of the landscape covered with Japanese Honeysuckle or Asian Privet like I have Kudzu. It absolutely dominates _everything_ in areas where it's present here (not surprising when it can grow up to a 1 foot (0.3 m) a day.)
Not trying to say you're incorrect, just trying to get a better handle on this. The thought that there are more destructive invasive plants in the US south than Kudzu is kind of blowing my mind.
You won't see swaths of honeysuckle or privet because it grows in the understory throughout the entire forest, choking out natives. Part of their destructive power is that they bloom earlier than most natives in spring, essentially stealing the available sunlight in those golden weeks before the overstory leafs out and reduces sunlight in the understory.
I guarantee you that if you've spent a meaningful portion of your life outdoors in the south you have seen Japanese Honeysuckle at the least, it is everywhere. But it's not a dramatic/easily identifiable shower like kudzu.
The data I'm citing is from my textbook for my Ohio Citizen Volunteer Naturalist program I did in the Fall semester, it cites the US Forest report but doesn't give a link. I think it's from this report [PDF warning]: https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs178/gtr_srs178_3...
I would say that it's more accurate to say that kudzu is not poisonous. I definitely would not say it tastes good. It's got that "green plant" taste that you get from just chomping on any ol' leaf you might find. I mean, if you're poor and starving you could maaaaaybe survive on Kudzu, but it will be rough, it's not very calorie dense, even for a leafy green. Goats won't even eat it unless there is literally nothing else to eat. This whole, "oh you, can eat kudzu!" thing is just crunchy-mom Instagram influencer bullshit.
I’ve proposed that someone open a restaurant of invasive species. You could make some decent dishes with lionfish, blackberries, golden oyster mushrooms, venison, etc
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.
A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.
So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.
I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.
I like your comment, but it seems the author acknowledged this as a caveat to the algorithm.
>Many home routers try to preserve the source port in external mappings. This is a property called “equal delta mapping” – it won’t work on all routers but for our algorithm we’re sacrificing coverage for simplicity.
So to what percentage is this coverage sacrificed exactly? No idea. Not as useful if the percentage is high, as you are implying.
It’s the same assumption is required for any hole punching handshake (including STUN).
> This is a property called “equal delta mapping”
FWIW I’ve worked in computer networking for 20 years and have never heard it called this. This blog is the only source that comes up when I search for that exact term. I wonder where the author got it from.
> It’s the same assumption is required for any hole punching handshake (including STUN).
This is incorrect.
Hole punching requires being able to predict external port. That's it. If the port remains the same, it certainly simplifies things, but ports going up (or down) by 1 (or 2, or 5) with each new mapping is quite common, trivial to detect and to punch through.
I wonder how many new technical terms are going to be created by LLMs - not to say that this post was N
necessarily written by an LLM (but, who knows!)
It comes from academic papers on categorizing NAT behaviors which (trust me) is hardly the page turning research most people are used to. In these papers they talk about patterns NATs use between successive external port allocations -- which they call the "delta."
The name "equal delta" just means a type of NAT with a delta that tries to preserve the source port. Not to be confused with "preserving" type deltas (that preserve "the same numerical distance" between successive mappings -- e.g. a "preserving delta" type with a value of +1 means each successive NAT allocation is one more than the previous.)
My internet provider didn't even maintain the ip-address. They have a pool of egress routes and seems to route round-robin. Basically every new connection can be from any address in the pool.
I had to call them to make it stop since it tripped the VPN solution at work, that interpreted it as a MIM attack. They disabled it no questions asked as soon as I called, so I guess it mostly works for most people, but not all.
But on that note, isn't it basically time now for IPv6 so we can stop shit like this and go to directly addressable devices like everyone did in the early 90s.
Can't both sides just keep trying different ports until they get lucky? There's not that many of them, and even if it takes several minutes to get a match, that's better than nothing at all.
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