Tag: Quote of the Week

Bionic Duckweed

bionic duckweed, noun

An as-yet-non-existent innovation, hyped with the aim not to sell it or to invent it, but simply to put a stop on or stalling the actually-existing competition.

In its broader sense, bionic duckweed can be thought of a sort of unobtainium that renders investment in present-day technologies pointless, unimaginative, and worst of all On The Wrong Side Of History. […] A a sort of promissory note in reverse, forcing us into inaction today in the hope of wonders tomorrow.

from Bionic Duckweed: making the future the enemy of the present.

On Moltbook

Bruce Schneier has probably found the best and most succinct quotes to summarize Moltbook:

Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

But it also has a very dystopian outlook on what might follow:

The theory is simple: First, AI gets accessible enough that anyone can use it. Second, AI gets good enough that you can’t reliably tell what’s fake. Third, and this is the crisis point, regular people realize there’s nothing online they can trust. At that moment, the internet stops being useful for anything except entertainment.

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.