Present-to-present time, especially while we wait for VK_EXT_present_timing to become adopted, can only be indirectly measured. This makes just-in-time rendering unnecessarily hard. High-accuracy event timings can only be made for rendering, not presentation. The missed latches can be seen by phase doubling. Waiting on the last frame to finish displaying requires use of a fence on a separate timing thread. The timings provided by this and by VK_KHR_present_wait are muddied with OS scheduler latency. Spin-locking the waits with zero timeouts should be a thing, but does not seem to be guaranteed. The compositor also seems to inject scheduler jitter.
After all that, people can talk about averaging methods, but there's a lot to be done before what this blog is talking about is even available.
The reason solving just-in-time rendering is important is because queue priority is not actually supported by most drivers. Some extensions can give us global priority for the process, not real priority for queues. The right way then to avoid workload A from causing workload B to miss a latch is to put workload A into the idle time that would exist from running B just in time. This is itself a luxury based on the fact that workload B is lightweight enough that its own uncertainty can only rarely exceed the latch deadline.
At least on VRR displays, making B a bit late has much less dire consequences, but driving refresh from the application needs exclusive access to the display, and not all compositors want to provide this.
Please do reach out if it seems like I'm only still catching up. I'm sure someone knows a decent way to get sub-millisecond just-in-time rendering accuracy without watching the phase suddenly double on FRR. Ping https://github.com/positron-solutions/mutate and we can get in touch.
What these hardliners are standing for, I have no idea. If the code passes review, we're just arguing about hues of zeros and ones. "AI" is an attribute that type-erases entirely once an engineer pulls out the useful expressions and whips them into shape.
The worst part about all reactionary scares is that, because the behaviors are driven by emotion and feeling as opposed to any intentional course of action, the outcomes are usually counter productive. The current AI scare is exactly what you would want if you are OpenAI. Convince OSS, not to mention "free" software people, to run around dooming and ant milling each other about "AI bad" and pretty soon OSS is a poisonous minefield for any actual open AI, so OSS as a whole just sabotages itself and is mostly out of the fight.
I'm currently in the middle of trying to blow straight past this gatekeepy outer layer of the online discourse. What is a bit frustrating is knowing that while the seed will find the niches and begin spreading through invisible channels, in the visible channels, there's going to be all kinds of knee-jerk pushback from these anti-AI hardliners who can't distinguish between local AI and paying Anthropic for a license to use a computer. Worse, they don't care. The social psychosis of being empowered against some "others" is more important. Either that or they are bots.
And all of this is on top of what I've been saying for over a year. VRAM efficiency will kill the datacenter overspend. Local, online training will make it so that skilled users get better models over time, on their own data. Consultative AI is the future.
I have to remind myself that this entire misstep is a result of a broken information space, late-stage traditional social, filled with people (and "people") who have been programmed for years on performative clap-backs and middling ideas.
So fortunate to have some life before internet perspective to lean back on. My instinct and old-world common sense can see a way out, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch the online discourse essentially blinding itself while doubling down on all this hand wringing to no end, accomplishing nothing more than burning a few witches and salting their own lands. You couldn't want it any better if you were busy entrenching.
Doing short form updates on BlueSky, but that is the worst algorithmic feed I have ever experienced in my life. I gave it some data. I indicated I didn't want to see some posts. The self-selection of the overall audience is overwhelmingly strong. No matter what I do to shape my engagement, all I get is Rachel Maddow in my feed.
The reason I'm not on X is because I just won't use a platform owned by someone who thinks Nazi salutes are just free expression (of desire to censor political opposition into utter powerlessness before purging them), so I'm not complaining about the Blue in Bluesky.
Nonetheless what it's abundantly clear that whatever audience I need to connect with, I cannot effectively do it on BlueSky. They need desperate overhaul to fix the self-selection bias that is likely making the platform appealing to only a very certain kind of ant.
Yeah the "more than a paragraph or two" is key here. Indicators of AI writing work both ways; the more text you write, the more likely you are to "slip" and use some phrasing or syntactical constructions uncommon in LLM output. (This is why AI detectors perform worse on shorter excerpts.)
I posted this elsewhere, but convincingly, consistently "writing like AI" and never slipping once takes an amount of knowledge and skill analogous to art forgery. Except that with art forgery you can at least make millions of dollars off it.
That HN was a neat community fifteen years ago, but like all things cool made by early adopters, it will eventually attract a following hoping to be somewhere, to exist among people doing things, but the tragedy of such followings is that they bring with them their toxicity, their immunity to their own poison, and drown out what they depend on until the early adopters early adopt away.
The real slop is all this lazy concern farming from an ant mill that is powerless to do anything except validate its own hand wringing.
What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether it is proprietary or not, or closed source or not.
GNU follows the Unix philosophy. ESR wrote The Art of Unix Programming [0] in which he writes extensively about it. GNU was envisioned to be a clone of Unix [1].
> The criterion is the size and complexity of the software
The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral.
I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, giving lots of later-comers the illusion that "free/libre" was an expansion pack for OSS when OSS came later, a very intentional evolution of the dogmatic "free" software movement.
The choice of "Cathedral" is an extremely obvious symbol when you consider the Protestant reformation as a defiance of Vatican, an overly central system where decisions can only flow from the top. There are a lot of metaphors ESR could have chosen from, but the "cathedral" rhymed with the undertones of the real tension between the many OSS practitioners who have divers motivations and the FSF's plan to slap GNU stickers on every piece of software on Earth while blessing their own cardinals at the FSF Vatican and excommunicating any dissent. Given that kind of very overt signalling, it's just not defensible to argue any other primary target than the FSF and the overly central development process they were dependent on to maintain control over projects.
GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.
What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball.
Many ideas from The Cathedral & The Bazaar made it into The Lean Startup. The Cathedral development model was more related to waterfall. YC was already chugging along, but you can bet your ass PG was already steeped in the tea.
You are arguing theology about who the cathedral metaphor was aimed at. The primary sources from ESR's own flagship pre-CatB project are public and open to examination.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:
Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:
Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.
ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.
Stating facts is nice, but the conclusion you're trying to get to is just a tangent about ESR. In 1988. How do you relate this to arguments I made?
> later criticised when it was other people's work
Seems like first-hand learning and applying those lessons to more relatable projects, such as those after 1988? Are we still a society that rewards learning or must all mistakes be worn permanently and shamefully so that the malcontents can endlessly self-validate in their misery?
The authz language is pretty funny. Free speech has always been self-inconsistent. If I may use my free speech to organize a fascist takeover of society, is free speech without limit not potentially a tool of its own destruction? If one is, as ESR is, so concerned with free speech, would there not then be a need for authz? If you argue that controls on free speech are a hypocrisy, isn't that also what a fascist would argue while angling to eliminate barriers to the use of free speech so that they can use it to end free speech?
The license is fun. I'm sure I have equally amusing writings stashed away somewhere. Amid this evidence of early tension, stewing, and ideological turmoil, I do sense within ESR a dissatisfaction with the FSF. Would this not foreshadow that CatB was later aimed at the FSF and that ESR was motivated for a long time and therefore, while he ultimately presented a different message informed by many other developments and a long time to think and refine, all along grappling with an irritation at something deep within the FSF that he could not reconcile with?
Doesn't this continue to argue in a very straight line that CatB was all about the FSF and that the cathedral development model's similarities to corporate waterfall were just incidental?
Speaking of first hand learning and applying those lessons: That's all very well and fine that you're using your free speech to speculate about the motives of ESR and his relationship to RMS, without having actually looked at any of the evidence yourself, but do you know either of them personally, and if so, for how long have you known them, and how often have you interacted?
Have you ever had to sit through ESR yapping at you relentlessly about TMNN in the 1980's? I have, and so have many of my friends from that era. It was all he would talk about at the time. He was notorious for his obsession with proselytizing about TMNN and trying to personally attack and tear down RMS's life's work. (Not to mention ESR's rank bouquet and Pepé Le Pew approach to women.)
And nobody wanted to work with ESR because he was an insufferable narcissist who didn't want to share his code with anyone, who wanted all the glory and bragging rights himself.
All he did was brag and brag like Trump bloviating about how smart he is, dissing all the competing software that was actually free and other people worked on and shared, without ever sharing his own code, or letting "many eyes" review it, over two full years, until he gave up on his TMNN project and never touched or spoke of it again.
There is literally a 365 line 3,135 word 19,560 character file in the TMNN source code called "doc/BRAGSHEET":
ESR's TMNN code wasn't a cathedral, a bazaar, or a mystery house -- it was a shanty town riddled with bugs and security holes far beyond the reach of "many eyes". I analyzed it with Claude: ~774 unsafe string call sites, 42 mktemp races, 61 shell-shaped holes, gets() normalized in a shared header. Review the code yourself if you don't believe me.
Imagine him cornering you at a science fiction convention and having to sit through him reciting that BRAGSHEET file to you again and again. It was his entire personality and discussion topic for two years (besides how much he hated RMS).
ESR's obsession is all about RMS personally, not just the EFF in general. His own TMNN license and my own personal first hand experience proves it. Have you ever discussed it with RMS himself, or even anyone else involved in the Free Software Foundation, or seen both of them interact in person? I have. I still communicate with RMS occasionally -- the last time he emailed me was a couple weeks ago.
I'm speaking from first hand knowledge and direct personal experience over decades. I'm not speculating and hallucinating and trying to carry ESR's water like you are, without knowing either of them personally.
If people actually bothered to look at any of his code, and the reactions of people knowledgeable at the time to his code (and/or his intellectual bloviations), the damage to "open source" would be so thorough that we'd probably all be using Microsoft products for an indefinite period. However, it's far easier to just nod your head and pretend he's very smart (in that reddit sort of way).
Personally, I love reading about people's reactions to the abomination of fetchmail, although my absolute favorite is him yapping with pride that he has code in basically everything -- which is ESRspeak for him writing libgif. Of course, dig down into that and you'll find he didn't write anything... he ported an MSDOS library someone else had written. Many such cases.
That's so wonderful. Glad you got your grievance's about ESR off your chest. Hopefully in the following forty years, you will be able to move on from events from the previous forty years.
It's all still supporting the accuracy of my statement, that CatB was more about the FSF than anything.
Do you have some grievances for me or was damning ESR supposed to make me self-destruct?
Arguably Linux wouldn’t have happened absent GNU although a lot of people I know argue that BSD would have eventually evolved to someplace like where Linux is today in spite of various legal and community factors holding it back.
I used a similarly shaped argument with different nouns to highlight the ambiguity, and now you see why that's problematic. Don't just make blind assertions without linking it back to some concrete, at least arguing that some mechanism was *dominant*.
> Rare Earth Minerals... ...unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades)
Look bro, if we can make SR-71s out of pizza ovens, I'm pretty sure somewhere in the CIA can scrounge up a few ounces of gadoluminium. Tankie dreams are placation for those who wait for somebody else to make the birdseed fall from the sky.
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