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.
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.
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.
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?
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”.
Curl comes to mind. Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
And they still get emails from randos when some program that uses curl doesn’t work (the Readme is top notch).
Libcurl is at the foundation of almost all networking.
That’s not remotely true, but it is nevertheless outstanding work and very much deserving of recognition and support.
curl is most definitely not developed solely by one person though, it has thousands of contributors. in fact, there is so much red tape around curl that you can’t even discuss making a change to it without first writing an RFC and having it approved by a committee.
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.
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…
Fabric Bellard’s body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.
Or just genius.
I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™
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 ☺️
“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.
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.
Fair point! I think that’s part of why I admire him, humble greatness
I second Rockbox here, it’s fucking great.
Holy shit Rockbox was amazing. I might still be subscribed to the mailing list. I used that on a few different MP3 players as a kid. I had no idea. Fuck I am old.
Edit: For a list of what he has worked on - https://daniel.haxx.se/opensource.html
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
Network Time Protocol? Cool, didn’t know that!
Though OpenNTPD, Chrony or timesyncd if you’re on Systemd, are usually better suited.
So they have a donation/support page?
I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn’t fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I’m telling this story from memory). It’s designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.
I’m telling this story from memory
pun intended? ;D
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
That’s actually the video I was retelling from memory.
Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.
It’s also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.
Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server
I don’t know, rm being short for “remove” is very verbaceous.
Oh go fsck yourself (maybe that works better written…).
Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "
Ah, pshaw, I don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s such a thing as “not a word.” Why bother having a system of root words, prefixes and suffixes if we’re not allowed to use that system to build the words we need? Especially for the fun of it. Verbaceous is adjectivacular.
If he hadn’t written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it’s a brilliant piece of software xD
And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd
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.
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…
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“especially today”? What’s today? Can you elaborate?
Den Nasjonale Runkedagen
Tidligere kjent som “Allrunk”, navnet ble endret et par år etter TV3 våget å arrangere en aldri så liten “Allrunk på Grensen”, noe svenskene var svært misfornøyd med.
Det gamle navnet og tradisjonene som hørte til er fortsatt gjeldende i deler av Vestlandet og i Trøndelag, men spesielt populært er det i Nordmøre.
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also the swedish meme subreddit is called r/unket
and runket translates to “the jerk”, as in a noun referring the act of (and/or the result of…) rubbing one out.
ie a Swedish circlejerk subreddit?
precisely
Hi, I’m a Finn. We also have a variation of this.
Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter sounds like someone did it on purpose.
There’s a lot of that in the software world. I’m thinking of gimp.
Graphics Image Manipulation Program, yeah right
You meant suffix, not prefix. But this is pretty funny regardless
Runke is the verb form. Runk is the noun form. You can say “en runk”.
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.
that really sounds like a case where someone ultimately says “fuck you, runk’s developer”. why didn’t that happen?
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.
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?
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”
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;
runkimplements 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.
Oh dear, that post from the core-js guy made my blood boil. He’s been taken advantage of by the whole world.
The
core-jsstory 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.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.
It’s especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
I saw a post earlier about Empress returning to game cracking. For modern video games that use Denuvo DRM, she’s the only person who can really crack it, as far as I know. Singlehandedly holding up the AAA game piracy scene.
I can’t help but laugh at how batshit crazy she is. Didn’t she write a rap at some point??
I’ll never not be convinced that she’s on a fair amount of meth and/or crack.
Writing poetry => meth + crack???
Not for most people no, but Empress? I will believe it straight away.
You should read the rap lol.
It was somewhat weird waiting for the HP release on her TG channel.
Like I’ve seen my fair share of terf transphobes, but she’s honestly best described as a hater.
There were so many rants.
But like with Harry Potter, I like to separate the artist from the art.
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.
holy shit that was nuts
When the US came close to going on permanent daylight savings time there were interesting discussions there.
Runk means masturbation in Icelandic so that adds another layer of hilarity to this
I’m from the west coast of Canada, a euphemism for jerking off where/when I grew up is “pulling the pud.” Moving to the UK had some funny bits…like Christmas Pud…as in pudding(dessert). Pronounced slightly different, but my inner 6 year old had a laugh anyway.
I’ve heard “shaking hands with the unemployed”.
If I’m remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There’s a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” that’s just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: “As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there’s a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you.”
Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn’t think I’ve listened to that album since the 90’s. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.
God…Primus is such a great band. I’ll have to dig out my albums and have a listen again.
Wasn’t the phrase supposed to be “Primus sucks”? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.
That does ring a bell. I wouldn’t say I was a fan, I bought a few of their albums, and enjoyed them, but idk if I’d be able to name one of their albums or songs…
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The guy that runs Rufus.
I believe the quintessential example is curl Also here’s the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
The curl author writes a lot about his struggles, but he’s also employed to maintain curl, so not really a good example
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