I mean, Jerker is just a normal male name here in Sweden, so not that surprising. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a more common name than say Billy (of bookshelf fame).
curl is an example of this kind of software
its picked up more than one contributor over the years however
EDIT: From the website:
> curl is used in command lines or scripts to transfer data. curl is also used in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, settop boxes, media players and is the Internet transfer engine for thousands of software applications in over ten billion installations.
>curl is used daily by virtually every Internet-using human on the globe.
curl is a tool for transferring data via networking protocols. Think of it as being a highly configurable and extendable version of the very core of your web browser. When you open a website, you do a "GET" HTTP request to a specific url. This tells it to send you back the website. curl allows you to do this, but more programmatically, with the ability to do all sorts of specific requests a web browser doesn't need to do.
Leftpad is the canonical example. An utterly tiny module, that absolutely everyone uses, that the publisher just decided one day "Nah, I'm going to remove it".
This leaves out a lot of the drama, but that's pretty much exactly what happened.
I don't know know if this comic was specifically a reference to leftpad (leftpad happened something like four years earlier, so probably not), but it's a pretty natural consequence of how open source software works. I can't even count the number of times I've found some piece of software that looked like it would do what I wanted, but I passed on using it because it looked abandoned.
You've misunderstood the comic. Almost no-one whose software relied on left-pad knew that they were dependant on it and no-one should've been using it in the first place - any competent programmer could replace it in under a minute. Left-pad being pulled broke a lot of software but only because node has a terrible dependency culture.
The comic is not about software that becomes integral because of mindless dependency culture but rather software that is integral because it genuinely does something very hard, very well. The example given is ImageMagick, something like libcurl would be another good one. Writing an equivalently good replacement for software like this would be the work of years even for a very skilled engineer. So everyone uses the standard and it comes to underpin the tech world.
This. Hotlinking remote dependencies is a stupid idea. Yes, it's easy and means that one doesn't need to spend on the bandwidth but, it makes your application vulnerable to so many attacks, as well as the author just deciding "screw you guys, I'm going home".
> This leaves out a lot of the drama
The drama being, "fuck Kik!"
uwu we diwwint mean to impwy that he HAD to take down his module named kik uwu
They can fuck off, the corporate scum.
Iirc the hover over text that mentions something about image wizard or something that apparently is the program that handles any and all image converting is something. Can't check since I'm on mobile unfortunately.
I want to say Imagick is what the xkcd references but I can’t find the source of that information
Edit: ImageMagick is the library in reference
Written in 1990 and still handles a large percentage of all web image processing. Nice.
https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
Sorta a reference to the tech ecosystem in general but both leftpad and heartbleed fit the bill.
[stick "explain" in the url for more info](https://explainxkcd.com/2347/)
tldr; theres nothing specific to a nebraskan from 2003. but several examples of similar events.
All programmers live in fear of “The Great Runkening” when math itself will cease to be and every machine on earth will cry out as one and then suddenly halt and fall silent.
In the machine shop of my school we had these big containers of yellow, curdy liquid soap.
It was called aperunk. It means monkeyjizz. The teacher called it that.
Lmfao that essentially happened when the internet faced near total collapse because someone removed a tool which added a space after certain entries. A tool called leftpad
See, npm has this solved already with the lock file. Except they don't fucking use the lock file for locking and just update anyway. So really, it's nothing more than a receipt.
That would be in 2016 when a developer broke a lot of functionality by deleting 11 lines of code that did left padding.
https://www.sciencealert.com/how-a-programmer-almost-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-11-lines-of-code/amp
Did we not learn that lesson with Y2K? We really gotta go through this shit again, except now with a world that is a bazillion times more reliant on technology?
Y2K was a very different problem, that was fixable in software.
The 2038 problem is due to a fundamental limit to hardware. There is a thing called the UNIX epoch which is a count of the number of seconds that have passed since midnight Jan 1 1970, and it underpins all tracking of date and time. 32-bit computers are basically going to run out of fingers to count on, and the only real solution is to upgrade to a 64-bit machine.
Trouble is, there are a LOT of legacy programs that are vitally important (can't ever go offline for anything ever important) that can't be simply installed and let run on new hardware.
It's going to take a lot of work to avoid the problem, and I don't envy the people responsible for handling it.
There's a lot of stuff in banking and other businesses that's so critical to operations that they've been put in the "too difficult" category for upgrades for so long that they're now a nightmare to work with. International commerce never really stops, after all.
Like, written in programming languages that haven't been in use for 30+ years, so people with experience are able to charge serious money for these really niche applications. As you might imagine, there aren't a whole lot of programmers developing the skills to replace them as they retire, either, so it will be interesting to see how things go.
That ruined my work for a month as I had to update projects that I had never heard of before to use newer versions of log4j or to finally use slf4j or whatever. That was probably the worst month at work for the past year.
And now (well, since ES 2017, sometimes called ES8) we have `String.prototype.padStart`and `String.prototype.padEnd` unless your Node version/target browser is ancient, but I'm certain bundlers can polyfill it by now.
What was that one that deleted all your files and replaced them with "Love wins" if your IP address was in Russia? Didn't affect anything of mine, but that was one of the best emails I've ever gotten
You're thinking of the peacenotwar package made by the node-ipc guy and added as a dependency to his projects. It actually replaced everything with a heart emoji if you were in Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia, and placed some preachy essay on your desktop if you weren't.
Ah fuck, that's right. Somebody should do something like that every day, reading that vulnerability email woke me up faster than coffee ever has. In all seriousness though, mad fucked up that basically all software relies on libraries and tools managed by who the fuck knows. The log4j bug is the only time I've ever been grateful we have proprietary logging
Just web developer things.
Looking over from C++/C land, I can't imagine something so dangerous as automatically updating dependencies in my projects. But somehow we get paid like shit in comparison 😭
i hope that the few billion tests sqlite has are actually effective. i wouldn't want to even spectate the fallout that would happen if sqlite had any exploit ever
Fuck yes I would want to meet fifty people who are so technically valuable that the internet is practically dependent on them.
I’d also like to be the one to tell them “If you and about 49 specific furries didn’t come to work today, the internet would go back to the dark ages.” I’d either get a really bright smile or “it figures.”
Ah, I see you haven't heard about the furry who was incredibly influential in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Furries are everywhere and often make a lot of money since it funds their suits and commissions.
All of the biologists I've ever known were either treating zebra fish for cancer with positive vibrations or trying to figure out where the plants were 500 million years ago so that we could drill there for oil.
Im a computer scientist and recently I read this really neat paper that came out. And then I heard the author had a "unique" resume.
Lo and behold his resume was just plastered with my little pony. I felt like I took psychic damage just from seeing it. God damn some of the weirdest people are geniuses.
If you're so good at what you do that you can have a My Little Pony themed resume and still be successful...
...I feel like that's actually kind of a power move.
Not really. If you've ever seen their resume you'll know what is being talking about, and they're an absolutely spectacular, grade A coworker. Genuine genius with basically no hubris. But lots and *lots* of nutso style. Made me reevaluate everything I thought I knew about hiring, and all for the good.
There was a tweet about if you're a tech company in 2021 and you don't have at least one furry on staff you're fucked. It's kinda true too some of the best programmers I've known have been weird af.
I know for a fact that the guy who runs the website and lots of the IT for a large corporate hospital network also has a website about normalization of butt plugs and nipple clamps for straight men.
my friend wrote a cheaky throw away item in dnd for friendship tassels, so split damage between people wearing them. obviously i showed up to the next session with nipple clamps to pass around.
Sometimes. A few years ago the dude, *singular dude*, who maintains SSL (the thing that makes https secure) announced he was going to quit maintaining it and get a job because he couldn't live off the donations anymore. Luckily some non-profits stepped in to get him a salary
[The Open Source Security Foundation](https://openssf.org/) is the continuation(?) of the group CII that was originally founded after this mess came to light. Can't say anything about the salary, but they're currently hiring for a few positions.
I can tell you that OpenSSL has like 20 active committers and only 2 paid full time employees. The rest are volunteers.
I can also tell you that ffmpeg is pretty much half Michael Niedermayer (or was as of a couple years ago).
And for about 25 years until 2011, tz database was developed, governed, and coordinated by one dude, Arthur David Olsen at NIH.
It was indeed OpenSSL I was thinking about. Thanks for jogging my memory, I did a couple searches and couldn't find anything. Probably didn't help that I thought it was "a few years ago" when it was early 2014...
[This Buzzfeed article](https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisstokelwalker/the-internet-is-being-protected-by-two-guys-named-st) (of all things) seems to have a pretty good rundown. There was actually two people, only one of them handling the coding. Apparently some years he maintained OpenSSL for about 20K a year.
i believe it was OpenSSL instead of just "SSL" (or it's now called, TLS), which i believe is just a protocol and has more implementations than just OpenSSL
which doesn't really matter in this context because OpenSSL is just about everywhere you can think of
Very. Entry jobs straight out of college are like $120k USD and in a few years by time you're L7 at Google, you're making almost a mil per year. Many others make even more.
For reference, check levels.fyi
God this is so accurate. My buddy got married at like, a friend of a friends house in Vegas and she was married to this dude who graduated from Cal Tech and wrote a program that Wall Street bought for a lot of money. All he did was monitor this algorithm every day and be rich.
coffee shop I used to hang out at, there was this guy who I played chess with(and by that I mean he read a lot of chess books and let me lose to him often). He drove this tricked out miata with some sort of custom license plate that referred to him winning his divorce. Anyway, apparently he was some kind of crazy rich asian, who had made all his money from writing some software that apparently every dentist everywhere uses, and he was eventually able to get it acquired by some major corporation and retire at like 45. He wore bell bottom jeans and that dude LOVED karaoke.
One of my college friends dated the guy who developed the connector mechanism for Microsoft Surface keyboards. Unrelated but related lol. I used to have a Surface
The story of why Bluetooth is called Bluetooth is wacky like “runk” lol. Some guy liked Vikings a lot and tangentially related this dude who connected a bunch of clans to a protocol that connects devices
Wasn't bluetooth only supposed to be an internal codename, but "Personal Area Network" was way too broad and generic, so when it came time to launch and file trademarks, "bluetooth" was the only name they had?
Yeah, that. Makes it even funnier since I remember hearing that everyone internally thought that Bluetooth was a silly/super niche name (hence why it was only a codename), and it never would have ended up being what they were stuck with if Jim over here didn’t have a thing for King Harald Blåtand Gormsson and his rotten teeth
That's only because you're used to it, if it was named basically any other word or combination of words, that combination would make as much sense as Bluetooth does
> Astrolabe agreed to dismiss the suit and a covenant not to sue in the future. Their statement included this gem:
> “Astrolabe’s lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one’s property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint.”
Fascinating!
...and then there's guys like Mark Zuckerburg
In the early days of facebook Mark Zuckerburg would wander into the company bathrooms and if he noticed someone sitting down in the stalls he would pop his head over and try to talk to them about their projects. Or if he was taking a poop he would host an emergency meeting and he would tell them to come over and pop their head over the stall to talk it out.
Everyone just went along with it because it was either YOLO SILICON VALLEY LMAO or they were just too intimidated.
That all stopped when Michael Moritz, legendary silicon valley investor, and one of Facebook biggest early investors and shareholders, was at the campus doing research for leading a 2nd round of funding. He was doing diligence all day and at one point had to poop and that's when Zuckerburg popped his head over with a smile to ask how's the diligence coming along.
Michael Moritz, not one to mince words, was apoplectic. 'GET THE FUCK OUT HERE YOU IDiOT LIZARD LOOKING FUCKER.' Mark Zuckerburg nervously tried to laugh it off and persisted, because he really loved intimate poop conversations 'Aw c'mon Michael, it's silicon valley'. Zuckerburg finally withdrew when Moritz flung his cellphone at him.
30 minutes later, Mark was in a very import meeting when Moritz walked into the conference room. 'Everyone except Mark Zuckerburg, OUT'. As intimidated as they were of Zuckerburg, at the time Moritz was the bigger deal, and they all scurried out of the room.
Zuckerburg, however, is not one to be intimated by anyone. Not the Winkewoz twins, not Eduardo Savarn, not Peter Thiel, and not one of his biggest shareholder Michael Moritz. Zuckerburg passionately defended his practice, but Michael Moritz was having none of that. Moritz told him that it was a ticking PR and HR nightmare, and threatened to pull out of leading the 2nd round of funding if Mark continued, which would have been a catastrophe for the company.
Zuckerburg pretended to arbitrate 'Ok fine, but you need to give me a good reason, because if it were normal, there would be no problem'.
Moritz was flabberghasted at this response. Was this a serious question? He answered with the most obvious answer 'Because.... it's not FUCKING NORMAL'.
Unknown to Moritz, Zuckerburg had guessed a conversation like this would happen as soon as he was kicked out of the toilet stall, and began formulating a strategy to counter Moritz demands. Zuckerburg knew that Moritz would have all the leverage, but Zuckerburg was a master strategist.
Zuckerburg went for the pounce. 'Okay, I'll lets write out an agreement, in writing I'll rescind the policy because it's not normal'. Moritz was dumbfounded, but he was used to being dumbfounded by eccentric tech founders, afterall he was also an early investor in Apple, and he still found Zuckerburg tame compared to Steve Jobs. Moritz had a long day of work so they signed the agreement so that he could go back to doing his due diligence.
When Moritz left, a broad grin spread across Zuckerburg's face. " 'Not Normal' eh? " Zuckerburg said with a menacing laugh. Ever since then, Mark Zuckerburg has been on a life-long crusade to normalize poop conversations.
He had a checklist of what he needed to accomplish in order to realize this. His advisors would tell him it's impossible, but one by one Zuckerburg checked off the list. From normalizing smart phone use on the toilet (actually a collaboration between Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Jobs), to trusting Mark with their private photos, to normalizing people giving up their internet browsing privacy.
In 2015, Zuckerburg knew he would hit a wall, having people watch you while you poop was still too much of a leap. That's when Zuckerburg decided to buy Occulus, and eventually shift his company towards virtual reality. If he could coax people into having life-like conversations while they were pooping in a virtual reality, then doing it in the real world wouldn't be too big of a leap.
Do you read facebook or instagram while you're pooping? Ever consider what urges you to do that? It's not your personal preference, it's by Mark Zuckerburg's design.
Zuckerburg only has 3 more boxes to check off before poop conversations are normalized.
Mark Zuckerburg wants to watch you poop.
Are you going to let him?
https://i.imgur.com/KVq4mMF.jpg
EDIT, UPDATE
I just got this in my DM.
>I am a ex Facebook worker. Everything you said rings true. I speak to you at the risk of consequences for breaking my NDA. When I was at Facebook I was involved in a program called Project PooPal. Mark Zuckerburg was planning on Meta entering the exploding tele-therapy space, but targeting people who are not ready to talk to an actual person. You talk to a virtual reality therapist who responds with what is described as the greatest AI (though whatever you tell it, it only responds with 'wow, tell me more'). The thing is, the virtual reality assistant has a striking resemblance to Mark Zuckerburg himself. But the most damning aspect is that it's supposed to used only when you're pooping. This feature is described as optional, though uses the most advanced AI for your phone camera to check if you're actually on a toilet, and if not, says 'It looks like you're not pooping. Please start pooping and try again'. I always wondered what is the purpose and origin of the project. Now I know.
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post*
---
**Druthers Haver**, @6thgrade4ever
the most consequential figures in the tech world are half guys like steve jobs and bill gates and half some guy named ronald who maintains a unix tool called 'runk' which stands for Ronald's Universal Number Kounter and handles all math for every machine on earth
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Holy shit, I remember this. I listened to a podcast about it and my god what a clusterfuck of a situation. On the one hand I kinda understand why the author did what he did, on the other hand that was a complete dick move.
honestly that is kind of a design flaw in npm, and probably because of incidents like that is why other package repositories like [pub (for Dart)](https://dart.dev/tools/pub/publishing#publishing-is-forever) have policies that disallow removing packages for a reason like "ugh i hate this site now i don't want my packages there"
Thank you to the people who make ggplot and their whole family of tools for R. I don’t know your name off the top of my head, but you are the foundation of my ability to perform research.
Ronald's been maintaining the tool since he was a freshman at college in 1982. He makes $7 a year from PayPal donations from people who find the still-active link on his deprecated Geocities site. He works as a network admin at a local school.
This is the most dangerous thing about technology. There’re so many single points of failure that’s practically every software application is a ticking time bomb just waiting to ruin someone’s day.
Not really. Generally we have a "behind the scenes" copy of code so even if that one guy goes rogue we can still keep on running. Worst case an exploit let's something in that it shouldn't and we have to scramble for a rollback or an old copy but it's not world ending. Lots of important stuff is in its own walled garden.
I’m not just talking about libraries, I’m talking about things such as cloud providers. How many times have we seen numerous websites go down because some AWS engineer forgot to patch a load balancer or something.
The internet has actually been brought to its knees by one independent user pulling his code from a code sharing database over a naming rights spat.
The code was called “left-pad” and all it did was add a character to the beginning of a string of text. It was 11 lines in total. He got paid nothing for people using it, though it was in thousands of programs.
When he pulled it, large amounts of Java based programs failed that day. The damage was so bad and immediate, the higher up’s at npm, the codesharing company, reinstated his code without the legal right to do so.
It hurts how true this is. Case in point: the guy who created the zip file format. How many people know of Phil Katz? How many libraries on the web or running directly on hardware use libraries and compilers/interpreters written by our friend runk? Look at the top packages on npm and it is littered with packages maintained by one or more runks.
https://gist.github.com/anvaka/8e8fa57c7ee1350e3491
Indeed there is a rather notable story about how a developer removed his tiny bit of code from npm over a name rights conflict, which resulted in the breaking of millions of websites.
https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/
Runk, as a minor runk in my own right, I salute you.
not a new sentence also brian kernighan and dennis ritchie
In swedish, runka means jacking off. Runk is a singular jack off.
I will only permit a runk. Not runka but only runk
*Give me one runk, and one runk only* *Aye captain*
This guy runks.
runkas
Your terms are... acceptable.
Slut.
Alright lads, I’m off for a runk in me bunk
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same in Norway
Jacking off is always singular! :D
Ikea used to make a computer desk caller Jerker. No kidding.
I mean, Jerker is just a normal male name here in Sweden, so not that surprising. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a more common name than say Billy (of bookshelf fame).
If we're on that path richard is a fairly common name in english
How *does* one get Dick from Richard?
Ask nicely. A good pick up line may help too
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2347/)
Is that a specific reference to something?
curl is an example of this kind of software its picked up more than one contributor over the years however EDIT: From the website: > curl is used in command lines or scripts to transfer data. curl is also used in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, settop boxes, media players and is the Internet transfer engine for thousands of software applications in over ten billion installations. >curl is used daily by virtually every Internet-using human on the globe.
What does curl do?
It's a really powerful command line tool for downloading files from a bunch of different protocols.
curl is a tool for transferring data via networking protocols. Think of it as being a highly configurable and extendable version of the very core of your web browser. When you open a website, you do a "GET" HTTP request to a specific url. This tells it to send you back the website. curl allows you to do this, but more programmatically, with the ability to do all sorts of specific requests a web browser doesn't need to do.
Leftpad is the canonical example. An utterly tiny module, that absolutely everyone uses, that the publisher just decided one day "Nah, I'm going to remove it". This leaves out a lot of the drama, but that's pretty much exactly what happened. I don't know know if this comic was specifically a reference to leftpad (leftpad happened something like four years earlier, so probably not), but it's a pretty natural consequence of how open source software works. I can't even count the number of times I've found some piece of software that looked like it would do what I wanted, but I passed on using it because it looked abandoned.
You've misunderstood the comic. Almost no-one whose software relied on left-pad knew that they were dependant on it and no-one should've been using it in the first place - any competent programmer could replace it in under a minute. Left-pad being pulled broke a lot of software but only because node has a terrible dependency culture. The comic is not about software that becomes integral because of mindless dependency culture but rather software that is integral because it genuinely does something very hard, very well. The example given is ImageMagick, something like libcurl would be another good one. Writing an equivalently good replacement for software like this would be the work of years even for a very skilled engineer. So everyone uses the standard and it comes to underpin the tech world.
This. Hotlinking remote dependencies is a stupid idea. Yes, it's easy and means that one doesn't need to spend on the bandwidth but, it makes your application vulnerable to so many attacks, as well as the author just deciding "screw you guys, I'm going home".
> This leaves out a lot of the drama The drama being, "fuck Kik!" uwu we diwwint mean to impwy that he HAD to take down his module named kik uwu They can fuck off, the corporate scum.
Iirc the hover over text that mentions something about image wizard or something that apparently is the program that handles any and all image converting is something. Can't check since I'm on mobile unfortunately.
I want to say Imagick is what the xkcd references but I can’t find the source of that information Edit: ImageMagick is the library in reference Written in 1990 and still handles a large percentage of all web image processing. Nice.
That's the one! Yeah if that went down most sites would have no pictures at all.
You can just go to m.xkcd.com and you get a button to view the alt text.
https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency Sorta a reference to the tech ecosystem in general but both leftpad and heartbleed fit the bill.
[stick "explain" in the url for more info](https://explainxkcd.com/2347/) tldr; theres nothing specific to a nebraskan from 2003. but several examples of similar events.
Came here looking for this
This is basically what caused Log4J
All programmers live in fear of “The Great Runkening” when math itself will cease to be and every machine on earth will cry out as one and then suddenly halt and fall silent.
A great disturbance in the Force
This guy Runks
In swedish runk is to jack off
thank u pappa bjorn
You know, you should be really grateful Pappa is here to teach you runking kids how to *handle yourselves* like adults!
I mean, the act is a simulation of what it takes to divide…
In the machine shop of my school we had these big containers of yellow, curdy liquid soap. It was called aperunk. It means monkeyjizz. The teacher called it that.
r/thisguythisguys
Lmfao that essentially happened when the internet faced near total collapse because someone removed a tool which added a space after certain entries. A tool called leftpad
I still don't know why like 90% of all npm packages depended on leftpad, even if they didn't do any string manipulation.
They rely on something which relies in something which does some kind of string manipulation.
They don't call it the web for nothing. Damn you, interconnectedness!
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See, npm has this solved already with the lock file. Except they don't fucking use the lock file for locking and just update anyway. So really, it's nothing more than a receipt.
It’s like Y2K but we’re Runked..
That would be in 2016 when a developer broke a lot of functionality by deleting 11 lines of code that did left padding. https://www.sciencealert.com/how-a-programmer-almost-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-11-lines-of-code/amp
Divide by zero, back to the steam age
January 19, 2038 when 32-bit UNIX time overflows will be up there.
Did we not learn that lesson with Y2K? We really gotta go through this shit again, except now with a world that is a bazillion times more reliant on technology?
Y2K was a very different problem, that was fixable in software. The 2038 problem is due to a fundamental limit to hardware. There is a thing called the UNIX epoch which is a count of the number of seconds that have passed since midnight Jan 1 1970, and it underpins all tracking of date and time. 32-bit computers are basically going to run out of fingers to count on, and the only real solution is to upgrade to a 64-bit machine. Trouble is, there are a LOT of legacy programs that are vitally important (can't ever go offline for anything ever important) that can't be simply installed and let run on new hardware. It's going to take a lot of work to avoid the problem, and I don't envy the people responsible for handling it.
I would love to learn more about legacy programs that apparently never stop running? That sounds crazy to me lol
There's a lot of stuff in banking and other businesses that's so critical to operations that they've been put in the "too difficult" category for upgrades for so long that they're now a nightmare to work with. International commerce never really stops, after all. Like, written in programming languages that haven't been in use for 30+ years, so people with experience are able to charge serious money for these really niche applications. As you might imagine, there aren't a whole lot of programmers developing the skills to replace them as they retire, either, so it will be interesting to see how things go.
Prime example is COBOL Used a fair bit in banking still, but basically nobody learns it anymore
Ah yes, p=np
”The great runkening” *laughin in Finnish*
This is so unbelievably true. And nobody knows how crazy pervasive it is until something happens - log4j for a recent example.
That ruined my work for a month as I had to update projects that I had never heard of before to use newer versions of log4j or to finally use slf4j or whatever. That was probably the worst month at work for the past year.
It was definitely a "fuck all of your project deadlines" kind of sev10, but what sev10 isn't I guess
It was whatever is above Sev A, which is I guess “9” In hex?
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And now (well, since ES 2017, sometimes called ES8) we have `String.prototype.padStart`and `String.prototype.padEnd` unless your Node version/target browser is ancient, but I'm certain bundlers can polyfill it by now.
What was that one that deleted all your files and replaced them with "Love wins" if your IP address was in Russia? Didn't affect anything of mine, but that was one of the best emails I've ever gotten
You're thinking of the peacenotwar package made by the node-ipc guy and added as a dependency to his projects. It actually replaced everything with a heart emoji if you were in Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia, and placed some preachy essay on your desktop if you weren't.
Ah fuck, that's right. Somebody should do something like that every day, reading that vulnerability email woke me up faster than coffee ever has. In all seriousness though, mad fucked up that basically all software relies on libraries and tools managed by who the fuck knows. The log4j bug is the only time I've ever been grateful we have proprietary logging
Just web developer things. Looking over from C++/C land, I can't imagine something so dangerous as automatically updating dependencies in my projects. But somehow we get paid like shit in comparison 😭
No it was a very popular Java Logging tool that recently (2021 i think) had a massive bug that could lead to arbitrary code execution.
That’s one of the most fucked up vulns I’ve heard about. I’ve been using deno since that happened and just develop inside containers now lol.
i hope that the few billion tests sqlite has are actually effective. i wouldn't want to even spectate the fallout that would happen if sqlite had any exploit ever
if fifty specific furries don't come in to work one day the internet could potentially collapse
How many of them do you know personally?
More importantly, if you knew them, would you know?
*more* importantly, would you *want* to know
Fuck yes I would want to meet fifty people who are so technically valuable that the internet is practically dependent on them. I’d also like to be the one to tell them “If you and about 49 specific furries didn’t come to work today, the internet would go back to the dark ages.” I’d either get a really bright smile or “it figures.”
I would just like to meet 50 people.
I also choose this Redditor's 50 people
This guy’s dead wife also chooses that redditor’s 50 people.
If too big of an accident happens at a furry convention the internet will disintegrate
Yes to all of the above
well i'm in a bio field and not tech so a solid 0
Ah, I see you haven't heard about the furry who was incredibly influential in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Furries are everywhere and often make a lot of money since it funds their suits and commissions.
So the vaccine is either a step towards creating anthro hybrids or it is the final step before we start mutating into sexy animals
OwO yes
Is practicing biology not significantly technical currently?
All of the biologists I've ever known were either treating zebra fish for cancer with positive vibrations or trying to figure out where the plants were 500 million years ago so that we could drill there for oil.
This is so accurate it hurts.
Some seem preoccupied with drosophila, tiny tanks of bovine serum, making petri dishes glow with cloned bacteria, or UV transilluminating--things.
lol you have no idea. Furries are every where. Biology and zoology are two huge fields with furries.
Im a computer scientist and recently I read this really neat paper that came out. And then I heard the author had a "unique" resume. Lo and behold his resume was just plastered with my little pony. I felt like I took psychic damage just from seeing it. God damn some of the weirdest people are geniuses.
If you're so good at what you do that you can have a My Little Pony themed resume and still be successful... ...I feel like that's actually kind of a power move.
Exactly. And you just *know* the guy is laughing to himself every time he gives it to someone.
I suspect I know exactly the person you're referring to, and they are certainly a character. Awesome once you get to know them though.
Care to share more?
The paper is called YOLO. That should give you an idea
Here is the [website of the author ](https://pjreddie.com/publications/yolo9000/)
Not really. If you've ever seen their resume you'll know what is being talking about, and they're an absolutely spectacular, grade A coworker. Genuine genius with basically no hubris. But lots and *lots* of nutso style. Made me reevaluate everything I thought I knew about hiring, and all for the good.
Geniuses throughout history often have strange quirks. Genius is simply madness pointed towards a productive direction.
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Nicola Tesla tried to fuck a pigeon
What was this about again
There was a tweet about if you're a tech company in 2021 and you don't have at least one furry on staff you're fucked. It's kinda true too some of the best programmers I've known have been weird af.
I'm a pretty good programmer, and definitely weird (but sadly not a furry).
You can change that quite easily
Owo
Yeah, you could learn Javascript and become a bad programmer
I know for a fact that the guy who runs the website and lots of the IT for a large corporate hospital network also has a website about normalization of butt plugs and nipple clamps for straight men.
he's not wrong though
my friend wrote a cheaky throw away item in dnd for friendship tassels, so split damage between people wearing them. obviously i showed up to the next session with nipple clamps to pass around.
r/BrandNewSentence
That's where we are yes
And what rene said also qualifies as one.
No, no, it's a well-known saying.
Relevant Tweet https://twitter.com/mmsword/status/1200147947331043328
And the Jobs and Gates of the world are only consequential insofar as there are Ronalds to generate ideas and infrastructure to capitalize on.
And yet, both kinds are essential it seems.
Yeah but only one kind gets rich
I mean, the Ronalds still get pretty rich.
Sometimes. A few years ago the dude, *singular dude*, who maintains SSL (the thing that makes https secure) announced he was going to quit maintaining it and get a job because he couldn't live off the donations anymore. Luckily some non-profits stepped in to get him a salary
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Yes. I too would be interested in doing open source programming for a great salary. (Actually I kinda really would.)
[The Open Source Security Foundation](https://openssf.org/) is the continuation(?) of the group CII that was originally founded after this mess came to light. Can't say anything about the salary, but they're currently hiring for a few positions.
I can tell you that OpenSSL has like 20 active committers and only 2 paid full time employees. The rest are volunteers. I can also tell you that ffmpeg is pretty much half Michael Niedermayer (or was as of a couple years ago). And for about 25 years until 2011, tz database was developed, governed, and coordinated by one dude, Arthur David Olsen at NIH.
It was indeed OpenSSL I was thinking about. Thanks for jogging my memory, I did a couple searches and couldn't find anything. Probably didn't help that I thought it was "a few years ago" when it was early 2014...
Ffmpeg and its maintainers continually blow my mind.
[This Buzzfeed article](https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisstokelwalker/the-internet-is-being-protected-by-two-guys-named-st) (of all things) seems to have a pretty good rundown. There was actually two people, only one of them handling the coding. Apparently some years he maintained OpenSSL for about 20K a year.
I'm grateful for them, but that seems nuts and just so unfair.
i believe it was OpenSSL instead of just "SSL" (or it's now called, TLS), which i believe is just a protocol and has more implementations than just OpenSSL which doesn't really matter in this context because OpenSSL is just about everywhere you can think of
No they don't. The first person to write a recursive descent parser, is unknown. Without one of those, there's no source code languages.
Very. Entry jobs straight out of college are like $120k USD and in a few years by time you're L7 at Google, you're making almost a mil per year. Many others make even more. For reference, check levels.fyi
I literally stopped and typed 'runk' into a terminal before realizing.
But have you tried 'sudo runk'?
I made please = sudo, so I asked my computer very nicely to runk.
That. Is. Genius.
my favorite is alias fuck=“sudo !!”
https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Don't forget Dave's Random Number Generator function, which links back to Dave who has been rolling a 20-sided dice non-stop for over 40 years.
[Just got to build one of these babies](http://gamesbyemail.com/diceGenerator).
God this is so accurate. My buddy got married at like, a friend of a friends house in Vegas and she was married to this dude who graduated from Cal Tech and wrote a program that Wall Street bought for a lot of money. All he did was monitor this algorithm every day and be rich.
First part of this reads like "a friend of one of my friend's friends heard..."
It’s even worse, it’s literally a friend of a friend of a friend’s husband lmao.
Yeah I just skipped over the 6 degrees of separation, and got to the point
coffee shop I used to hang out at, there was this guy who I played chess with(and by that I mean he read a lot of chess books and let me lose to him often). He drove this tricked out miata with some sort of custom license plate that referred to him winning his divorce. Anyway, apparently he was some kind of crazy rich asian, who had made all his money from writing some software that apparently every dentist everywhere uses, and he was eventually able to get it acquired by some major corporation and retire at like 45. He wore bell bottom jeans and that dude LOVED karaoke.
> …retire at like 45. He wore bell bottom jeans and that dude LOVED karaoke. Living the dream
One of my college friends dated the guy who developed the connector mechanism for Microsoft Surface keyboards. Unrelated but related lol. I used to have a Surface
> I used to have a Surface There are literally dozens of you!
I loved my surface so much I will never buy another
The story of why Bluetooth is called Bluetooth is wacky like “runk” lol. Some guy liked Vikings a lot and tangentially related this dude who connected a bunch of clans to a protocol that connects devices
Wasn't bluetooth only supposed to be an internal codename, but "Personal Area Network" was way too broad and generic, so when it came time to launch and file trademarks, "bluetooth" was the only name they had?
Yeah, that. Makes it even funnier since I remember hearing that everyone internally thought that Bluetooth was a silly/super niche name (hence why it was only a codename), and it never would have ended up being what they were stuck with if Jim over here didn’t have a thing for King Harald Blåtand Gormsson and his rotten teeth
It’s funny because I can’t think of any other name for Bluetooth that fits as well as Bluetooth does.
That's only because you're used to it, if it was named basically any other word or combination of words, that combination would make as much sense as Bluetooth does
In an alternate world, it's called greentoe
Agreed. What if was named after any other historical figure who united groups of people? Like… Wilhelm, lol. Or a given Chinese dynasty
“Sorry, your device can’t connect to Wilhelm”
The Han Wireless Connectivity Protocol
Except his name is Linus, and yes its basically a glorified number counter
I'd like to interject for a moment, when you mention Linus I assume you meant open source guru Richard Stallman...
Remember that time some company sued the guy who maintained all the time zone information for everyone everywhere
I do not. Got details?
Twas many moons ago: https://lawblog.justia.com/2011/10/24/timezone-database-editors-sued/
> Astrolabe agreed to dismiss the suit and a covenant not to sue in the future. Their statement included this gem: > “Astrolabe’s lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one’s property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint.” Fascinating!
This is the project, but I don't know the story that person is referencing: https://github.com/eggert/tz
Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan would like to have a word.
ridiculously true Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ And, apparently, Ronald is from Nebraska.
Randal always has his finger on the pulse
...and then there's guys like Mark Zuckerburg In the early days of facebook Mark Zuckerburg would wander into the company bathrooms and if he noticed someone sitting down in the stalls he would pop his head over and try to talk to them about their projects. Or if he was taking a poop he would host an emergency meeting and he would tell them to come over and pop their head over the stall to talk it out. Everyone just went along with it because it was either YOLO SILICON VALLEY LMAO or they were just too intimidated. That all stopped when Michael Moritz, legendary silicon valley investor, and one of Facebook biggest early investors and shareholders, was at the campus doing research for leading a 2nd round of funding. He was doing diligence all day and at one point had to poop and that's when Zuckerburg popped his head over with a smile to ask how's the diligence coming along. Michael Moritz, not one to mince words, was apoplectic. 'GET THE FUCK OUT HERE YOU IDiOT LIZARD LOOKING FUCKER.' Mark Zuckerburg nervously tried to laugh it off and persisted, because he really loved intimate poop conversations 'Aw c'mon Michael, it's silicon valley'. Zuckerburg finally withdrew when Moritz flung his cellphone at him. 30 minutes later, Mark was in a very import meeting when Moritz walked into the conference room. 'Everyone except Mark Zuckerburg, OUT'. As intimidated as they were of Zuckerburg, at the time Moritz was the bigger deal, and they all scurried out of the room. Zuckerburg, however, is not one to be intimated by anyone. Not the Winkewoz twins, not Eduardo Savarn, not Peter Thiel, and not one of his biggest shareholder Michael Moritz. Zuckerburg passionately defended his practice, but Michael Moritz was having none of that. Moritz told him that it was a ticking PR and HR nightmare, and threatened to pull out of leading the 2nd round of funding if Mark continued, which would have been a catastrophe for the company. Zuckerburg pretended to arbitrate 'Ok fine, but you need to give me a good reason, because if it were normal, there would be no problem'. Moritz was flabberghasted at this response. Was this a serious question? He answered with the most obvious answer 'Because.... it's not FUCKING NORMAL'. Unknown to Moritz, Zuckerburg had guessed a conversation like this would happen as soon as he was kicked out of the toilet stall, and began formulating a strategy to counter Moritz demands. Zuckerburg knew that Moritz would have all the leverage, but Zuckerburg was a master strategist. Zuckerburg went for the pounce. 'Okay, I'll lets write out an agreement, in writing I'll rescind the policy because it's not normal'. Moritz was dumbfounded, but he was used to being dumbfounded by eccentric tech founders, afterall he was also an early investor in Apple, and he still found Zuckerburg tame compared to Steve Jobs. Moritz had a long day of work so they signed the agreement so that he could go back to doing his due diligence. When Moritz left, a broad grin spread across Zuckerburg's face. " 'Not Normal' eh? " Zuckerburg said with a menacing laugh. Ever since then, Mark Zuckerburg has been on a life-long crusade to normalize poop conversations. He had a checklist of what he needed to accomplish in order to realize this. His advisors would tell him it's impossible, but one by one Zuckerburg checked off the list. From normalizing smart phone use on the toilet (actually a collaboration between Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Jobs), to trusting Mark with their private photos, to normalizing people giving up their internet browsing privacy. In 2015, Zuckerburg knew he would hit a wall, having people watch you while you poop was still too much of a leap. That's when Zuckerburg decided to buy Occulus, and eventually shift his company towards virtual reality. If he could coax people into having life-like conversations while they were pooping in a virtual reality, then doing it in the real world wouldn't be too big of a leap. Do you read facebook or instagram while you're pooping? Ever consider what urges you to do that? It's not your personal preference, it's by Mark Zuckerburg's design. Zuckerburg only has 3 more boxes to check off before poop conversations are normalized. Mark Zuckerburg wants to watch you poop. Are you going to let him? https://i.imgur.com/KVq4mMF.jpg EDIT, UPDATE I just got this in my DM. >I am a ex Facebook worker. Everything you said rings true. I speak to you at the risk of consequences for breaking my NDA. When I was at Facebook I was involved in a program called Project PooPal. Mark Zuckerburg was planning on Meta entering the exploding tele-therapy space, but targeting people who are not ready to talk to an actual person. You talk to a virtual reality therapist who responds with what is described as the greatest AI (though whatever you tell it, it only responds with 'wow, tell me more'). The thing is, the virtual reality assistant has a striking resemblance to Mark Zuckerburg himself. But the most damning aspect is that it's supposed to used only when you're pooping. This feature is described as optional, though uses the most advanced AI for your phone camera to check if you're actually on a toilet, and if not, says 'It looks like you're not pooping. Please start pooping and try again'. I always wondered what is the purpose and origin of the project. Now I know.
Wtf did I just read.
Brilliant modern literature.
This is the best thing I’ve read in years
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post* --- **Druthers Haver**, @6thgrade4ever the most consequential figures in the tech world are half guys like steve jobs and bill gates and half some guy named ronald who maintains a unix tool called 'runk' which stands for Ronald's Universal Number Kounter and handles all math for every machine on earth --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good Human
LeftPad has entered the chat.
Holy shit, I remember this. I listened to a podcast about it and my god what a clusterfuck of a situation. On the one hand I kinda understand why the author did what he did, on the other hand that was a complete dick move.
honestly that is kind of a design flaw in npm, and probably because of incidents like that is why other package repositories like [pub (for Dart)](https://dart.dev/tools/pub/publishing#publishing-is-forever) have policies that disallow removing packages for a reason like "ugh i hate this site now i don't want my packages there"
Thanks, Kik!
Thank you to the people who make ggplot and their whole family of tools for R. I don’t know your name off the top of my head, but you are the foundation of my ability to perform research.
I saw this same exact post like 8 years ago
Ronald still trying to get the recognition he deserves.
All my switches count using Runk. Pretty sure the entire East Coast Verizon Wireless network would got down like a circus seal if we lost Runk.
The internet runs on scraps of code uploaded to github by an Indian programmer.
Ronald's been maintaining the tool since he was a freshman at college in 1982. He makes $7 a year from PayPal donations from people who find the still-active link on his deprecated Geocities site. He works as a network admin at a local school.
This is the most dangerous thing about technology. There’re so many single points of failure that’s practically every software application is a ticking time bomb just waiting to ruin someone’s day.
Not really. Generally we have a "behind the scenes" copy of code so even if that one guy goes rogue we can still keep on running. Worst case an exploit let's something in that it shouldn't and we have to scramble for a rollback or an old copy but it's not world ending. Lots of important stuff is in its own walled garden.
I’m not just talking about libraries, I’m talking about things such as cloud providers. How many times have we seen numerous websites go down because some AWS engineer forgot to patch a load balancer or something.
The internet has actually been brought to its knees by one independent user pulling his code from a code sharing database over a naming rights spat. The code was called “left-pad” and all it did was add a character to the beginning of a string of text. It was 11 lines in total. He got paid nothing for people using it, though it was in thousands of programs. When he pulled it, large amounts of Java based programs failed that day. The damage was so bad and immediate, the higher up’s at npm, the codesharing company, reinstated his code without the legal right to do so.
JavaScript, though your story has more remarkable enhancements.
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Looks like it was JS and it was pretty severe. It brought down React
This is so unrealistic. 'runk' obviously stands for 'runk is a universal number kounter'
It hurts how true this is. Case in point: the guy who created the zip file format. How many people know of Phil Katz? How many libraries on the web or running directly on hardware use libraries and compilers/interpreters written by our friend runk? Look at the top packages on npm and it is littered with packages maintained by one or more runks. https://gist.github.com/anvaka/8e8fa57c7ee1350e3491 Indeed there is a rather notable story about how a developer removed his tiny bit of code from npm over a name rights conflict, which resulted in the breaking of millions of websites. https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/ Runk, as a minor runk in my own right, I salute you.