Trailblazing Braille Taser

Hehe, I was just poking fun. I love FOSS and don’t disagree intellectually with this stuff, but the way it’s presented is a little off-putting to me. A bit too dogmatic for me.

If Data had feelings, he’d be very upset right now.

• Free as a bird, and this bird you cannot change
• Free to do what I want, any old time
• Free ride, take it easy
• Ok I ran out of songs now. Free as in malloc?

One is his name, the other is not

How did you disable old fart mode? Asking for a friend.

Sorry, I was writing that in Trump’s voice. I am an American who loves and contributes to open-source :)

Freedom isn’t free as in beer?

If it’s free, then why are we paying for it?

Usually I remember the inflection and number of syllables of the word I want, just not the actual sounds.

Are you arguing that assembly languages are not architecture-specific? I don’t think that’s the typical definition.

Nasm is an assembler, but it also represents a specific assembly language targeting x86 architectures.

Gas is an assembler of a higher order. It can emit code for many architectures, and thus it accepts many different architecture-specific assembly languages.

Out of curiosity, do you own your tools?

You can also “simply” raw-dog Wireguard. It’s built into the Linux kernel, so you barely have to install anything besides the userspace tools.

Basically, I objected to being reliant on the generosity of a for-profit company. “We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.”

This is a rough sketch:

• Create a Linux server. It can even be a VM/container if you get the networking right.
• Create a Wireguard interface and pick a private IP address subnet that won’t conflict with your home subnet: https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/
• Define PostUp and PostDown rules in your Wireguard config that modify iptables to masquerade traffic from the Wireguard subnet
• Also set net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 with sysctl. (There is probably an IPv6 equivalent but I live in the past.)
• Generate keypairs and configs for each device you want to use
• Set up dynamic DNS, e.g. https://freedns.afraid.org/
• Forward UDP port 51820 to your server
• Install the Wireguard app on your client devices. If Linux, you can just write a client config containing the necessary magic words and start it up with wg-quick.

Boom. Tailscale’d.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some steps. I have some janky automation that’s broken in a new way every time I try to use it.

Not a lawyer, but I thought trademarks are distinct from copyright. Even if copyright went poof, it’s still possible to violate a trademark.

I thought flies use ZZ for the onomatopoeia

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I have no opinion of them, but I’m curious why advertising would imply untrustworthiness. Are you saying they’re too eager or something? Spending money on ads is also consistent with a company that’s making money by charging for a service — I’d be more suspicious of free VPNs.

Given the warning about capitalization, the best possible case is that they’re using ast.literal_eval() rather than throwing untrusted input into eval().

Err, I guess they might be comparing strings to ‘True’ and are choosing to be really strict about capitalization for some reason.

My knife is printf, but my scalpel is gdb.

I honestly think autocorrecting your scripts would do more harm than good. ShellCheck tells you about potential issues, but It’s up to you to determine the correct behavior.

For example, how could it know whether cat $foo should be cat "$foo", or whether the script actually relies on word splitting? It’s possible that $foo intentionally contains multiple paths.

Maybe there are autofixable errors I’m not thinking of.

FYI, it’s possible to gradually adopt ShellCheck by setting --severity=error and working your way down to warnings and so on. Alternatively, you can add one-off #shellcheck ignore SC1234 comments before offending lines to silence warnings.

Hey man, don’t bring IEEE 754 into this unless you want to discuss how negative zero, infinity, NaN, and subnormals relate to the qualia of color perception.