Unlurker

Perl's Decline Was Cultural (beatworm.co.uk)

No. Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN and, its extremely flexible syntax does not scale for medium to large team coordination.

I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well. I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []sd[dsd]@$#!&lala lines written by previous developers

Nah Perl just wasn't a very good language. Not every language is equally good.

There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic for use in a field with a lot of turnover and job hopping.

Yeah the joke was, Perl is write-only.

I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

I think a big part is does someone starting to program even hear that Perl exists? No, and they start learning python and so have little need to learn Perl after that

Perl6/Raku killed Perl. Python 3 almost killed Python. It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.

> Python 3 almost killed Python. People were being crybabies; the critics were extremely vocal and few. Python 3 improved the language in every way and the tooling to upgrade remains unmatched.

In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

There was so much complexity hidden behind "do what I mean". For example, scalar vs array context which was super subtle: my @var = @array # copy the array my $var = @array # return the count of elements in array

Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language. But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for working in that space, but it is much easier to learn, both in terms of reading and writing. In other words, it encourages broadly maintainable code. Ruby is quite similar (although I think people massively overstate how much the language itself generally encourages understandable semantics)

Yeah I think I would have been considered part of the “in” crowd of Perl to some degree and it wasn’t the culture that drove me away and to Python. It was Django and the people involved with it.

Python is mentioned and I think the key reason it's continued to grow while Perl declined, is a vastly more welcoming culture. Python says you know nothing, but want to automate a small task. The community will help you. More so than any other language. Then again, Python 2 and Python 3 are two different languages. Very few projects are willing to have such a massive migration.

Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice versa). It is the perfect language for system adminstration and personal use. Even if it isn't for machine learning and those kinds of bleeding edge things that need constant major changes. There are trade-offs. This kind of ubiquitous availablility (from early popularity) combined with the huge drop-off in popularity due to raku/etc, lead to a unique and very valuable situation unmatched by any other comparable language. Perl just works everywhere. No containers, no dep hell, no specific versions of the language needed. Perl is Perl and it does what it always has reliably. I love it. The decline was a savior.

[delayed]

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Z-Image: Powerful and highly efficient image generation model with 6B parameters (github.com/Tongyi-MAI)

We have vLLM for running text LLMs in production. What is the equivalent for this model?

i have been testing this on my Framework Desktop. ComfyUI generally causes an amdgpu kernel fault after about 40 steps (across multiple prompts), so i spent a few hours building a workaround here https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI/pull/11143 overall it's fun and impressive. decent results using LoRA. you can achieve good looking results with as few as 8 inference steps, which takes 15-20 seconds on a Strix Halo. i also created a llama.cpp inherence custom node for prompt enhancement which has been helping with overall output quality.

The [demo PDF]( https://github.com/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image/blob/main/assets/Z-Image-Gallery.pdf ) has ~50 photos of attractive young women sitting/standing alone, and exactly two photos featuring young attractive men on their own. It's incredibly clear who the devs assume the target market is.

Just want to learn - who actually needs or buys up generated images?

Dying businesses like newspapers and local banks, who use it to save the money they used to spend on shutterstock images? That’s where I’ve seen it at least. Replacing one useless filler with another.

Some ideas for your consideration: - Illustrating blog posts, articles, etc. - A creativity tool for kids (and adults; consider memes). - Generating ads. (Consider artisan production and specialized venues.) - Generating assets for games and similar, such as backdrops and textures. Like any tool, it takes certain skill to use, and the ability to understand the results.

I've done some preliminary testing with Z-Image Turbo in the past week. Thoughts - It's fast (~3 seconds on my RTX 4090) - Surprisingly capable of maintaining image integrity even at high resolutions (1536x1024, sometimes 2048x2048) - The adherence is impressive for a 6B parameter model Some tests (2 / 4 passed): https://imgpb.com/exMoQ Personally I find it works better as a refiner model downstream of Qwen-Image 20b which has significantly better prompt understanding but has an unnatural "smoothness" to its generated images.

On fal, it takes less than a second many times. https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/z-image/turbo/api Couple that with the LoRA, in about 3 seconds you can generate completely personalized images. The speed alone is a big factor but if you put the model side by side with seedream and nanobanana and other models it's definitely in the top 5 and that's killer combo imho.

So does this finally replace SDXL? Is Flux 1/2/Kontext left in the dust by the Z Image and Qwen combo?

SDXL has been outclassed for a while, especially since Flux came out.

Subjective. Most in creative industries regularly still use SDXL. Once Z-image base comes out and some real tuning can be done, I think it has a chance of replacing it for the function SDXL has

HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (info.arxiv.org)

It must have been around 1998. I was editor of our school’s newspaper. We were using Corel Draw. At some point, I proposed that we start using HTML instead. In the end, we decided against it, and the reasons were the same that you can read here in the comments now.

Seeing the Gemini 3 capabilities, I can imagine a near future where file formats are effectively irrelevant.

I have family members with health conditions that require periodic monitoring. For some tests, a phlebotomist comes home. For some tests, we go to a hospital. For some other tests, we go to a specialized testing center. They all give us PDFs in their own formats. I manually enter the data to my spreadsheet, for easy tracking. I use LLMs for some extraction, but they still miss a lot. At least for the foreseeable future, no LLM will ever guarantee that all the data has been extracted correctly. By "guarantee", I mean someone's life may depend on it. For now, doctors take up the responsibility of ensuring the data is correct and complete. But not having to deal with PDFs would make at least a part of their job (and our shared responsibilities) easier.

Seriously. More people need to wake up to this. Older generations can keep arguing over display formats if they want. Meanwhile younger undergrad and grad students are getting more and more accustomed to LLMs forming the front end for any knowledge they consume. Why would research papers be any different.

> Meanwhile younger undergrad and grad students are getting more and more accustomed to LLMs forming the front end for any knowledge they consume. Well, that's terrifying. I mean, I knew it about undergrads, but I sure hoped people going into grad school would be aware of the dangers of making your main contact with research, where subtle details are important, through a known-distorting filter. (I mean, I'd still be terrified if you said that grad students first encounter a paper through LLMs. But if it is the front end for all knowledge they consume? Absolutely dystopian.)

Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop (tinycorelinux.net)

/* On the website, body { font-size: 70%; } — why? To drive home the idea that it's tiny? The default font size is normally set to the value comfortable for the user, would be great to respect it. */

I've used it around early 2010s as a live cd to fix partitions etc. Definitely recommend as a lightweight distro. Was a little tricky to install on disk and even on disk it behaved mostly like a live cd and file changes had to be committed to disk IIRC. Hope they improved the experience now.

https://luxferre.top http://t3x.org All of the minilaguages exposed there will run on TC even with 32MB of RAM. On TC, set IceWM the default WM with no opaque moving/resizing as default and get rid of that horrible dock.

I've used many of these small Linux distros. I used to have Tiny Core in a VM for different things. I also like SliTaz: http://slitaz.org/en , and Slax too: https://www.slax.org/ Oh and puppy Linux, which I could never get into but was good for live CDs: https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ And there's also Alpine too.

Wondering if it would be a good idea to setup a VM with this. Setup remote connection, and intellij. Just have a script to clone it for a new project and connect from anywhere using a remote app. It will increase the size of the VM but the template would be smaller than a full blown OS Aside from dev containers, what are other options? I'm not able to run intellij on my laptop, is not an option I use Nvim to ssh into my computer to work, which is fine. But really miss the full capacity of intellij

Those clay tablets needed to be fired and had a negative carbon footprint. Handmade parchment, or leather carvings if you don’t mind.

Why fire them when you can just reuse them?

I usually only install on like a Raspberry Pi or VM for these toy distros Are any distros using block chain for this ? I am used to using code signing with HSMs

I’d install it as a VM maybe, > are any sisters using blockchain I don’t think so, but it’s always struck me as a good idea - it’s actual decentralised verification of a value that can be confirmed by multiple people independently without trusting anyone other than the signing key is secure. > I am used to code signing with HSMs Me too, but that requires distributing the public key securely which… is exactly where we started this!

GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches (grapheneos.social)

Samsung Androids are not safe? Big surprise there! /s

Graphene has really caught my eye in the last several months, but unfortunately I couldn't find a good deal for Pixel phones (>128GB storage), used or new. That's the biggest bottleneck for adoption it seems. I just finally switched from an S10E to a S25Ultra (black friday deal brought down to $820), but not being able to use Graphene in the future hurts a bit for sure.

Why was it that in the early PC days, IBM was unable to keep a lid on 'IBM compatible', allowing for the PC interoperability explosion, yet today, almost every phone has closed drivers, closed and locked bootloaders, and almost complete corporate control over our devices? Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?

> Why was it that in the early PC days, IBM was unable to keep a lid on 'IBM compatible', allowing for the PC interoperability explosion IBM didn't think to lock it down, the BIOS was the main blocker and was relatively quickly reverse-engineered (properly, not by copying over the BIOS source IBM had included in the reference manual). They tried to fix some with the MCA bus of the PS/2 but that flopped. > almost every phone has closed drivers Lots of hardware manufacturers refuse to provide anything else and balk at the idea of open drivers. And reverse engineering drivers is either not worth the hassle for the manufacturer or a risk of being sued. > Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice? Incentive. Specifically its complete lack of existence.

Because the original IBM PC was designed to be cheap and built in a hurry. IBM had a mandate for the original PC to use off the shelf components as much as possible. They also neglected to secure an exclusive license from Microsoft for DOS. 95% of building an IBM PC clone was buying the same parts and getting a DOS license from Microsoft (which they were very happy to sell you). Everyone saw what happened to IBM and just didn't do it that way again.

You can actually look at history and see what happens when IBM tries to wrest control of the PC platform back with the PS/2, which was a flop with consumers because it wasn't backwards compatible enough with IBM's own previous PCs or the wider PC market that developed. A bunch of PC clone manufacturers got together and came up with the EISA bus standard so they wouldn't have to pay IBM license fees for MCA, and made it backwards-compatible with ISA cards people already had. It was successful enough that IBM ended up adopting EISA for some of their PCs. The other notable thing about the situation is that three companies ended up simultaneously responsible for a large part of the PC platform, originally -- IBM, Microsoft and Intel. They all worked in various ways to encourage competition to each other -- the reason we see OS competition on the PC platform is that IBM and Intel both found it in their interests to allow other OSes on the platform to reduce Microsoft's leverage over them. IBM in fact created one of the competing PC OSes out the gate, OS/2, which was originally an IBM/Microsoft joint project until they started feuding. Now, OS/2 is dead, but IBM's interest in being able to support their own OS instead of Microsoft's is a big reason the PC platform was built in an OS agnostic way. People criticize UEFI for locking down the PC platform more than the previous BIOS implementations, but UEFI is still _way_ more open than basically any other platform, most of which don't have a standard for bootloaders at all. It's really the absense of a standard for bootloaders that keeps most Android phones locked down. Two Android phones from the same OEM might have different bootloaders, much less two phones from different manufacturers. We've yet to see an alternate OS with the resources to support implementing their own bootloaders for a majority of Android phones.

The systems and software were vastly less complex and powerful in the 8088 days. Very little of it was open, including the headliner apps of WordPerfect and 123. Google had the benefit of three decades to study IBM's loss of control to prevent it with Android. Aside from China, they have been largely successful.

Other companies saw that IBM effectively lost control over their platform (and thus lost a large revenue stream), and are determined to not make the same mistake. That's a long running effort, going all the way from lobbying (DMCA and their ilk), to all kinds of hardware root-of-trust, encrypted and signed firmware, OS kernels and drivers etc etc. And yes, today we have the transistor budgets to spend on things like this, which wasn't an option back when the PC architecture was devised.

The company making a device that is licensed by the FCC has to do everything that they can to mitigate the risk of an unlicensed broadcast on their devices. https://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/rfdevice > INTENTIONAL RADIATORS (Part 15, Subparts C through F and H) > An intentional radiator (defined in Section 15.3 (o)) is a device that intentionally generates and emits radio frequency energy by radiation or induction that may be operated without an individual license. > Examples include: wireless garage door openers, wireless microphones, RF universal remote control devices, cordless telephones, wireless alarm systems, Wi-Fi transmitters, and Bluetooth radio devices. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-15/subpart-C Other countries have similar regulations. PCs don't have that restriction. You might be able to get to the point where you have a broadcast license and can get approved to transmit in the cellphone radio spectrum and get FCC approval for doing so with your device... but if you were to distribute it and someone else was easily able to modify it who wasn't licensed and made it into a jammer you would also be liable. The scale that the cellphone companies work at such liability is not something that they are comfortable with. So the devices they sell are locked down as hard as they can to make it clear that if someone was to modify a device they were selling it wasn't something that they intended or made easy.

The only thing proprietary in the early PC architecture was the BIOS. Everything else was pre-existing architecture from third parties, there was nothing to keep a lid on. Since a PC was a big box of parts anyone could manufacture one. A modern phone is much more complicated. As to why there aren’t a plethora: the market doesn’t demand it that much. The people doing it aren’t wildly successful. Perhaps that’s changing (I hope so) but I know very few people outside this community who have ever thought “I wish I could have a third party version of Android”.

> Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice? There are technical reasons, but as ever the real underlying causes are incentives. Companies realized that the OS is a profit center, something they can use to influence user behavior to their benefit. Before the goal was to be a hardware company and offer the best hardware possible for cost. Now the goal is to own as large a slice of your life as possible. It's more of a social shift than a technological one. So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments? They'd be undercutting themselves. That's not to say that attempts to build interoperability don't exist, just that they happen due to what are essentially activist efforts, the human factor, acting in spite of and against market forces. That doesn't tend to win out, except (rarely) in the political realm. i.e. if you want interoperable mobile hardware you need a law, the market's not going to save you one this one.

I generally agree, but as a caveat sometimes it's cheaper, more robust and more efficient to build an integrated system without having to worry about interoperability. BYD's electric vehicle chasis for example, seems to greatly cut manufacturing costs, even if it makes swap-in repairs harder down the road. But, I'd guess this accounts for a relatively small fraction of corporate decision on lock-in strategies for rent extraction - advanced users should be able to treat their cell phones OS like laptops, with the same basic concepts, eg just lock down the firmware for the radio output, to keep the carriers happy, and open everything else, maybe with a warranty void if you swap out your OS. Laws are needed for that, certainly.

As a LineageOS user, I'd be interested in the disparity between GrapheneOS and LineageOS.

GrapheneOS is a locked-down, security-hardened system that's good if you need absolutely maximal security (e.g. journalists, activists, folks targeted by state actors). LineageOS is a more of an open system for tinkerers who want to play outside Google's walled garden. You can have root to control your own device on Lineage, but not Graphene.

I believe you can root GrapheneOS. It just breaks the security model, so it's not recommended to do so.

Ah, you're right: https://github.com/schnatterer/rooted-graphene I stand corrected. Still, as you say, less point in it since it breaks their security model.

If you care about security above all else and you have a Pixel, GrapheneOS should really be your only consideration. LineageOS has a place for those who care less about security and more about features, "freedom", compatibility, community etc... I was a LOS user and maintained my own forks for devices, but switching to GrapheneOS was a good decision and I don't really miss anything.

It might be important to mention, that Lineage OS is available on a number of the devices abandoned by their original vendors, so sometimes it may be a much better solution to get a Lineage OS onto their former "flagship" which stopped getting updates 18 months after the release. So if the bootloader can be relocked and not passing Play Integrity scam is not a problem, Lineage may be a better option. Better than nothing, that is.

That comparison shows "Deblobbed? Yes" for GrapheneOS. That implies they've replaced (most of) the blobs for wifi, bluetooth, 5g chips etc. Is that actually true? It's such a big deal, and I see little to no work being done on this front. Anyone have any idea what GrapheneOS actually deblobbed?

They can because they essentially support Google chipsets, which are not blobby like MediaTek or Qualcomm because Google for all its faults is still relatively open (except their recent change in release schedules is why the Pixel 10 series still only has experimental GrapheneOS support).

https://tbot.substack.com/p/grapheneos-new-oem-partnership > GrapheneOS has officially confirmed a major new hardware partnership—one that marks the end of its long-standing Pixel exclusivity. According to the team, work with a major Android OEM began in June and is now moving toward the development of a next-generation smartphone built to meet GrapheneOS’ strict privacy and security standards.

Oh that's one of the best news in the smartphone world in a long time. It's impossible to escape the Apple/Google duopoly but at least GrapheneOS makes the most out of Android regarding privacy. I still wish we could get some kind of low resource, stable and mature Android clone instead of Google needlessly increasing complexity but this will over time break app compatibility (Google will make sure of it) Edit: I do think Pixel devices used to be one of the best but still I'd like to choose my hardware and software separately interoperating via standards

How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM (telefoncek.si)

Wow, HN is really desperate for the clickbait today. (And no! Don't just say this isn't a substantive comment! Do better! This isn't the first ragebait top story that made commenters foam at the mouth today, and thanks to the bullshit asymmetry of AI slop, it's even easier to churn out posts like 'this cheap shitbox SBC lacks systemd but includes tcpdump'.)

> To summarize: the device is riddled with security flaws, originally shipped with default passwords, communicates with servers in China, comes preinstalled with hacking tools, and even includes a built-in microphone So like pretty much any BMC out there, just with the benefit that an attacker taking over that thing doesn't have direct access to reflash your bios with a backdoored version? Any halfway sane person deployed any kind of BMC or networked KVM to a access restricted management VLAN for at least a decade now because all of those things are a big mess, and the impact of them getting owned typically is pretty severe.

Once I dissected the code of a FDA-approved medical device, Vendys Endothelix. If connected to the internet, the device would covertly send measurement data to a specific email address. The usernames and comments baked in the code suggested Chinese development. I would be curious to know what percentage of our highly sensitive data ends up overseas.

I think it's safe (or maybe prudent) to assume that pretty much all phones, computers, and network switching gear are backdoored by someone .

You are using a KVM. When not trusting the manufacturer a microphone is the least of your problems xD

This said wildly inappropriate features included do violate the principle of least user authorization. You expect if your KVM gets hacked your servers are pretty fucked, the problem now is any conversation you had by the KVM is suspect too. Goes along with 'the S in IOT stands for security'.

The Chinese part makes one think the Chinese could access the microphone. Nevermind that, if they could access the device, they'd also be able to read your kvm i/o.

And rather than "the Chinese", how about "anyone robo-dialling some SSH connections"?