That's an abrasive question but i dare say that we all do. It's our only constant point of reference.

> Have you written a parser or interpreter?

i have written many parsers, several parser generators, and a handful of programming languages. This article, however, covers a whole other level, way over my head (or well beyond any of my ambitions, in any case).

Pics or it didn't happen: fossil.wanderinghorse.net/r/cwal

Since such "clean room" implementations ostensibly do not see the source, it's arguably irrelevant whether such sources are open are not. Such implementations will happen regardless of whether the sources they're reimplementing are opened or closed.

(Enter name of large software vendor here) has long-since proven that security through obscurity is not a real thing.

Re. platform portability: i primarily write C code and have had very close to 0 issues regarding software portability (once one finally internalizes that unqualified "char" may be either signed or unsigned, depending on the platform, and codes accordingly, it's smooth sailing). On my home ARM servers i've had zero issues re. availability of tools which i'd expect to have on x86 systems. They "just work".

That is, i guess, to say: don't hesitate to try it out if you have the opportunity to do so.

[^1]: my current system is on loan to me from a generous colleague, so moving to an ARM hoster would be a new cost, which currently rules it out as an option. If i were paying full price for the current x86 box i'd have most definitely already looked for an ARM substitute.

Noting that you willfully cut the qualifying "virtually" from that quote, thereby transforming it to over-stated:

> Let me rephrase this, 17% of the most popular Rust packages contain code that virtually nobody knows what it does

No, you're not. Company time + company resources = company property. Company project = company property. No code within any given company belongs to one person, but belongs to (spoiler alert!) the company.

If you want to develop voodoo to make you irreplaceable, do it in the context of your own projects, with your own resources, on your own time.

PS: there may well be legal reason that they require the prompts. e.g. to ensure that you're not injecting materials owned by someone else. They are perfectly justified in demanding access to every byte which goes into their software, documents, infrastructure, etc.

Edit: i now see there's a separate LICENSE file in the github repo, but (A) that's not what this post directly links to, nor (B) is there any mention of that license in the source file.

Whoever it was who bet me 20 Euros that we already are already living in a dystopia, my opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, i owe you some money.

TIL. Woot! Sure enough, it's right there in the sidebar - no deep searching of settings needed.

Coincidentally, i saw several headlines yesterday (now long gone from my news feed) claiming that blue light filters are not nearly as effective as once believed. It may be worth researching the current status on that info before committing to a red-only screen. (There's no way i'd buy one, in any case.)

The ceiling is effectively "wherever it first breaks beyond the maintainer's capability of fixing it." Once development can't get past a given problem, it's hit, at least temporarily, the ceiling.

i dare say, with nothing but the intuition gained through decades of practical experience (as opposed to studies and numbers) to back it up, that the ceiling for someone with zero coding experience is not very far from the floor.

Edit:

> Trying to separate hype from reality.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701971> just showed up in the feed and seems particularly applicable here.

One relevant snippet:

> Real products need experts and it is of extreme difficulty to become such an expert if you don’t possess the expertise from either your own effort or watching more skilled colleagues.

According to a speculative blog post by Eric S. Raymond in September 2020, Microsoft is literally moving towards replacing Windows' internals with Linux. Unfortunately, that post is now unreachable, but searching for "eric raymond article about windows being replaced with a linux kernel" finds many third-party references to it and summaries of it.

Spoken like a marketer, as opposed to a developer ;).

> I mean do you have any other better recommendations for reach?

Unfortunately no. All of my code gets posted on my own site (not github) and is left there to die, with no real concern for whether other folks make use of it. That's not a popular approach, nor does it lead to any popularity for me or my projects, so is not necessarily a model for others to follow.

> I just want to effectively convey what my product does to the right audience.

_That_ is entirely up to your docs, not the hosting platform. What you're asking about is more a function of (A) the hosting platform and (B) the various channels which drive people to that platform. i'm roughly 0% qualified to suggest any approaches to that than just "throw it over the wall" :/.

1. Dark mode

2. (Now that i'm seeing it in action for the first time) inline responding. That said: this increases the weight of the page considerably (in JS code), so delegating it to the various third-party apps is arguably the better approach for this specific platform. (But now that i've seen it in use here i'll have to add this to the Fossil SCM's forum at some point, as this is sooooo much more comfortable.)

To re-frame the question: why do you care how many stars (presumably you're talking about github stars?) you have? Does the number of stars change what you develop or how you develop it?

Losing sleep over github star count is akin to losing sleep over up/downvotes on HackerNews or thumbs on Your Favorite Social Media Site. Tying one's self-worth to them, or one's self-image of one's own works to them, is... well, kinda sad.

> i might just be wrong about what the market wants right now.

Github stars are no indication of "what the market wants" - they're an indication of how many people (or scripted bots) have seen the project, thought "huh, interesting," and clicked the star so that they have a bookmark of it for later reference in their github settings.

Linux is the most obvious, but there are numerous flavors of BSD as well.

> and yet... still unusable by the mass majority of people.

That info is 20+ years out of date. Distros like Suse and Ubuntu made Linux "click, click, click, it's installed" more than two decades ago. i've watched complete non-techies switch to Mint Linux long-term, the only intervention from me (their resident techie) being showing them how to boot up the USB stick installer.

cp "works" but it has a very strong possibility of creating a corrupt copy (the more active the db, the higher the chance of corruption). Anyone using "cp" for that purpose does not have a reliable backup.

sqlite3_rsync and SQLite's "vacuum into" exist to safely create backups of live databases.