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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

    A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

    Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.








  • In about 2018, I think, a team of researchers put together a mathematical model of how markets work. What they found is that wealth just naturally accumulates to a few people. It’s inherent to how markets work, and it’s more or less at random; in their simulation runs, every person started out in an equal position.

    It’s all luck. It doesn’t even take being in the right place at the right time, although that helps. Since us humans operate on narratives and just-world fallacies, it’s really easy for us to construct a post hoc story about why a certain billionaire succeeded. But it’s all luck.

    (I remember that I read about this research in Scientific American, but I don’t have the link handy.)



  • Is there anybody who’s done the analysis on his bad it will be? California’s online tracker shows right now that nearly every major reservoir in the state is above the historical average level for March 15th. The system as a whole is at over 78% of capacity. The news stories that I found put the releases at of 2.2 billion gallons, which is not much. (The lake near me contains about 133 billion gallons.) They were from Lake Kaweah and Lake Success, both reservoirs which primarily serve flood-control functions.






  • There’s a joke/urban myth that it’s the law in Wisconsin that restaurants have to serve a slice of cheese with apple pie.

    We did used to have a law that oleo (margarine) had to be sold undyed, which made it a sickly-looking blue-ish white. This was to protect the state’s dairy industry. Only butter could be yellow. People near the borders used to bootleg yellow margarine back across the border from other states. The law was dealt a mortal blow when one of our state representatives publicly took a blind taste test in order to prove that butter was better…

    …and failed. His family had been worried about his health, and was surreptitiously substituting yellow margarine for butter in their meals. (In an amusing historical twist, now that we know about the danger of transfats, we know that butter is indeed better.)