Eric S. Raymond

Announcing sshexport release 2.7 Your system package manager probably knows this as 'sshexport' Install your ssh keys on remote sites. This script tries to export ssh public keys to specified sites. It will walk you through generating key pairs if it doesn't find any to export. It handles all the fiddly details like making sure local and remote permissions are correct, and tells you what it's doing if it has to change anything. Unlike some competing tools, you only have to enter your password once. New in this release: Code hardening by ChatGPT 5.2. Fix a crash in the delete path if config exists and is malformed. Prevent TOCTOU race in tempfile creation. For VisualHostKey=No so installation is not foiled by ASCII art. gitlab.com/esr/sshexport

@notcalledjack @jon_stokes As somebody else pointed out in a sibling thread, SaaS is under its own death pressure. Very frequently, customers are going to start wondering why they should pay a subscription fee for something they could vibe code in-house.

@esrtweet @jon_stokes Except that LLMs were born in a world where almost all software is delivered as SaaS. The biggest consumers of desktop software are cos - who have negative incentives to decompile and own code.

Fast, cheap AI-assisted decompilation of binary code is here. Which means code secrecy is dead. Decompilers in themselves are not a new technology. Security researchers have employed them for years to analyze compiled malware. There's been some limited use by others, notably by hobbyists decompiling abandonware games. But there were a couple of issues that prevented this from becoming common practice. One is simply that running decompilers was difficult. It wasn't as simple as feed in binary, get out source; it needed a person with specialist skills prepared to do spelunking through wildernesses of machine code and object formats. The other problem was that decompilation didn't give you anything like the explanatory comments that had been in the original code, so you could easily wind up with code that you could read without being able to understand or modify it. Now large language models are busily smashing both of those barriers flat. They're better at the kind of detail analysis required to run the human side of a decompilation than humans are. More importantly, in the process of decompiling code, they rather automatically build a global model of how it works that can easily be expressed by high quality comments in the extracted code. All you have to do, basically, is ask for the comments. I'm going to reinforce that latter point because it may not be obvious how good LLMs are at this, and how much better they're going to get. When they decompile code and comment it for you, they're not just working from that one piece of code you have put in front of them - they'll have in their training set hundreds, possibly thousands of pieces of code similar to it and with comments. This will give them superhuman levels of insight not just into what it does at the microlevel, but what it means to the humans who wrote it, and what technical assumptions it's embodying. Compilation no longer guards your secrets. Or, to put it more precisely the expected time span in which you can still count on it to obscure them is measured in months. Possibly weeks. What does this mean? It means you're in an open-source world now. All it's going to take for anybody to bust your proprietary IP open is care enough to spend tokens on the analysis. You will maximize your chances of survival as a software business if you get out ahead of this rather than trying to fight it. This isn't exactly the way I expected open source to win. But, you know, I'll take it. Good enough.

Announcing tetrix release 2.7 Your system package manager probably knows this as 'tetrix' A UNIX-hosted, curses-based clone of Tetris. Probably obsolete unless you can't use X for some reason, but of some historical interest. New in this release: Port fix for BSD systems. Minor release in response to a bug report. I'm frankly a bit surprised this still gets bug reports! gitlab.com/esr/tetrix

@huguruma_izumi "...while doing sake and drugs." This is not true. Sake would be much classier booze than what Florida Man actually guzzles.

アメリカはとても深いBBQ文化を持つ国と言うことを知りました。 カリフォルニアは何故か嫌われることが多い州だということを知りました。 フロリダは全裸男性がサケやドラッグをやりながらワニを殴ることが多い州だということを知りました。

@digitalzanmai @TheBrownestHat In the United States we call this "Minnesota".

@TheBrownestHat 北海道は試される大地と呼ばれます。 酔って寝た人が凍死したり、窓を開けて寝た人が凍死したり、大雪で家が潰れて死んだり、屋根から雪を降ろそうとして滑り落ちて死んだり、道を歩いていて落雪で死んだり、暖かくなればヒグマに襲われたり、生きる力が試されます。

@Devon_Eriksen_ @outlighter Ask Devon says. From my neo-pagan point of view, the differences between secular socialism and religious monotheism are minor and uninteresting. Both are systems designed to produce unquestioning obedience via a worship of single-point authority. Bad magic either way.

@outlighter @esrtweet has been floating a similar idea for some time now.

(Getting lots of smart comments from the Japanese crowd on this topic... I'm impressed that the translator is up to the task.) Yes. Universalist, post-ethnic religions like Christianity are super-strong against military threats, but weak against ideological subversion. Christianity can unite completely different cultures to launch a crusade against the Saracens, but if it does not wield secular power to enforce orthodoxy, anyone can claim to be Christian, preach love, tolerance, and socialism, and pretty soon the West is overrun without a shot fired, by people who have no hope of defeating the West in a shooting war. In other words, paper scissors rock. Christ beats Odin. Marx beats Christ. Odin beats Marx. Paganism was defeated by Christianity because it had no answer to multi-ethnic coalitions. Christianity is being defeated by socialism because it has no answer to ideological subversion.

Announcing sitemap release 2.9 Generate a site map from HTMK descerption attributes on your pages. Indexes all pages under the current directory and writes an HTML map page to standard output. The code looks for description information for each page in a meta `description' header; if it doesn't find one, the page is omitted from the index. New in this release: Minor bug fixes due to ChatGPT 5.3. gitlab.com/esr/sitemap

esr@snark:~/WWW/intercal$ shipper -t Announcing intercal release 0.34 Your system package manager probably knows this as 'intercal' A compiler for the INTERCAL language. INTERCAL is the original esoteric language, a farrago of features that will test the mettle of any programmer and bend the minds of most. The INTERCAL suite includes not just a compiler and debugger for the language but most of the code ever written for it as well. New in this release: Code hardening with ChatGPT5.2. Fixed some minor buffer-management issues. Work around a beef between autoconf-2.71 and GCC 15 gitlab.com/esr/intercal

@TRHLofficial Okay, I'll play. @grok, describe @esrtweet in five words.

How does Grok describe you?

@ecree429 @En_Plein_Aire You really don't want to start comparing casualty counts of Brits who died in wars putatively serving American interests with the reverse. You'll lose thar argument rapidly and massively.

@En_Plein_Aire @esrtweet The corpses of British servicemen slain in Iraq and Afghanistan stand witness to your ingratitude.

Hello, Europeans. The first thing you need to understand about the rant I'm about to utter is that I'm not MAGA, not a Trumpite, but a libertarian who has in the past nevertheless been strongly supportive of US military presence overseas. Because I want the wars that defend this country to be fought in somebody else's country, as far away from me as possible with a nice big ocean in the way. Also relevant: I have a history of having lived in Europe and traveled there extensively. I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish, and have been passably fluent in Italian and French as well. I could probably still find my way around London and Rome and central Paris reasonably well. So if you're tempted to tell yourselves that I'm some kind of parochial American hick, abandon that hope. All that was set-up. So that, when I tell you that almost the entirety of the US electorate, not just Trump supporters, is increasingly fed up with your shit, take me seriously. We've been cleaning up your messes and keeping the sea lanes open since 1917. And that was for you, not us - we, being very close to resource self-sufficient, don't need that investment so much. We've spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure on keeping you safe. We risked nuclear hellfire on our own cities for nearly 50 years to keep Soviet tanks from rolling through the Fulda Gap. Even since the Cold War ended, we've subsidized your socialist-playpen welfare states and disastrous immigration policies by taking the need to maintain militaries more effective than a sack of wet farts off the table. Now we've come looking for help keeping a bunch of rabid Islamic fanatics from getting nuclear weapons that are a clear and present danger to all of you even more than they are to us, and what do we hear? "Waah! It's another Republican president we don't like, just like the last half dozen of them! So we're going to sulk in a corner, except when we're biting at your ankles with crap like airspace restrictions." No. No, we're not going to take this anymore. It's not just conservatives who have had enough, it's moderates and people who used to be strong supporters of liberal internationalism. Our citizen's willingness to pay higher taxes to protect you was upward-bounded by your gratitude. Now that we know your gratitude has effectively gone to zero, so does our willingness. Don't expect this to change if the Democrats take power here. They are much less liberal-internationalist than Republicans now. While they might make mouth noises that soothe you, their overriding concern is the gaping, insatiable maw of their income transfer programs. They'll sacrifice subsidizing Europe's playpen socialism to feed their domestic version in a heartbeat. And there is no longer any significant Democratic constituency to argue against that. In truth, three decades after the Cold War ended there is no American constituency at all for the massive subsidies you get. It frankly surprises me they lasted this long, that we were this patient with your cowardice and your bitchy whining. This moment has been a long time coming. It's not Donald Trump sinking the transatlantic alliance, it is absolutely you.

Announcing ski release 6.16 Your system package manager probably knows this as 'ski-game' A hotdogging game, evade the deadly Yeti on your jet-powered skis. Imagine you are skiing down an infinite slope, facing such hazards as trees, ice, bare ground, and the man-eating Yeti! Unfortunately, you have put your jet-powered skis on backwards, so you can't see ahead where you are going; only behind where you have been. However, you can turn to either side, jump or hop through the air, teleport through hyperspace, launch nuclear ICBMs, and cast spells to call the Fire Demon. And since the hazards occur in patches, you can skillfully outmaneuver them. A fun and very silly game that proves you don't need fancy graphical user interfaces to have a good time. New in this release: Code-hardening changes suggested by CharGPT 5.3. gitlab.com/esr/ski

That wasn't cunning manipulation, it was dealing with domestic American political reality at the time. WWI was recent memory and there was basically zero public interest in foreign entanglements until Pearl harbor happened. That's why FDR had to do naval warfare against the Germans by stealth, because it would have been political suicide for him to do it openly. "Look, we're getting a whole bunch of money out of this" was the only way to make aid to Great Britain fly politically.

@esrtweet We were exhausted and broke (and divested) partly because even Lend-Lease only started after you'd sucked us dry with Cash and Carry. Taking advantage of the world crisis to hollow out your rival started a lot sooner than 'the post-war peace'. FDR delenda est.

You actually have half a point here. Only half, because if bankrupting GB had been a US goal we'd have gone about it a lot more directly. Okay, a quarter of a point. There's no way forcing imperial divestiture was a main geostrategic goal of the war; we had far more important things to achieve than that. It's more like a condition we semi-accidentally discovered we could enforce on the post-war peace. And yes, I think busting up the British Empire was a mistake. The world was far better off with it than with the dozens of ramshackle failed states that mostly replaced it. But American idealism about self-determination was a real thing, even if misguided in retrospect. Also it was strongly in our interest to break up the imperial system of trade preferences. I think the few Americans realistic enough to argue against the former in the immediate postwar period couldn't have made any headway against the latter. No hope. As for needing your help policing the world, what help were you capable of? You were so exhausted and broke that even when I lived in London in the late 1960s it was obvious that Britain wasn't up to policing any damn thing. You had lost the capability and the confidence; betting on your help would have been just dumb.

@esrtweet Dear America, If you wanted our help policing the world, you shouldn't've made our bankruptcy and divestment of Empire your main geostrategic goals of World War 2. Plus maybe then the playpen socialists wouldn't have gotten power here that we suffer to this day. Yours, Dad.

If you really believe all that is true, you should be happier than a pig in shit to see us go all isolationist, pull in our troops, and cease meddling with the rest of the world. Keep up your whingeing and sputtering; you'll get what you claim to want. Then will come the Finding Out. What it's like to live in a world without a hegemon as (imperfect but) benign as the US. I wish you great joy of that discovery.

@esrtweet Horse shit. We've been fomenting chaos all over the world for the past 70 years. From coups to civil wars, to reneging on our word, to that protection racket all to make sure we remain on top. Beside scale and audacity, the only difference is Trump is worse at hiding his hand.

@nikutaberuru It's not uncommon. Mine did it.

日本人たちは アメリカのママがチェリーパイを 焼いているって信じている。 アメリカのママは チェリーパイを焼きますか？

Announcing wumpus release 1.12 Your system package manager probably knows this as 'wumpus' Exact clone of the ancient BASIC Hunt the Wumpus game WUMPUS is a bit of retrocomputing nostalgia. It is an *exact* clone, even down to the godawful user interface, of an ancient classic game. This version fixes two minor bugs in my original USENET posting of the source. New in this release: Repair Makefile errors. I'm a bit under the weather, so only a very minor release again today. Probably only of interest to wumpus package maintainers. gitlab.com/esr/wumpus

I looked into it, and US weapons sales to Europe didn't even remotely reach close to parity with the value of the subsidy until well after the start of the Ukraine war. Before then we were unequivocally losing money every year. Even if this hadn't been true, how do you think the median American voter would react to the proposition that "we should keep subsidizing Europe so it makes American arms manufacturers richer"? *plonk* If you want to make popular support for NATO plummet faster than it's doing now, that would make an excellent accelerator.

@esrtweet NATO lost its purpose when USSR collapsed. It is a sales tool to push Europeans buy weapons made in the USA.

@Devon_Eriksen_ @AnEriksenWife @ImKingGinger I could clue them in, too. But I don't want to.

@AnEriksenWife @ImKingGinger If I go more in depth on this, I'd have to tell a lot of Christians a lot of things that they simply are not ready to hear.

The Truth About Why Christian Movies are So Bad. I’ve spent the last four years building a streaming platform and talking to people at the very top of the faith-based entertainment industry. Studio heads. Distributors. Producers. Investors. And I’ve come to a conclusion that I think is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Christian movies are bad on purpose. The talent is out there. I’ve met them. I’ve sat with them at 3am over whiskey and cigars listening to pitches that should have been picked up immediately. So that left a question that any Christian filmmaker could quickly answer. If the talent is there, why is everything so mediocre? It starts with an avatar named Bookstore Betty. I’m not making that up. When the faith-based film industry was being built out, it was done in partnership with Christian bookstore executives. They weren’t asking “how do we make great cinema.” They were asking “who walks into our stores and how do we sell them a movie the same way we sell them a devotional.” The target was a 35 year old woman. The tone, the casting, the conflict resolution, the soft lighting, all of it was reverse-engineered to appeal to Betty. Not to a general audience. Not to men. Not to teenagers. Just Betty. Every major Christian film you can think of relies on distribution deals with secular studios. The same studios that blacklisted almost everyone who worked on The Passion of the Christ and refused to distribute Kirk Cameron's Pro Life movie. Think about that. Passion made over $600 million on a $30 million budget. The most obvious play would have been to duplicate that movie hundreds of times like it was the MCU. But instead of greenlighting more, Hollywood blacklisted the people involved. So what did they do instead? They set up a system where they get to be the gatekeepers. They only greenlight the safest, most formulaic, most non-threatening stuff possible. Because if Christian films ever started consistently competing with mainstream entertainment, those studios would have a real problem. So they make sure that never happens. And the church helps them do it. Christian movies don’t need word of mouth. They don’t need to be good. They need pastors to bulk-buy tickets. You make a movie with a “message,” market it to churches, and pastors subsidize the whole thing by buying hundreds of tickets to hand out on Sunday. You don’t have to compete in a fair market when your distribution model is guilt-driven generosity. And the funding is even more rigged. Most of these films are funded through Donor Advised Funds, which means donors get a tax write-off for their “investment” regardless of whether the movie makes a dollar. There’s no market pressure to make something good. The donors got their deduction. The studio got their budget. And Betty got another movie about a woman who finds a journal in the attic. What would happen if someone actually came along and made faith-based content that created pop culture instead of reacting to it? I think it would instantly expose how low-effort the current industry is. It would be like when Uber showed up and embarrassed the taxi industry overnight. The monopoly only survives because nobody has disrupted it yet. The talent is there. The audience is there. The only thing missing is capital that wants disruption instead of a tax write-off.

Most folks do have them. Many Americans are unaware of this, since our mass media is lividly anti firearms. However, the distribution is quite uneven and there are swathes of the US where household weapons are relatively uncommon. Generally you would not want to live in those areas, since they tend to be high-crime and very badly governed.

アメリカニキって銃社会だと思うけど、実際に所持してる家庭は何割くらいなんだろ？ 日本人はおそらくほとんどの人が持っていると思ってる