Notices by asm & tamsyn & forth, oh my! (millihertz@oldbytes.space)

it always seems to me that distinguishing between reference counting and "garbage collection" gets the two things exactly the wrong way round. reference counting is garbage collection! when something is known to be useless (unreachable), it's immediately discarded. in contrast, what we call garbage collection is, in fact, recycling: assume the whole heap is a trash mountain, then sift through all of it to find and rescue the things that still have potential before sending the rest into the incinerator

@namenlos @klardotsh people who work on software for the public good shouldn't need to be good at making financial decisions. failing to accrue money in a capitalist society is not a moral failing, no matter how loudly that society insists otherwise

someone posted an "open source is broken" thing yesterday featuring the plight of the lead (only?) core-js developer... and all i could think was that the primary way in which open source is broken was intentional, and by design - it allows corporations, the very people who should be paying the upkeep, to freeload

the thing about corporations is that if they're not required to pay for something, there's a legal case to be made that their fiduciary duty to their shareholders requires them not to. at least the Free Software movement required them to contribute back in kind - the Open Source movement was created to push back against that, and even now people buy into the corporate-shill message that putting even the tiniest barrier in the way of a corporation leeching off your work is somehow hostile to the entire intent and purpose of open source

and yeah, the core-js dev totally should just down tools and leave. fuck every company depending on their work without paying for its upkeep.

reminder that basically the last three decades of compiler development have stemmed from a (wilful?) misreading of the C89 standard:

https://www.yodaiken.com/2021/05/19/undefined-behavior-in-c-is-a-reading-error/

haha i see what you did there https://mina86.com/2022/urls-in-cpp/#c