This is so true tho
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They are real people
XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
When I last talked to Richard he had company to work on SQLite. It was like four people.
SQLite is still deployed on everything, everywhere. You browser. Your phone. Macs. Half of Linux machine. Your airplane. It’s super impressive.
Fatfs is also a big one iirc
This is why when Steve Jobs died in 2011 another far more important figure died… Dennis Ritchie. The man who made the C programming language and Unix, without which nothing Apple produced would be possible.
Not to downplay dmr’s importance here because he quite literally is the father of modern computing, but without him we’d just have something else and perhaps it would’ve been a bit later. A different systems programming language and a different operating system everything else is modeled after. High-level programming languages weren’t a new concept when he wrote C. Before B they already had Fortran. Funny to call any of those High-level in 2026, but that’s the whole importance of C, isn’t it? It made writing complex systems easy compared to assembly languages or even fortran.
I’m not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.
The first examples are consequential in the same way Voldemort was.
>>> import runk
>>> print(runk.count(1))
1
>>> runk.count(2)
1
>>> runk.count(3)
3
>>> man runk
This is peak comedy
How nice of them to provide a Python wrapper for the C library
The amount of businesses with things you just can’t touch for whatever reason is surprising.
The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
Reminds me of the Imperium in Warhammer 40k how a lot of the tech they use is barely understood or some of it is not understood at all. Like the adeptus mechanicus believe in the Omnissiah (me too) and a lot of what they do is purely ritualistic.
But lots of those rituals are just stuff like turning something on in the right order. Or other mundane things that have become an arcane ritual after thousands of years that need doing for a thing to work right but nobody remembers why it needs to be done or how the thing works. Just that these are things you must do to please the machine spirits and make whatever random thing work right.
Honestly there is enough complexity in enough tech nowadays that I’m sure almost all of us are doing something similar in many areas of our life. Like I would struggle to explain how the Internet works or even how my television actually creates an image on itself. Maybe a better example would be cars, a lot of people use them but don’t know anything about necessary maintenance or basic principles of how they work.
Social collapse isn’t an exciting day in your life, it’s a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.
Some dude in the year 2345 will be shitposting about how we didn’t see it coming because we are dumb.
We did see it coming, but we are dumb
That sounds like a ‘crunch’ category risk
Yeah, and things can putter on for hundreds of years before they really “collapse”
deleted by creator
Also extremely stable.
What do we think the blocks on the right represent? Projects like TempleOS?
Sounds about right. Those things that are worked on by people who for whatever reason have unlimited free time and can hence afford to reinvent the wheel. SerenityOS is another example
ffmpeg is a good candidate im p sure
Nah that’s used by a ton of projects and websites
By gods, the interactive one is great!
I didn’t know how much I needed the interactive version until now.
Ah. He must be a KDE contributor as well.
Kontributor
You know, I was VERY tempted to write it that way, but decided against it at the last moment.
Klearly you are not a KDE Kontributor.
Qrunk
Ronald is indescribably more important than any tech billionaire could ever hope to be. So let’s raise a glass and give out a hardy thank you to all the Ronalds of the world!
Too bad all the tech billionaires profit from Ronald’s work while he does it for free.
“Ronald” is all of us.
Not sure if it’s part of the joke but that word means “jerk” (as in “jerk off”) in Swedish.
Most likely is. Many open source projects have a joke as a name, often containing some form of innuendo or a double meaning. Helps in maintaining the free nature of the tool (corporations don’t want anything to do with it) as well as lower expectations on professionalism. Plus it’s funny, especially if it’s an in-joke of a niche language.
On the topic of “runk”, it’s also been loaned from Swedish to Finnish as runkata, or to runk = to jerk off. The actual act of it would be runkkaus or runkkaaminen. Can also be encountered in the form runkkari, aka a wanker (I’d assume Swedish had a matching equivalent). So the joke works in Finnish as well.
So a perfect open source name then.
Runk that hog, swedish boy.
pojke/kille/grabb/gosse = boy/dude/guy/kiddo, so have fun with that. 😂
Bless Ronald
Our math depends on him 🙏
Written in hand-optimized assembly with individual implementation for every CPU on the planet, with integer division function in 10000 lines of code impelented with XOR and bit-shifting which is somehow 0.3% faster than CPU built-in division operation.
He had to de-optimize the init sequence because the little trick he added that caused the init sequence to return a little power to the grid instead of taking it was causing grid stability issues because the returned power from offices starting up was a bit higher than the extra power required for factory startup weekday mornings.
I love that this is an actual possibility.
The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.
It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.
There is a video where a real game dev was showing how bad a specific benchmark was. It was basically read arguments, get a random number, do a for loop 10,000 times, inside there do another for loop 10,000 times, do some equation with a modulo, put result in array, pick a number from array and print to screen.
The biggest time cost was the modulo as that’s the hot path. He basically went through and typecast all the ints to double. He got 4x the speed. It went from almost 2 seconds to less than 0.5 second just on that change. This is mostly due to cpu and compiler now using simd instructions.
Small changes can have big impacts.
Yeah, I’ve actually written quick and dirty code that used both a division and a modulus, but then went back later to use the former to calculate the latter with a multiplication and a subtraction to get a speed improvement.
There have been other occasions where I’ve been able to replace something like
average = sum / count; if average > ywithif sum > count * y, when it’s not entirely obvious that y could be multiplied by anything and remain meaningful.But when a division can’t be avoided, you still want that genius-written magical library to take some of the sting out of it.
He didn’t do any of that. Just typecast the numbers to be doubles.
The whole benchmark was a mess but that part specifically surprised me.
Fabrice Bellard is ten Ronalds.
FFmpeg and QEMU? Holy shit!
I had no ideaand tcc, which while maybe not as ‘important’, is extremely cool.
Is QEMU simply a VM?
It’s basically the best virtualization platform. It can do full system emulation across a number of platforms, or hardware assisted virtualization (using KVM). It’s incredibly useful for debug as well as doing real work.
I would say so? It’s an emulator and I personally use it to manage KVM on Linux. Makes my life easier.
Not really sure about the precise details, sorry
Everyone who understands Norwegian love the name Ronald chose for his invaluable tool.
For the uninitiated: well, let’s just say. jorkin it.
and by “it”… hehe, well lets just say… my digits
Came here to say this (no pun intended)
But pun gladly taken nonetheless
Yeah, I was just going to be mysterious and write sniggers in Norwegian, but I guess there’s no point in that now :c
I don’t know a word of Norwegian but I know the internet.
I don’t know a word of Norwegian
Now you do. So if you see any Norwegian or Swede, remember to tell them “I know runk”.
For a long time all systems which deal with timezone data (like ability to convert utc to est for example) was reliant on 1 server in 1 random guy’s basement which he paid for himself. I heard they were working to correct this situation but haven’t been following it.
You sent me down the exact kind of weird rabbit hole I love. Genuinely thank you.
It’s maintained by the IANA now (the same people who basically run the modern Internet, saying what domains are allowed and such for those who don’t know). Though Arthur David Olson (the man you mentioned) still contributes his expertise and data.
You’re probably thinking of Paul Eggert.
I remember when he got sued for copyright infringement or something ridiculous and it was big news
The myth of Steve Jobs needed the actual genius of others to exist. Steve’s gift to the world was recognizing and pointing out actual gifts tonthe world that would have otherwise gone unoticed or not brought to their full potential.
If Steve was still around, he would have taken Ronald’s idea and had it rebuilt with a little polish and an exorbitant price tag.
There is no Jobs without Wozniak.
One hundred percent, but don’t forget Jony Ive. The mythology of Steve Jobs is built on the genius of Woz and the designs of Ive.
