Tag: Quote of the Week

Simulating Statically Compiled Binaries in Glorified Tarballs

Containers won for one reason: they simulate a statically compiled binary that’s ergonomic for engineers and transparent to the application. A Docker image is a glorified tarball with metadata in a JSON document.

From Joseph’s comment on “Containers and giving up on expecting good software installation practices”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but from a developer’s perspective it makes sense. It may not be incidental that the new programming languages of the 2010s (e.g. Go, Rust, Zig) produce statically linked binaries by default.

I always thought of containers as a way to add standardized interfaces to an application/binary that can be configured in a common way (e.g. ports, data directories, configurationenv vars, grouping and isolation). The only other ecosystem that does this and maybe even goes a little further is Nix.

Because the binary format itself is ossified and the ecosystem fragmented enough we missed the train for advanced lifecycle hooks for applications (think multiple entry points for starting, pausing, resuming, stopping, reacting to events, etc. like on Android, iOS, MacOS) … in Linux this is something that’s again bolted on from the outside: with e.g. D-Bus, Systemd, CRIU).

Gebrauchsanmaßung ohne Zueignungsabsicht

Juristen haben echt grandiose Wörter 😂:

Zueignungsabsicht, f.

Die Absicht einer Person beschreibt, sich eine Sache wenigstens vorübergehend anzueignen bei gleichzeitigem Vorsatz, den Berechtigten um die Sache dauerhaft zu enteignen (siehe Diebstahl, Unterschlagung).
— Wikipedia

Gebrauchsanmaßung, f.

Eine vorübergehende eigenmächtige (und damit unberechtigte) Nutzung von beweglichen Sachen unter zeitweiliger Brechung fremden Gewahrsams. Gemeint ist, dass die Sache zwar unberechtigt benutzt, dem Berechtigten später aber zurückgebracht wird.
— Wikipedia

Ich bin durch einen News-Artikel über diese Wörter gestolpert.

Those ones were the expensive headcount anyway

Arstechnica reports on a study where they measured the productivity of software developers of different open source projects doing different (also non-coding) tasks.

In the comments there’s a snarky summary of the articles main point:

“These factors lead the researchers to conclude that current AI coding tools may be particularly ill-suited to “settings with very high quality standards, or with many implicit requirements (e.g., relating to documentation, testing coverage, or linting/formatting) that take humans substantial time to learn.” While those factors may not apply in “many realistic, economically relevant settings” involving simpler code bases, they could limit the impact of AI tools in this study and similar real-world situations.”

So as long as I cull the experienced people and commit to lousy software the glorious Age of AI will deliver productivity gains? Awesome, those ones were the expensive headcount!