What choice of paint you throw into the tarpit makes zero difference.

The filesystem is so deeply connected to the OS I bet there's a lot of horror around swapping those interfaces. On the contrary, I've never heard anything bad about DragonflyBSD's HAMMER. But it's basically assumed you're using DragonFlyBSD.

Would I keep a company's database on a new filesystem? No, nobody would know how to recover it from failed disk hardware.

This isn't really my area but a Rust OS using a ZFS-like filesystem seems like a lot of classic Linux maintainer triggers. What a funny little project this is. It's the first I've heard of Redox.

Edit: reminds me of The Tarpit chapter from the Mythical Man Month

> The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong or so skillful but that he ultimately sinks.

So, on the consent-quality-useful triangle (WIP), Google is clearly eliminating quality and consent to provide you with a useful interface to the Google consentless compression box. Just what everyone wanted. The future is now.

Notification: You have 2 new views (details button: 2 ad-consenting views, 0 other views) on the photo you took of the compression artifact on a video that you suspect Google might have accidentally compressed without your consent, confusing itself to be Instagram. Unfortunately, your comparison photo gets equally confused and is compressed to be equally as bad as the compressed one. Now the photos look identical, and you look like a conspiracy theorist tweeting about "video encoding" from your Sesame Street Elmo phone, just like everyone else, with no issue at all. "We're in the Ourobouros. Maybe Paramount isn't the issue. Maybe it's Paramount Plus." The Samsung rolly-polly bug interrupts and insists this issue will have to wait because it's 2pm on Friday. Now, your Elmo phone is now the only device still working in the office, as you try to convince your wife why you have to stay late, "Because you're different than the rest of the people posting compression artifact-laden photos."

In fact, my Gnome-fearing worldview was reinforced just last month by my construction of samba/s3/sftp windows NTFS-LFS FUSE netshare vpn on my Proxmox server to solve this issue of multiple desktop environments for the last and final time. Compatibility with everything? No issue.

I achieved a monumental 2kb/s transfer speed, slower than the modem speeds I experienced in my childhood on dial-up. My 2kb/s supercomputer environment was remarkably consistent across all protocols. Thanks to the Gnome community, I was glad to hear that the speeds I was getting were apparently a major improvement since the last release.

Surprisingly, nobody has provided me with any file access architecture memes from the thriving Arch Linux PDP-11 community. Needless to say, having the choice of a desktop environment is great. And KDE is just happy I showed up with a cool ride.

edit: less neg

Like when your mom picks up the phone and it kicks you off the dial-up internet. Except these days, it's like 4 pancakes of getting kicked off since Cloudflare entered in the scene, 5 pancakes if you're in the EU, and sure, let's throw in Anubis the catgirl just to be extra safe with the computers.

OBJECTIVE: Any project that demands HDRP and Nanometric Mesh

BONUS: Find the happy path

The sole defender of this system, a user who bought a game from Steam on their mobile device, completely unaware of any Steam app, maintains that the portable wallet vacuum works as intended.

It's too late. Negative convergence of the Dyson vacuum's warranty appears inversely proportional to Gaben's proximity to retirement. The Y-combinator is reaching criticality.

The Steam Chat app opens.

Sent from my Steam™ (Claude x Gemini "Dew It Right" 2025 Black Edition).

---

I always check for maintained libraries for my programming languages for any messaging library. Bindings in many languages are consistent across Kafka, ZeroMQ, and NATS.

Kafka is a write-ahead log, not a queue per se. It handles transactions to the disk. The networking is a simple broadcast, not a shared queue. You also can't (canonically, at least) pop/insert/delete rows. It's append-only. It can do basic seeking, like replaying from the start.

ZeroMQ is a good choice for learning from its excellent documentation, and programmers interested in C programming. Probably a good lead into Beej's networking guide. ZeroMQ is the odd one as it has no central broker ("Zero" for zero broker); you copy your favorite broker.py pattern from the ZeroMQ guide.

Dropping anchor to throw in the POSIX standard sockets, the BSD kqueue, the Linux epoll, newer io_uring, and libuv for boring cross-platform asynchronous I/O.

https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/preface/

https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/html/split/

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/p...

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/s...

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?kqueue

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/epoll.7.html

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/io_uring.7.html

https://docs.libuv.org/en/v1.x/

Still, I disagree that Kafka is always overkill.

When god opened a datagram socket on your computer, you needed to have been capturing this data X months ago, but weren't paying attention. You need to build warbot.py and put it into production before you have the chance to deal with cold storage. Kafka is my go-to if you can do this before you run out of disk space.

I frequently append JSON lines to a "data.json" file in Python. Add a socket server, compression, and typed bindings for 20+ languages. Boom. Kafka. Don't oversell it. Need to delete a row? Congratulations, you selected the wrong tool. It's appending JSON lines to a file. Kafka is a write-ahead log, not a queue.

To your point about Postgres, I've found Postgres has fantastic JSONB support and awesome developers who have been very influential in my life and whom I admire. Postgres is my preferred cold storage, which I connect to Kafka. It feels like swimming upstream because RMDBs are traditionally for normalized data, not denormalized JSON lines that make XML look hip again.

If you have a choice in DB, Postgres' JSONB has helped me avoid unnecessary normalization steps. It's good to have options.

ZeroMQ would call this the Titanic pattern and mic drop because the guide has a section on it. That's why I like ZeroMQ.

Edit: Apologies for typos/brevity. I have an ancient phone that only works with 20% of the web and phone apps. There are no apps or LLMs to help this dyslexic soul.

Reference for the Titanic pattern. The guide's author is cynical about me shoving spinning rust in the middle, but it doesn't say no. https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/chapter4/#Disconnected-Reliab...

RabbitMQ is neat out of the box. But I went with ZeroMQ at the time.

ZeroMQ is cool but during current year I'd only use it to learn from their excellent documentation. Coming from Python, it taught me about Berkeley sockets and the process of building cross-language messaging patterns. After a few projects, it's like realizing I didn't need ZeroMQ to begin with I could make my own! If ZeroMQ's Hintjens were still with us I'd still be using it.

It's like the documented incremental process of designing a messaging queue to fit your problem domain, plus a thin wrapper easing some of lower level socket nastiness. At least that's my experience using it over the years. Me talking about it won't do it enough justice.

NATS does the lower level socket wrapper part very nicely. It's a but more modern too. Golang's designed to be like a slightly nicer C syntax, so it would make sense that it's high performance and sturdy. So it's similar to ZeroMQ there.

I'm not sure if either persist to disk out of the box. So either of these are going to be simpler and faster than Kafka.

The DB people are probably trying too hard to cater to the queues. Ideally I'd have normalized the data and modeled the relations such transactions don't lock up the whole table. Then I started questioning why I needed a queue at all when databases (sans SQLite which is fast enough as is) are made for pooling access to a database.

Kafka supports pipelining to a relational database but this part is where you kind of have to be experienced to not footgun and I'm not at that level. I think using it as a queue in that you're short-circuiting it from the relational database pipeline is non-standard for Kafka. I suspect that's where a lot of the Kafka hate is from. I could understand if the distributed transactions part is hell but at that point it's like why'd you skip the database then? Trying to get that free lunch I assume.

I have an alternative. Try inserting everything into a SQLite file. Running into concurrency issues? Use a second SQLite file. Two computers? send it over the network. More issues? Since it's SQL just switch to a real database that will pool the clients. Or switch to five of them. SQL is sorta cool that way. I assume that would avoid the reimplementing half of the JVM to sync across computers where you get Oracle Java showing up to sell you their database halfway into making your galactic scale software or the whatever.

I must be stressed today. Thanks for asking.

The Master said, “I consider my not being present at the sacrifice, as if I did not sacrifice.”

The Analects (Confucius, 551-479 BCE), translated by James Legge (1815-1897)