This is so true tho
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.
You just explained the experience of anybody having to properly configure Apache for the first time.
Configure the right incantations and the machine god will serve your web pages, brother.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Probably gonna get really bad once AI actors start combing the internet for exploits on a larger scale.
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 should have used a copyleft licence.
If I had a dollar for every copyleft project whose maintainer became Ronald, I could found a tech company.