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And Yet It Moves

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During COVID, I walked a lot. As a consequence, I started listening to more podcasts. Since then the walking has dropped off dramatically, as my wife would tell you. The habit of listening to history podcasts has stuck. I’ve been binge-listening to two of my favorites recently, The Rest is History and Fall of Civilizations, and I couldn’t help but notice that for most of history everything usually sucked.

Wars! Banditry! Plagues! Famine! Nothing resembling justice! Oppression! Frequent cruelty and death! Brutality as the unquestioned norm! Great civilizations collapsing from without and within! Unfairness! History is fascinating but as a lifestyle it had very little to recommend it until quite recently. Things have only gotten better in fits and starts for a tiny slice of the time we’ve been recognizably human. It got a little better with the Renaissance, a little better with the Enlightenment, and in many ways somewhat better over the last century. Many things still suck, but there are fewer of them, and they suck a little less.

Modernity has spoiled us in thinking things won’t get dramatically and catastrophically worse, worse in a way that will last for generations. But things have gotten abruptly much worse before, and they can again. And yet people must persevere, even if their children and grandchildren who will see the benefits and not them.

Trump won yesterday, as I feared he would. I firmly believe America — and likely the world — will get significantly worse for at least a generation, probably more. I’ll spare you, for now, the why. Frankly, I think you either already accept it or will never accept it. The things I care about, like the rule of law and equality before it, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, free trade in service of free people, relative prosperity, protection of the weak from the strong, truth, and human dignity are all going to suffer. Bullies and their sycophants and apologists will thrive.

What should we do?

I have a few thoughts.

Ask Yourself if You’ve Earned The Right To Wallow: I’m a middle-aged, comfortable, straight white guy. I’m not going to take the brunt of what happens. So I have decided not to wallow or give in to hopelessness. I haven’t fucking earned it. Americans far less fortunate than I fought greater and even more entrenched injustice. Civil rights protestors, anti-war protestors, African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, all sorts of people have bravely faced death and penury and injustice without giving up and without the protections I enjoy. What right do I have to give up? None. Maybe you’re different. You may not be as fortunate. I’m not judging you. I’m only judging myself and inviting you to ask the question. Be patient and merciful with people less able to fight.

Reconsider Any Belief In Innate American Goodness: Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? But a glance at history shows it’s not true. Bodies in graves and jails across America disprove it. We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception. That doesn’t make us worse than any other nation. It’s all very human. But faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us. Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. But to win elections you still have to talk people out of evil things. You can’t just trust them to reject evil. You must persuade. You must work. You have to keep making the same arguments about the same values over and over again, defend the same ground every time. Sometimes, when people are afraid or suffering and more vulnerable to lies, it’s very hard. Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.

Start Out Making a Small Difference: A country that votes for Trump is broken in very complicated and daunting ways. Harris could have won in a landslide and 45% of the people voting for Trump would still have reflected a country broken in terrible ways. Moreover, any road out is long and rocky and painful. A Trumpist GOP has control of the entire government, the judiciary is dominated by judges who are Trumpist or willing to yield to Trumpism if it gets rid of Chevron deference, and state and local politics are increasingly dominated by extremists. The GOP is doing everything it can to rig the game to make it harder to vote our way out, and after four more years a stuffed judiciary will be even less inclined to stop them. The struggle to fight back is generational, not simple.

But nobody’s telling you that you have to fix everything. You can fix something. In Schindler’s List, Stern tells Schindler “whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” So save the world that way — one fellow American at a time. You can’t stand up alone against all the Trumpist bullies in America, but maybe you can stand up to a few local ones in defense of a neighbor. You can’t save everyone from mass deportation but maybe you can help one family. You can’t save all trans people from the terrible, cynical jihad against them, but you might be able to support one trans person. Start small. Make a difference for just one person. Use the gifts you have. Use your voice.

Believe Unapologetically: Nobody likes to lose. So when your side loses an election, there’s huge social and psychological pressure to change your stance, to moderate what you believe so you don’t feel like a loser. Don’t do it. Things are worth believing and fighting for. Did you ever see a Trumpist moderate or express doubt? No. Trump spewed loathsome bigotry and lies and ignorance and promoted terrible and cruel policies, many of which he may actually implement. The fact he won big doesn’t mean you were wrong to oppose those things and condemn them. Nor does it mean that you can’t win an election in the future by opposing those things and condemning them. Even if it did mean that — even if America as a country has gone so irretrievably wretched that ignorance and bigotry are essential to electability now — then it would be time for something new and different rather than the Republic we have now.

Trump won; opposition to Trump lost. People will want you to abandon your believes because of that. They want you to bend the knee. Screw them. Evil has won before and will win again, and it’s not an excuse to shrug and go with the flow. It’s going to get harder to stand up for decent values. You will face scorn, official suppression, even violence. That’s not enough reason to stop.

Not only is abandoning your values weak, it’s credulous. The Trumpist narrative will be that the electorate soundly rejected anti-Trump values. But did they? How much of the electorate acted from indifference, indifference that will be swayed the other way some day by different economic or cultural factors? Consume skeptically the “this shows you must abandon these goals” narratives.

Fuck Civility: Do you need to be screaming and waving your middle finger in the face of Trump voters? Only if you want to. Live your best life. But please don’t be conned by the cult of civility and discourse, the “now is the time to come together” folks. You are under no obligation to like, respect, or associate with people who countenance this. We’ve all heard that we shouldn’t let politics interfere with friendships. But do people really mean that, sincerely? Do people really think you shouldn’t cut ties with, say, someone who votes for an overt neo-Nazi, or an overt “overthrow the system and nationalize all assets” tankie? I don’t buy it. I think everyone has their own line about where support of — or subservience to — a doctrine is too contemptible to let a civil relationship survive. For most of my life no major party candidate was over that line for me. I have trusted, liked, and respected people who have voted the other way for decades. But whatever my feelings about Trump in 2016 or 2020, Trump in 2024 is definitely over my line.

Furthermore, no civility code or norm of discourse is worth being a dupe. Trump and his adherents absolutely don’t respect or support your right to oppose him. They have contempt for your disagreement. They despise your vote. They don’t think it’s legitimate. The people who voted for him, at a minimum, don’t see that as a deal-breaker. So Trump voters, to the extent they fault you for judging them, have a double standard you need not respect. Part of the way Trumpists win is when you announce “ah well, voting for Trumpists is just a normal difference of opinion, we all share the same basic American values,” while the Trumpists are saying “everyone who disagrees with us is cuck scum, they’re the enemy within.” Stop that nonsense.

I am invited to break bread with people who think my children, by virtue of being born elsewhere, poison the blood of America — or at least with people who think it’s no big deal for someone to say so. I decline. I decline even to pretend to accept or respect the suggestion that I should.

Don’t Let Regression Trick You Into Abandoning Progress: I know what Christ calls me to do — to turn the other cheek and love the Trumpists. I am not equal to the task, and I’m at peace with that and will accept the price. However, I must advocate for a similar concept: we can’t allow Trumpism to trick us into abandoning key values like due process of law, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion, just because they scorn them.

It would be tempting to throw up our hands and give up on those values. They have proven wholly inadequate to counter Trumpism and to protect themselves. Trump is a rampant criminal who will escape consequences because the system failed us. It remains to be seen if the system will protect us as he and his followers seek to use it to retaliate against their enemies. Maybe the Federalist Society can have a Chick-Fil-A sack lunch to talk about it. What good is freedom of speech if it elects someone whose overt agenda is to limit freedom of speech? What good is freedom of religion if it least to the triumph of foul Christian nationalism? What good is due process if it protects the rich and suppresses the poor?

The answer is not comforting: nobody promised you a featherbed. The promise has never been that due process and freedom will always prevail. The argument has never been if we have them we’ll never be vulnerable to tyranny again. That’s not how it works. The argument is that they are better than the alternatives, more righteous, better to promote human dignity, less likely to be abused by the powerful against the powerless than the alternatives. The premise is that the alternatives are more dangerous. Believing in due process, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are a form of humility: it shows we know we are fallible and should be trusted with as little power as possible.

With Trumpism ascendant, there will be huge pressure to abandon these values that weren’t enough to protect us. For instance there will be wider calls for regulation of media - even as a Trump administration may retaliate against media enemies. But don’t let Trumpists turn you into a Trumpist. The existence of Trumpists — the existence of people who would, at a minimum, shrug and accept Trump’s abuses — shows why government power should be limited.

That means supporting due process and freedom of speech and religion, even for Trumpists who do not support extending the same values to you. That’s the way it works. That’s as close as I get to turning the other cheek.

Trumpism Is Not The Only Wrong: The essence of Trumpism is the Nixon-to-Frost proposition that “if my side does it, it’s not wrong.” Trump dominates American conservatives and putative people of faith even as he rejects the values they’ve previously claimed, because they’ve decided he’s their guy. He’s famously intolerant of dissent within his camp and that’s only going to get worse.

Don’t be like Trumpists. Keep criticizing people “on your side” when they are wrong. Criticize your side on Gaza. Criticize your side on criminal justice — God knows Biden’s and Harris’ records warrant criticism. “My side, right or wrong” is not a way to live. We are all in this together, but you can’t protect values by abandoning them to appease allies.

Stay Tuned For Violence: Violence is as American as cherry pie. America was founded on, by, and through violence, and maintained by violence on several occasions. Debate is preferable. Jaw, jaw is better than war, war. But most Americans would agree with what Thomas Jefferson said about the blood of patriots and tyrants. At some point violence is morally justified and even necessary. Americans will disagree on when. But I think Trumpism brings it closer than it has been in my lifetime — certainly the prospect of defensive violence, if (when?) the Trumpists use it first. When? I don’t know. Putting more than ten million people in camps with the military and a nationalized law enforcement is a very credible candidate, though. 

Resist. Do not go gently. Do not be cowed by the result. Resist. Agitate, agitate, agitate. The values you believe in, the ones that led you to despise Trumpism, are worth fighting for whether or not we are currently winning. Ignore the people who will, from indifference or complicity or cowardice, sneer at you for holding to those values. Speak out. Every time you act to defend your fellow people, even in small ways, you defy Trumpism. In the age of Trumpism, simple decency is revolutionary. Be revolutionaries.



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acdha
14 days ago
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“Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.”
Washington, DC
wmorrell
13 days ago
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timmymac
11 days ago
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Needed to read this today.

Cruel Luxuries

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wmorrell
157 days ago
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Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?

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The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren't in there enough, so now we're into the silly season with Microsoft's announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft's LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000's Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF ... THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on "help the users get stuff done". Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they're asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it's a truthful answer or not.

Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don't want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel's share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they've been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as "Macbook Air killers", largely because they're playing catch-up with Apple's M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.

Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.

First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they've released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there's on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There's a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can't read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.

Microsoft Recall is not that.

"Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could use AI in Windows to help our users see everything they've ever done on their computer?" Is a great pitch, and Recall kinda-sorta achieves this. But the implementation is soemthing rather different. Recall takes snapshots of all the windows on a Windows computer's screen (except the DRM'd media, because the MPAA must have their kilo of flesh) and saves them locally. The local part is good: the term for software that takes regular screenshots and saves them in the cloud is "part of a remote access trojan". It then OCRs any text in the images, and I believe also transcribes any speech, and saves the resulting output in an unencrypted SQLite database stored in:

C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\CoreAIPlatform.00\UKP{GUID}

And there are tools already out there to slurp through the database and see what's in it, such as TotalRecall.

Surprise! It turns out that the unencrypted database and the stored images may contain your user credentials and passwords. And other stuff. Got a porn habit? Congratulations, anyone with access to your user account can see what you've been seeing. Use a password manager like 1Password? Sorry, your 1Password passwords are probably visible via Recall, now.

Now, "unencrypted" is relative; the database is stored on a filesystem which should be encrypted using Microsoft's BitLocker. But anyone with credentials for your Microsoft account can decrypt it and poke around. Indeed, anyone with access to your PC, unlocked, has your entire world at their fingertips.

But this is an utter privacy shit-show. Victims of domestic abuse are at risk of their abuser trawling their PC for any signs that they're looking for help. Anyone who's fallen for a scam that gave criminals access to their PC is also completely at risk.

Worse: even if you don't use Recall, if you send an email or instant message to someone else who does then it will be OCRd and indexed via Recall: and preserved for posterity.
Now imagine the shit-show when this goes corporate.

And it turns out that Microsoft is pushing this feature into the latest update of Windows 11 for all compatible hardware and making it impossible to remove or disable, because that tactic has worked so well for them in the past at driving the uptake of new technologies that Microsoft wanted its ~~customers~~ victims to start using. Like, oh, Microsoft Internet Explorer back in 2001, and remember how well that worked out for them.

Suddenly every PC becomes a target for Discovery during legal proceedings. Lawyers can subpoena your Recall database and search it, no longer being limited to email but being able to search for terms that came up in Teams or Slack or Signal messages, and potentially verbally via Zoom or Skype if speech-to-text is included in Recall data.

It's a shit-show for any organization that handles medical records or has a duty of legal confidentiality; indeed, for any business that has to comply with GDPR (how does Recall handle the Right to be Forgotten? In a word: badly), or HIPAA in the US. This misfeature contravenes privacy law throughout the EU (and in the UK), and in healthcare organizations everywhere which has a medical right to privacy. About the only people whose privacy it doesn't infringe are the Hollywood studios and Netflix, which tells you something about the state of things.

Recall is already attracting the attention of data protection regulators; I suspect in its current form it's going to be dead on arrival, and those CoPilot+ PCs due to launch on June 18th are going to get a hurried overhaul. It's also going to be interesting to see what Apple does, or more importantly doesn't announce at WWDC next week, which is being trailed as the year when Apple goes all-in on AI.

More to the point, though, Windows Recall blows a hole under the waterline of Microsoft's trustworthiness. Microsoft "got serious" about security earlier this decade, around the time Steve Balmer stepped down as CEO, and managed to recover somwhat from having a reputation for taking a slapdash approach to its users data. But they've been going backwards since 2020, with dick moves like disabling auto-save to local files in Microsoft Word (your autosave data only autosaves to OneDrive), slurping all incoming email for accounts accessed via Microsoft Outlook into Microsoft's own cloud for AI training purposes (ask the Department of Justice how they feel about Microsoft potentially having access to the correspondence for all their investigations in progress), and now this. Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it's really hard to regain it.

Some commentators are snarking that Microsoft really really wants to make 2025 the year of Linux on the Desktop, and it's kind of hard to refute them right now.

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wmorrell
167 days ago
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denubis
168 days ago
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autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon

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I've gotten a few bits of feedback asking for my thoughts and/or reactions to the whole "xz backdoor" thing that happened over the past couple of days. Most of my thoughts on the matter apply to autoconf and friends, and they aren't great.

I don't have to cross paths with those tools too often these days, but there was a point quite a while back when I was constantly building things from source, and a ./configure --with-this --with-that was a given. It was a small joy when the thing let me reuse the old configure invocation so I didn't have to dig up the specifics again.

I got that the whole reason for autoconf's derpy little "recipes" is that you want to know if the system you're on supports X, or can do Y, or exactly what flavor of Z it has, so you can #ifdef around it or whatever. It's not quite as relevant today, but sure, there was once a time when a great many Unix systems existed and they all had their own ways of handling stuff, and no two were the same.

So, okay, fine, at some point it made sense to run programs to empirically determine what was supported on a given system. What I don't understand is why we kept running those stupid little shell snippets and little bits of C code over and over. It's like, okay, we established that this particular system does <library function foobar> with two args, not three. So why the hell are we constantly testing for it over and over?

Why didn't we end up with a situation where it was just a standard thing that had a small number of possible values, and it would just be set for you somewhere? Whoever was responsible for building your system (OS company, distribution packagers, whatever) could leave something in /etc that says "X = flavor 1, Y = flavor 2" and so on down the line.

And, okay, fine, I get that there would have been all kinds of "real OS companies" that wouldn't have wanted to stoop to the level of the dirty free software hippies. Whatever. Those same hippies could have run the tests ONCE per platform/OS combo, put the results into /etc themselves, and then been done with it.

Then instead of testing all of that shit every time we built something from source, we'd just drag in the pre-existing results and go from there. It's not like the results were going to change on us. They were a reflection of the way the kernel, C libraries, APIs and userspace happened to work. Short of that changing, the results wouldn't change either.

But no, we never got to that point, so it's still normal to ship a .tar.gz with an absolute crap-ton of dumb little macro files that run all kinds of inscrutable tests that give you the same answers that they did the last time they ran on your machine or any other machine like yours, and WILL give the same answers going forward.

That means it's totally normal to ship all kinds of really crazy looking stuff, and so when someone noticed that and decided to use that as their mechanism for extracting some badness from a so-called "test file" that was actually laden with their binary code, is it so surprising that it happened? To me, it seems inevitable.

Incidentally, I want to see what happens if people start taking tarballs from various projects and diff them against the source code repos for those same projects. Any file that "appears" in the tarball that's allegedly due to auto[re]conf being run on the project had better match something from the actual trees of autoconf, automake, ranlib, gettext, or whatever else goofy meta-build stuff is being used these days.

$ find . -type f | sort | xargs sha1sum
7d963e5f46cd63da3c1216627eeb5a4e74a85cac  ./ax_pthread.m4
c86c8f8a69c07fbec8dd650c6604bf0c9876261f  ./build-to-host.m4
0262f06c4bba101697d4a8cc59ed5b39fbda4928  ./getopt.m4
e1a73a44c8c042581412de4d2e40113407bf4692  ./gettext.m4
090a271a0726eab8d4141ca9eb80d08e86f6c27e  ./host-cpu-c-abi.m4
961411a817303a23b45e0afe5c61f13d4066edea  ./iconv.m4
46e66c1ed3ea982b8d8b8f088781306d14a4aa9d  ./intlmacosx.m4
ad7a6ffb9fa122d0c466d62d590d83bc9f0a6bea  ./lib-ld.m4
7048b7073e98e66e9f82bb588f5d1531f98cd75b  ./lib-link.m4
980c029c581365327072e68ae63831d8c5447f58  ./lib-prefix.m4
d2445b23aaedc3c788eec6037ed5d12bd0619571  ./libtool.m4
421180f15285f3375d6e716bff269af9b8df5c21  ./lt~obsolete.m4
f98bd869d78cc476feee98f91ed334b315032c38  ./ltoptions.m4
530ed09615ee6c7127c0c415e9a0356202dc443e  ./ltsugar.m4
230553a18689fd6b04c39619ae33a7fc23615792  ./ltversion.m4
240f5024dc8158794250cda829c1e80810282200  ./nls.m4
f40e88d124865c81f29f4bcf780512718ef2fcbf  ./po.m4
f157f4f39b64393516e0d5fa7df8671dfbe8c8f2  ./posix-shell.m4
4965f463ea6a379098d14a4d7494301ef454eb21  ./progtest.m4
15610e17ef412131fcff827cf627cf71b5abdb7e  ./tuklib_common.m4
166d134feee1d259c15c0f921708e7f7555f9535  ./tuklib_cpucores.m4
e706675f6049401f29fb322fab61dfae137a2a35  ./tuklib_integer.m4
41f3f1e1543f40f5647336b0feb9d42a451a11ea  ./tuklib_mbstr.m4
b34137205bc9e03f3d5c78ae65ac73e99407196b  ./tuklib_physmem.m4
f1088f0b47e1ec7d6197d21a9557447c8eb47eb9  ./tuklib_progname.m4
86644b5a38de20fb43cc616874daada6e5d6b5bb  ./visibility.m4
$ 

... there's no build-to-host.m4 with that sha1sum out there, *except* for the bad one in the xz release. That part was caught... but what about every other auto* blob in every other project out there? Who or what is checking those?

And finally, yes, I'm definitely biased. My own personal build system has a little file that gets installed on a machine based on how the libs and whatnot work on it. That means all of the Macs of a particular version of the OS get the same file. All of the Debian boxes running the same version get the same file, and so on down the line.

I don't keep asking the same questions every time I go to build stuff. That's just madness.

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wmorrell
225 days ago
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Inertia is real. Seems at least part of it is so many people deciding to move on to new languages and toolchains, and evolving there … instead of trying to cater to build systems trying to keep compatibility with massively obsolete systems.
denubis
226 days ago
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Death, Lonely Death

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Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.

Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan Am, F.W. Woolworth, Fotomat booths, Borders bookshops, and Pier 1. Americans were watching Happy Days, M*A*S*H and Charlie’s Angels on television; their British cousins were watching George and Mildred, The Goodies, and Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If you turned on the radio, “Hotel California” by The Eagles was alternating with “Dancing Queen” by Abba (and, if we want to be completely honest, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce). Most cars still ran on leaded gasoline, most phones were still rotary dial, and the Internet was a wonky idea that was still a few weeks from a working prototype.

_The Thorn Birds_ was on top of everyone’s bestseller list. The first Apple II home computer had just gone on sale. The Sex Pistols were in the studio wrapping up _Never Mind The Bollocks_; they would tour on it for just three months and then break up, and within another year Sid Vicious would be dead of a heroin overdose. Barack Obama was a high school junior living with his grandparents in Honolulu, Hawaii: his grades were okay, but he spent most of his time hanging with his pot-smoking friends in the “Choom Gang”.  Boris Johnson was tucked away at the elite Ashdown House boarding school while his parents marriage was slowly collapsing: although he was only thirteen, he had already adopted his signature hair style.  Elvis had just died on the toilet a few weeks ago.  It was the summer of Star Wars.

And Voyager 1 was blasting off for a tour of the Solar System.


There’s no way to pack the whole story of Voyager 1 into a single blog post.  Here’s the TLDR: Voyager was the first spacecraft to fly past Jupiter, and the first to take close-up photos of Jupiter’s moons.  It flew on past Saturn, and examined Saturn’s moon Titan, the only moon with an atmosphere.  And then it flew onwards, on and on, for another forty years.  It officially left the Solar System and entered interstellar space in 2012.  It just kept going, further and further into the infinite emptiness.  

(You know about the Golden Record?  Come on, everybody knows about the Golden Record.  It’s kind of hokey and cheesy and also kind of amazing and great.)

Voyager has grown old.  It was never designed for this!  Its original mission was supposed to last a bit over three years.  Voyager has turned out to be much tougher than anyone ever imagined, but time gets us all.  Its power source is a generator full of radioactive isotopes, and those are gradually decaying into inert lead.  Year by year, the energy declines, the power levels  relentlessly fall.  Year by year, NASA has been switching off Voyager’s instruments to conserve that dwindling flicker.  They turned off its internal heater a few years ago, and they thought that might be the end.  But those 1970s engineers built to last, and the circuitry and the valves kept working even as the temperature dropped down, down, colder than dry ice, colder than liquid nitrogen, falling towards absolute zero.  

(Voyager stored its internal data on a digital tape recorder.  Yes, a tape recorder, storing information on magnetic tape.  It wasn’t designed to function at a hundred degrees below zero.  It wasn’t designed to work for decades, winding and rewinding, endlessly re-writing data.  But it did.)

Voyager kept going, and kept going, until it was over 15 billion kilometers away.  At the speed of light, the Moon is one and a half seconds away.  The Sun is about 8 minutes away.  Voyager is twenty-two hours away.  Send a radio signal to it at lunch on Monday, and you’ll get a response back Wednesday morning.

* * *

I could go on at great length about Voyager — the discoveries it has made, how amazing it has all been, the Deep Space Network that has maintained contact over the decades, the ever shrinking crew of aging technicians keeping it alive on a shoestring budget. But I’ll restrict myself to just this:  the Pale Blue Dot.


Dark grey and black static with coloured vertical rays of sunlight over part of the image. A small pale blue point of light is barely visible.


In 1990, just before Voyager’s camera shut down forever, the probe turned around and looked backwards.  It zoomed in and took a picture of Earth.  But by that time, it was so far away that Earth was just a single pale blue pixel.  Look at the right-most band of light.  A little past halfway down — see that speck?  It’s not a defect.  It’s not something on your screen.  That’s the Earth.

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan

Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo.  It’s still going.  It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever. 

* * *

Here’s a bit of trivia: Voyager 1 currently holds the record for most distant active spacecraft.  It’s not even close.  The only other contender is Voyager’s little sister, Voyager 2, which had a different mission profile and so lags billions of kilometers behind their older sibling.

Here’s another bit of trivia:  if you’re reading this in 2024?  It’s very unlikely that you will live to see that record broken.  There are only two other spacecraft outside the Solar System — Voyager 2 and New Horizons.  Both of them are going to die before they get as far as Voyager 1.  And nobody — not NASA, not the Chinese, not the EU — is currently planning to launch another spacecraft to those distances.  In theory we could.  In practice, we have other priorities.

* * *

We thought we knew how Voyager would end.  The power would gradually, inevitably, run down.  The instruments would shut off, one by one.  The signal would get fainter.  Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data.  A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were.  And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

(This is a problem NASA long since solved.  These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth.  Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse?  That’s accurate.  It’s been standard practice for 30 years.  But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)

Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens.  Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds.  The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age. 

And they’re trying to fix the problem.  But right now, it doesn’t look good.  You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away.  (For starters, there isn’t the bandwidth.)  They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day.  They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.

So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat.  And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

And that’s all.

 

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wmorrell
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DGA51
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Deep space 1.
Central Pennsyltucky

Popular git config options

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Hello! I always wish that command line tools came with data about how popular their various options are, like:

  • “basically nobody uses this one”
  • “80% of people use this, probably take a look”
  • “this one has 6 possible values but people only really use these 2 in practice”

So I asked about people’s favourite git config options on Mastodon:

what are your favourite git config options to set? Right now I only really have git config push.autosetupremote true and git config init.defaultBranch main set in my ~/.gitconfig, curious about what other people set

As usual I got a TON of great answers and learned about a bunch of very popular git config options that I’d never heard of.

I’m going to list the options, starting with (very roughly) the most popular ones. Here’s a table of contents:

All of the options are documented in man git-config, or this page.

pull.ff only or pull.rebase true

These two were the most popular. These both have similar goals: to avoid accidentally creating a merge commit when you run git pull on a branch where the upstream branch has diverged.

  • pull.rebase true is the equivalent of running git pull --rebase every time you git pull
  • pull.ff only is the equivalent of running git pull --ff-only every time you git pull

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make sense to set both of them at once, since --ff-only overrides --rebase.

Personally I don’t use either of these since I prefer to decide how to handle that situation every time, and now git’s default behaviour when your branch has diverged from the upstream is to just throw an error and ask you what to do (very similar to what git pull --ff-only does).

merge.conflictstyle zdiff3

Next: making merge conflicts more readable! merge.conflictstyle zdiff3 and merge.conflictstyle diff3 were both super popular (“totally indispensable”).

The main idea is The consensus seemed to be “diff3 is great, and zdiff3 (which is newer) is even better!”.

So what’s the deal with diff3. Well, by default in git, merge conflicts look like this:

<<<<<<< HEAD
def parse(input):
    return input.split("\n")
=======
def parse(text):
    return text.split("\n\n")
>>>>>>> somebranch

I’m supposed to decide whether input.split("\n") or text.split("\n\n") is better. But how? What if I don’t remember whether \n or \n\n is right? Enter diff3!

Here’s what teh same merge conflict look like with merge.conflictstyle diff3 set:

<<<<<<< HEAD
def parse(input):
    return input.split("\n")
||||||| b9447fc
def parse(input):
    return input.split("\n\n")
=======
def parse(text):
    return text.split("\n\n")
>>>>>>> somebranch

This has extra information: now the original version of the code is in the middle! So we can see that:

  • one side changed \n\n to \n
  • the other side renamed input to text

So presumably the correct merge conflict resolution is return text.split("\n"), since that combines the changes from both sides.

I haven’t used zdiff3, but a lot of people seem to think it’s better. The blog post Better Git Conflicts with zdiff3 talks more about it.

rebase.autosquash true

Autosquash was also a new feature to me. The goal is to make it easier to modify old commits.

Here’s how it works:

  • You have a commit that you would like to be combined with some commit that’s 3 commits ago, say add parsing code
  • You commit it with git commit --fixup OLD_COMMIT_ID, which gives the new commit the commit message fixup! add parsing code
  • Now, when you run git rebase --autosquash main, it will automatically combine all the fixup! commits with their targets

rebase.autosquash true means that --autosquash always gets passed automatically to git rebase.

rebase.autostash true

This automatically runs git stash before a git rebase and git stash pop after. It basically passes --autostash to git rebase.

Personally I’m a little scared of this since it potentially can result in merge conflicts after the rebase, but I guess that doesn’t come up very often for people since it seems like a really popular configuration option.

push.default simple, push.default current

These push.default options tell git push to automatically push the current branch to a remote branch with the same name.

  • push.default simple is the default in Git. It only works if your branch is already tracking a remote branch
  • push.default current is similar, but it’ll always push the local branch to a remote branch with the same name.
  • push.autoSetupRemote and push.default simple together seem to do basically the same thing as push.default current

current seems like a good setting if you’re confident that you’re never going to accidentally make a local branch with the same name as an unrelated remote branch. Lots of people have branch naming conventions (like julia/my-change) that make this kind of conflict very unlikely, or just have few enough collaborators that branch name conflicts probably won’t happen.

init.defaultBranch main

Create a main branch instead of a master branch when creating a new repo.

commit.verbose true

This adds the whole commit diff in the text editor where you’re writing your commit message, to help you remember what you were doing.

rerere.enabled true

This enables rerere (”reuse recovered resolution”), which remembers how you resolved merge conflicts during a git rebase and automatically resolves conflicts for you when it can.

help.autocorrect 10

By default git’s autocorrect try to check for typos (like git ocmmit), but won’t actually run the corrected command.

If you want it to run the suggestion automatically, you can set help.autocorrect to 1 (run after 0.1 seconds), 10 (run after 1 second), immediate (run immediately), or prompt (run after prompting)

core.pager delta

The “pager” is what git uses to display the output of git diff, git log, git show, etc. People set it to:

  • delta (a fancy diff viewing tool with syntax highlighting)
  • less -x5,9 (sets tabstops, which I guess helps if you have a lot of files with tabs in them?)
  • less -F -X (not sure about this one, -F seems to disable the pager if everything fits on one screen if but my git seems to do that already anyway)
  • cat (to disable paging altogether)

I used to use delta but turned it off because somehow I messed up the colour scheme in my terminal and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I think it’s a great tool though.

I believe delta also suggests that you set up interactive.diffFilter delta --color-only to syntax highlight code when you run git add -p.

diff.algorithm histogram

Git’s default diff algorithm often handles functions being reordered badly. For example look at this diff:

-.header {
+.footer {
     margin: 0;
 }

-.footer {
+.header {
     margin: 0;
+    color: green;
 }

I find it pretty confusing. But with diff.algorithm histogram, the diff looks like this instead, which I find much clearer:

-.header {
-    margin: 0;
-}
-
 .footer {
     margin: 0;
 }

+.header {
+    margin: 0;
+    color: green;
+}

Some folks also use patience, but histogram seems to be more popular. When to Use Each of the Git Diff Algorithms has more on this.

core.excludesfile: a global .gitignore

core.excludeFiles = ~/.gitignore lets you set a global gitignore file that applies to all repositories, for things like .idea or .DS_Store that you never want to commit to any repo. It defaults to ~/.config/git/ignore.

includeIf: separate git configs for personal and work

Lots of people said they use this to configure different email addresses for personal and work repositories. You can set it up something like this:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/code/<work>/"]
path = "~/code/<work>/.gitconfig"

url."git@github.com:".insteadOf 'https://github.com/'

I often accidentally clone the HTTP version of a repository instead of the SSH version and then have to manually go into ~/.git/config and edit the remote URL. This seems like a nice workaround: it’ll replace https://github.com in remotes with git@github.com:.

Here’s what it looks like in ~/.gitconfig since it’s kind of a mouthful:

[url "git@github.com:"]
	insteadOf = "https://github.com/"

One person said they use pushInsteadOf instead to only do the replacement for git push because they don’t want to have to unlock their SSH key when pulling a public repo.

A couple of other people mentioned setting insteadOf = "gh:" so they can git remote add gh:jvns/mysite to add a remote with less typing.

fsckobjects: avoid data corruption

A couple of people mentioned this one. Someone explained it as “detect data corruption eagerly. Rarely matters but has saved my entire team a couple times”.

transfer.fsckobjects = true
fetch.fsckobjects = true
receive.fsckObjects = true

submodule stuff

I’ve never understood anything about submodules but a couple of person said they like to set:

  • status.submoduleSummary true
  • diff.submodule log
  • submodule.recurse true

I won’t attempt to explain those but there’s an explanation on Mastodon by @unlambda here.

and more

Here’s everything else that was suggested by at least 2 people:

  • blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs lets you specify a file with commits to ignore during git blame, so that giant renames don’t mess up your blames
  • branch.sort -committerdate, makes git branch sort by most recently used branches instead of alphabetical, to make it easier to find branches. tag.sort taggerdate is similar for tags.
  • color.ui false: to turn off colour
  • commit.cleanup scissors: so that you can write #include in a commit message without the # being treated as a comment and removed
  • core.autocrlf false: on Windows, to work well with folks using Unix
  • core.editor emacs: to use emacs (or another editor) to edit commit messages
  • credential.helper osxkeychain: use the Mac keychain for managing
  • diff.tool difftastic: use difftastic (or meld or nvimdiffs) to display diffs
  • diff.colorMoved default: uses different colours to highlight lines in diffs that have been “moved”
  • diff.colorMovedWS allow-indentation-change: with diff.colorMoved set, also ignores indentation changes
  • diff.context 10: include more context in diffs
  • fetch.prune true and fetch.prunetags - automatically delete remote tracking branches that have been deleted
  • gpg.format ssh: allow you to sign commits with SSH keys
  • log.date iso: display dates as 2023-05-25 13:54:51 instead of Thu May 25 13:54:51 2023
  • merge.keepbackup false, to get rid of the .orig files git creates during a merge conflict
  • merge.tool meld (or nvim, or nvimdiff) so that you can use git mergetool to help resolve merge conflicts
  • push.followtags true: push new tags along with commits being pushed
  • rebase.missingCommitsCheck error: don’t allow deleting commits during a rebase
  • rebase.updateRefs true: makes it much easier to rebase multiple stacked branches at a time. Here’s a blog post about it.

how to set these

I generally set git config options with git config --global NAME VALUE, for example git config --global diff.algorithm histogram. I usually set all of my options globally because it stresses me out to have different git behaviour in different repositories.

If I want to delete an option I’ll edit ~/.gitconfig manually, where they look like this:

[diff]
	algorithm = histogram

config changes I’ve made after writing this post

My git config is pretty minimal, I already had:

  • init.defaultBranch main
  • push.autoSetupRemote true
  • merge.tool meld
  • diff.colorMoved default (which actually doesn’t even work for me for some reason but I haven’t found the time to debug)

and I added these 3 after writing this blog post:

  • diff.algorithm histogram
  • branch.sort -committerdate
  • merge.conflictstyle zdiff3

I’d probably also set rebase.autosquash if making carefully crafted pull requests with multiple commits were a bigger part of my life right now.

I’ve learned to be cautious about setting new config options – it takes me a long time to get used to the new behaviour and if I change too many things at once I just get confused. branch.sort -committerdate is something I was already using anyway (through an alias), and I’m pretty sold that diff.algorithm histogram will make my diffs easier to read when I reorder functions.

that’s all!

I’m always amazed by how useful to just ask a lot of people what stuff they like and then list the most commonly mentioned ones, like with this list of new-ish command line tools I put together a couple of years ago. Having a list of 20 or 30 options to consider feels so much more efficient than combing through a list of all 600 or so git config options

It was a little confusing to summarize these because git’s default options have actually changed a lot of the years, so people occasionally have options set that were important 8 years ago but today are the default. Also a couple of the experimental options people were using have been removed and replaced with a different version.

I did my best to explain things accurately as of how git works right now in 2024 but I’ve definitely made mistakes in here somewhere, especially because I don’t use most of these options myself. Let me know on Mastodon if you see a mistake and I’ll try to fix it.

I might also ask people about aliases later, there were a bunch of great ones that I left out because this was already getting long.

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acdha
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Washington, DC
wmorrell
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denubis
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