Posts by FeRDNYC

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Re: please America .....

It's "literally" killing me, the accelerating pace at which misunderstood / misheard cliches are coming to mean exactly the opposite of what they used to mean.

"Cannot be overstated" is the latest I've noticed. Not appreciating how the phrase subtly creates a superlative by denying the possibility of excessive praise, #KIDSTODAY are more and more bastardizing it into "cannot be understated". Which, again, is exactly the opposite.

So they think they're saying something akin to "should not be understated" or "must not be understated", when in fact they're insulting whatever it is they're trying to compliment, by claiming that any praise at all Is undeservedly excessive.

(And don't get me started on the verbing. Verbing weirds language.)

Our intrepid documentarian has accidentally hit upon the Most Cunning Plan for Jim & co. to have extricated themselves from this predicament.

If Cellino & Barnes & No-Bull WAS actually a law firm, as well as a bookstore, then they could've sued themselves over the phantom shopping-cart activity!

How could they possibly lose? (Or, for that matter, win?)

Ex-CISA officials, CISOs dispel 'hacklore,' spread cybersecurity truths

Re: Is this really the priority?

Is this really the priority?

Well, it's the priority of that site, because it was built for the sole purpose of combating vulnerability misinformation. Which is to say, it's not occupying space used for any other purposes, or pushing out any other type of information -- so it doesn't really seem to be a question of prioritization. There's nothing more important for the hacklore site/team to focus on instead of this.

And in terms of overall priority within our collective lives and attention, I guess it comes down to, "people can think about more than one thing". Is it the highest-priority issue facing the world right now? Obviously not. But is there so much else going on that we can spare no time for this? I would argue, also no.

None of the things they're talking about are entirely wrong, and most is entirely correct. However, I have to question whether dispelling some "myths", some of which I would rather characterize as "exaggerations", is really going to help much. For example, I think they're right that there's no history of actual attackers using public USB ports in their attacks; it's too unreliable. Is there really much effort going into telling people that this does happen, and is correcting that misconception something we need to spend time on?

Well, there I think it is about priorities, because people can only do so much to keep themselves safe, and any time they waste on meaningless, folklore protections against imaginary threats is time that could've been better spent preparing for actual threats. Not to mention, when it comes to physical vulnerabilities like USB connections, there are entire cottage industries springing up devoted to selling woo "defenses" against this kind of stuff. Helping people not waste their money on bullshit security products is a noble undertaking, IMHO.

Also, I don't think end users are the sole audience for the site or its messaging, possibly not even the main audience. One of its purposes is surely to educate the journalists who perpetuate exactly the sort of hacklore that prompted the site's creation. If they can stop the endless flood of misinformation, end users won't need to be disabused of those wrong-headed notions as much.

Re: Of course

My middle mouse button has grown insolent, and may need to be liquidated.

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

Re: Trump and his supporters

I've known and worked for other people like that, yeah.

A mutual acquaintance of one of them asked me if the person in question and I were friends. I told him, "We've worked together, and we're friendly enough, but we're not really friends. Which is probably for the best. I've seen how ____ treats his friends. I can't take that kind of abuse!"

Re: “ Pretty sure Presidential Executive Order is the law”, nope

True, but Congress has passed many laws granting the Executive powers it can exercise with the force of law, because the law says so. These funding bills they're always passing (remember the One Bloated Butterface Bill?) or not passing (see the current shutdown) are in no small part made up of money stuffed down the Executive's blouse for this or that purpose, thus making the execution (aha! see?) of those tasks by order of the President a matter of law.

Of course, over the centuries we've increasingly granted the President more and more latitude in interpreting those legally-obligated tasks and in deciding how exactly to go about them.

Or NOT go about them, because the argument has been made, and.came up again during Obama's first term, that if any part of the office's obligations under the law are likely to be deemed Unconstitutional by the Supremes, then the President has an obligation NOT to carry out that task.

Because when a law is struck down as Unconstitutional, it doesn't become invalid only at that point. A law struck down by the highest court was NEVER valid to begin with, and any actions that the Federal government took in implementing that law were unlawful acts

(Not that anyone involved would be likely face criminal charges. The government's actions are unlawful, not the actions of any civil servants obeying the law as it was understood at the time. You need some seriously exceptional circumstances, like the Nuremberg trials, for civil servants to go down because they followed the law and did the job as defined to them.)

...Getting back on track, tho: Problem is, we all know THIS Supreme Court isn't going to be slapping any of Trump's executive powers out of his hand -- real OR imaginary.

Rich people are literally bringing him lumps of gold to curry favour.

Joke's on them, too, because no amount of bribery or kow-towing will inspire any loyalty in President Cheeto. The moment they make a single decision that doesn't benefit him (even if it has nothing to do with him), he'll turn on them faster than guacamole sitting out in the sun on a summer day.

To solve compatibility issues, Microsoft would quietly patch other people's code

That is about the most Compaq thing I've ever heard.

Re: What is a filename?

Well, you'll notice the lack of "Program Files" in the path there, because in the pre-Win2000 era there was no centralized install location and programs could and would be installed anywhere, often right on the root of some hard drive. And the user was much more likely to specify their own directory name, when selecting the install location.

So, EVERY mail program wouldn't have installed to C:\MAIL\MAIL.EXE, but there was a reasonable chance that more than one totally unrelated program could end up with the same full path on different machines, yes.

(Or, more likely, a user installs a bunch of applications to C:\WORK\, and there's nothing to indicate exactly which programs those are based on the filename OR the full path.)

There were also a nontrivial number of applications that all launched from a generic filename like START.EXE or WINAPP.EXE.

Uncle Sam lets Google take Wiz for $32B

Nobody beats 'em!

Wonder if this means Google will start having Christmas in July?

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Re: Which side of the pond are you?

...You can freeze eggs?

AlmaLinux gives Btrfs a home after Red Hat kicked it out

Although Red Hat might not be keen on Btrfs

That seems like a bit of an exaggeration, as it's the default filesystem format in the Fedora installer.

They just don't consider it enterprise-level stable yet, which seems understandable given the other issues mentioned.

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

Re: Interesting, I guess

Now, that's just false. The reason ext4 was never embraced on Windows is the same reason every other non-Windows filesystem was never embraced on Windows: It was a bad fit for Windows files.

Adding ext4 (or HFS+ or ZFS or...) drivers under Windows would've left you with a case-sensitive filesystem without support for legacy DOS 8.3 short names, two things bound to confuse Windows users if those volumes were mixed in with NTFS drives.

(Linux can use a case-insensitive filesystem like NTFS case-sensitively without any real issues. You just say that a file named "Document.txt" doesn't also match "DOCUMENT.TXT", even though it would on Windows. But it doesn't work so well in reverse. You can't easily bring a case-sensitive filesystem into a case-insensitive environment, because that filesystem might contain BOTH "Document.txt" AND "DOCUMENT.TXT" and the case-insensitive system can't easily differentiate between those two completely separate files.)

So Microsoft or any native partner was never going to add ext4 support to Windows. And the open-source Linux developers, for the most part, had neither motivation nor inclination to do it themselves, because why?

Re: Interesting, I guess

Won't help of your ext4 filesystems are inside LVM2 volume groups, which of course they always should to be because LVM2 is the bee's knees.

Re: During the meanwhile ...

Well, NONE of these NTFS drivers are intended as any sort of alternative to ext4. They all lack features expected on Linux-native filesystems, and always will because NTFS itself lacks those features. You'd never want to put any of your standard Linux partitions on NTFS.

(I tried with the /boot partition, years ago when I had a dual-boot machine and wanted access to the Grub configuration from both sides — but an NTFS /boot reliably broke Fedora's distro upgrade process twice a year, so I abandoned that experiment.)

The only reason to use NTFS under Linux is because you have an existing volume that needs to remain accessible to both Windows and Linux. But, that does describe a LOT of existing storage out there.

Curl project, swamped with AI slop, finds not all AI is bad

Re: No one would complain about AI bug reports

some of them will be bugs they already know about but aren't important enough to bother fixing (like "application crashes inside the function shutdown_on_error()")

I wish that was a joke, but the Lua team regularly gets fuzzer- or AI-originated bug reports along the lines of, "It's possible to crash Lua by doing ______ using the debug library."

To which their response is always (but in far more polite terms than I think are warranted), "DUH!!! It's the debug library, OF COURSE it can crash the interpreter. The whole point is that it gives you access to unsafe things!!"

But still the reports come, because people with fuzzers are the skript kiddies of this decade. Their good intentions don't count for as much as they might think, absent any sort of critical evaluation of the bugs they're blindly submitting.

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

Printer memory was particularly obscene, especially back when it required proprietary daughtercards instead of standardized modules.

I remember always wanting to get a 512K upgrade board for some HP laser printer, which would've brought the memory up to a whopping 1MB but, crucially, would've been enough to do full-page bitmap prints at full resolution. I could never justify it, though, as the expansion board cost SEVERAL hundred dollars.

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

I don't understand the suggestion that this could be used as a code font, since it's clearly terrible for that. The lowercase 'A' is easily confused with the lowercase 'O', and I'd bet money there's insufficient distinction between the lowercase 'I', 'J', and semicolon, or between the capital 'I', lowercase 'L', '1'. It's clearly a very stylized display font for use when aesthetic trumps legibility. It'd be insane to use it in a situation where the main concern is being able to clearly and unambiguously interpret the text.

If you want a really amazing code font, Fira Code is a revelation. It has near-perfect separation between all of the characters I mentioned, and any other problem groupings that often trip up even other supposed coding fonts. Zeroes are slashed by default so they're distinct from capital 'O', the '1' has a baseline bar and a diagonal top member, the lowercase 'L' has a curved baseline extension with a horizontal top half-bar that looks nothing like a '1', the lowercase 'I' and 'J' both have horizontal half-bars below the dot, the '4' has an open top-right corner so it doesn't turn into a capital "A' at any size...

And all of that's before you get into the ligatures, which combine common code operators like '==', '===', '!=', '!==', '<=' , '>=', '->', '=>', and a whole bunch more into symbols without throwing off the alignment.

(For example, '==' combines into a long equals sign, while '>=' becomes '≥' and '->' becomes '→', but spaced on either side to maintain a 2-character width. Ditto '!=' becoming '≠'. '===' becomes a long three-bar equal sign (in the space of three characters), and '!==' becomes a slashed three-bar equals.)

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: My code doesn't compile

Yes and no, Literate Programming fanatics talk about embedding code In documentation, and formatting that documentation richly, but they still took a coder's view of how that was done. The documentation was written in source form (typically using TeX), which is kind of the exact opposite of writing code in Word.

Any documentation system can allow rich markup in doc comments (Python supports ReStructuredText markup in docstrings, and Doxygen can interpret MarkDown), but you're still writing the source for that rich text, which may eventually be rendered more elegantly.

I don't think anyone has yet come up with the WYSIWYG code editor that would allow you to edit that markup without delving into its source. And, of course, unless you're using something like LaTeX your markup is a lot less flexible than Word. (No margins, no font control or sizing, no text alignment, etc.)

Re: Typical case of...

I don't think that analogy works, Val wasn't any sort of messenger in this scenario.

What happened to him was more along the lines of mafia rules: No witnesses.

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

Excel in particular is black magic, the gulf between people who are good with Excel and all the rest of us is vast and intimidating

If you're possessed of basic computer literacy, you can muddle your way through Word, or PowerPoint, or Outlook. The UI will do plenty to help you help yourself, and it's possible to discover the features you need and become fairly proficient in just a few hours using nothing more than an inspection-trial-error loop.

With Excel, though? No amount of flailing around in its interface will turn someone into a self-taught expert... not quickly, anyway. Maybe if you kept at it for weeks or months. Maybe.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: Today..

the early 'freeness' (as in 'without obvious renumeration' rather than 'as in beer')

Wait, no, those are the same thing. "Free as in beer" refers to obtaining something without obvious remuneration.

The other type of free is "free as in freedom". Which is a whole separate conversation when it comes to the internet, especially.

True, the terminology with ISDN hardware was "Terminal Adapter" or TA. An ISDN TA took the place of your dial-up modem, when you upgraded to #TheFUTURE of blazing-fast 128 kbps connectivity.

Re: George Foreman has entered the chat.....

(Er, George Foreman's 12 children consist of 7 daughters and five sons. The Man Himself™ may no longer be with us, but that doesn't make his children somehow past-tense.)

Re: George Foreman has entered the chat.....

People here may need the context, for this joke, that George Foreman's 12 children consisted of 7 daughters and five sons. I don't know his daughters' names. His sons' names are George, George, George, George, and George.

Yes, the narcissist named every one of his sons after himself. So they're George Jr. through George VI, and each of those Georges has four brothers named George.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

with models on show from an early Amiga 1000 through to the more-powerful 4000 (although the latter is not currently running).

If it's a really early model, then it's not an Amiga 1000 at all — the very first units released were just "The Commodore Amiga", because it was the only one.

Once plans were developed to expand the line by adding the A500 and A2000, the first model was rebranded as the A1000 and made part of a product family..

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: ... or some cosmetically waxed neanderthals

I hate to think what the total cost was.

If it helps any, for that expensive a leased line the service public wasn't metered. If they just paid a flat monthly rate, then the more data sent over the line the LOWER the cost per byte. So really, you were just helping them get more value out of their investment.

Re: Percussive or gravitational maintenance.

The LART is reserved for Lusers whose Attitude merely needs Readjustment, though.

Meddling "IT" "professionals" get the spring-operated trap door, or the defenestration ejector.

Re: "web interface ... a back-rev browser that doesn't complain about certificate errors."

My damn 2021-vintage HP printer STILL serves its web interface in HTTP only. It claims to take a certificate that will let it enable the HTTPS server, but I've seen no evidence of any truth to that claim.

Plus, even if I could give it a self-signed certificate, then I'd have the adventure of trying to convince my browser to trust that certificate.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Spiriting patient data off into a murder basement? Whatever for?

Andy never told anyone about the fix. And the government never figured out how their system for clandestinely making "backups" of all patient test results stopped getting updates from this one hospital CT machine.

(Kidding. I hope!)

Atlassian's Trello redesign may be 'worst in tech history' say frustrated users

Re: I love when they change software interface for the sake of changing it

Automakers also continue to enable "spirited debate" among drivers and/or their national governments regarding which side of the car the driver's seat should be on.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

I had a similar experience a couple of years ago in a slightly lower-stakes (but still frustrating) context.

I keep Messages on my phone paired to Google's Messages for Web client, because it means I can receive and send texts using my keyboard and mouse in a web browser, an infinitely more comfortable experience than thumbing messages in on my phone's soft keyboard. (And don't even get me started on the annoyance of finding photos or other media to attach, when it's anything other than the most recent shot taken with the phone camera.) Messages for Web is, honestly, the bee's knees.

But because it's a web client gaining access to the inner workings of your Android device's privileged SMS client, a potential vector for anything from identity theft to exfiltration of all your most embarrassing secrets to out-and-out fraud and financial ruin, they keep the connection rather locked down. The pairing method is fairly robust (scan a QR code displayed by the web client using the phone you want to pair to), and web clients need to be re-paired fairly often, especially when they haven't been used in a while.

At the time this came up, I was dealing with the fact that the rear camera on my phone had just bit the dust, a casualty of a swelling battery that popped it right off the back of the device and rendered it non-functional. Naturally, within 2-3 days of that happening, Messages for Web demanded that I re-pair my browser with the phone.

Which involved scanning a QR code.

Which is hard to do without a rear camera. (It wouldn't use the front camera, and it wouldn't accept an already-stored photo from device storage.)

The punchline was, at the time (they've since fixed this), that method of pairing was the ONLY method of pairing available. Meaning, without a working camera on the device, I was locked out of Messages for Web completely, with my only recourse being to either get the phone's camera fixed, or buy a new phone with a working camera.

I eventually did the latter, and Google eventually realized their system was being a pain in the ass by keeping itself a little too secure, so I guess ultimately the story has a happy ending? "Yay."

IRL Com recruits teens for real-life stabbings, shootings, FBI warns

It's far more likely that any given member's identity is known only to their immediate "handler" within the organization (the one who recruits them), who's also responsible for assigning them tasks and motivating them to comply by any means necessary (including swatting and other threats). That person has the same relationship with their handler/supervisor, and so on.

All types of information, from members to targets to "clients", tends be highly compartmentalized in these sort of groups. Nothing is ever centralized. That's what makes them so hard to wipe out fully. If they arrest 7 members, odds are good that's one or two low-level organizers, plus the 5-6 people they'd brought in — and except for the ringleader(s), none of them have ever been in contact with anyone in the larger organization.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

I'm concerned about the implication that there are contexts where lies should be tolerated.

In what contexts, actually, should we accept being lied to without complaint?

The obvious answer, or at least one obvious answer, is: "When being told a story" -- in other words, in any creative-fiction context.

But that's just a bad definition of 'lie'. A fictional story isn't a lie, it's fiction. And even fiction has to be internally consistent, so a better definition of "lying" in the context of creative output is to violate the internal framework of the fiction. If a work of fiction contradicts itself, that's lying, and it collapses the fictional reality.

And guess what? LLMs do that ALL THE TIME. Even when using them to generate pure fiction, their output has to be carefully checked-over for plot discontinuities, loss of narrative threads, and internal logical inconsistencies. So, even the contexts where it's "ok" to make stuff up, AIs still can't do that in a reliable fashion.

The survey takers also sometimes used text-to-text models for captions and descriptive assistance

..."image-to-text", perhaps? Or was it really referring to respondents who use LLMs to punch up bland description texts?

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Huh ?

Your servers had optical drives? I suppose most did, decades ago, but it always seemed like a waste to me. A drive that's used once to install the OS, and then never again. (Software installs and even OS upgrades were already network-delivered, at least on our systems, by the mid-1990s.)

So ours were CD-less. Granted, they were mostly 3Com telephony rack systems that couldn't have fit an optical drive anyway. (The control unit had a PCMCIA card slot, its sole concession to removable media.)

What they DID have, tho, was a console command dedicated to manipulating the entire chassis' extensive complement of blinkenlights. (Not only could we flash the lights on whatever blade we needed a tech to pull, but we could even script a chase pattern pointing directly at its release lever. All they had to do was follow the bouncing LEDs.)

BOFH: If you can't beat the AI, let it live inside you

"What's a jack see?"

"I don't know, usually a car's undercarriage?"

Stylish and powerful!

Plus, if you get TWO batteries you can wear them as platform shoes. Far-out and totally mod, Daddy-o!

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Oh, you STRENUOUSLY objected?

LOl. "I told it IN ALL CAPS". Oh, well, then it should've been extra caref—waaaaaait, I just remembered: It's a f--ing LLM you nitwit, it doesn't work better if you shout your instructions at it!

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

It is my right to choose what I will or will not respect ;)

It of course is (I mean that sincerely, even if you said it in jest), but consider that certain acts of respect reflect more upon oneself than the person we're disrespecting. I can't speak for you, so I'll speak for myself. Maybe some points will resonate. Others may not.

• If I'm going to espouse a belief that everyone is entitled to their preferred identity expression (gender, pronouns, written and spoken form of their name, etc.) -- and I do espouse such a belief, frequently -- then denying Mr. bider that courtesy would make me a pretty big hypocrite.
• By the same token, if I'm going to ask that people respect the choices I and others have made regarding identity expression, then I need to practice what I preach.
• It's often pointed out that freedom of speech only really matters when it's speech you disagree with. Nobody suppresses speech they like; "freedom of speech" is really a reminder to tolerate speech you don't. Same goes for identity expression. So, whether I find bider's choices or, indeed, bider himself to be stupid or nonsensical really doesn't come into it.
• (An exception is made for cases that are obviously disingenuous and/or mean-spirited. If Marjorie Taylor Greene stands on a stage at some conservative circle-jerk and gets a big chorus of mouth-breathing guffaws by saying some bullshit like, "My pronouns are gun, bullet, and Jewish space laser!", I consider myself under no obligation to respect those choices. Or, indeed, her continued presence on this plane of existence.)
• I am articulate, well-read, and (most critically) have been a BOFH reader since the mid-1990s. So I am very confident that I can effectively convey my utter contempt for Mr. bider and his views without having to resort to cheap-shot acts of disrespect like capitalizing his name wrong. I got this.

I was going to reply to the OP and say that neither is correct, as it should be "Mr. bider" -- but I should've trusted you to have gotten it right from the get-go.

BOFH: The auditor is asking too many questions. We have just the laptop for that

Re: Cor blimey!

Not quite a quote if you butcher my American spelling of "metastasized". (You're not using it right, but I know you either don't care or it's quite intentional.)

And, no, "at the coal face" is not at all a common expression anywhere in the US. It is strictly UK corporate jargon from what I can tell. (Though I can't speak for Australia.)

Yes, I'm well aware that there is a Duck® brand duct tape (been around since the 1990s), and I'm personally quite amused by that clever bit of marketing.

And there isn't one damn person who has ever said "duck tape" and meant Duck® brand duct tape.

I'm kind of worried that both the OP and other comments may have been using "duck tape" completely at face value and without even a trace of irony.

Despite the completely nonsensical nature of the term, it appears to be another linguistic evolution that's metastasized far too extensively to reverse. Much like how what we used to call "a toast" is today termed "a cheers" and that bothers me every time I encounter it. Because I am old and I yell at clouds.

Cor blimey!

we're the ones at the coal face of the Company's IT purchasing policies

Another Extremely British™ idiom, it seems, in the long history of Extremely British™ BOFH turns-of-phrase.

And there appears to be widespread disagreement on whether it's to be written "at the coal face" or "at the coalface".

(Beyond that, it means pretty much what you'd guess it means from context clues: something roughly synonymous with "on the front lines".)

Anthropic won't fix a bug in its SQLite MCP server

Anthropic says it won't fix an SQL injection vulnerability

Ewwwww, that "an" implies the term is expected to be read as "ess cue ell" instead of "sequel". I don't care for that at all.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Sigh

It's sad that "well-meaning techie demonstrates security flaw and gets accused/threatened/punished for it" has risen to the level of cliche. It's actually the expected reaction these days. Most people really do have zero security intuition, which does not bode well for our increasingly-vulnerable online lives.

Cosmoe: New C++ toolkit for building native Wayland apps

Re: not a waylasnd fan

There is already a skeletal outline for X12.

https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/Development/X12/

I want to see discussion about _that_.

"Last edited Mon 18 Sep 2017 07:52:26 AM UTC" (And I guarantee the actual content is probably at least 10 years older than that.)

People have been talking about X12 since X11R1. The last pre-X.org release was X11R6, and that was back in the mid-1990s.

People looking to replace X11 with something better looked at X12. Then they decided to build Wayland instead.

They also finished the job and released an actual piece of software, whereas X12 still resolutely fails to exist. Primarily because, like flying cars, X12 might sound pretty neat... but once you really start to dig into it, it turns out to be a terrible idea that nobody should want.

X11 IS bad. What anyone thinks of Wayland shouldn't even be part of that conversation. It's objectively bad. It was bad back in the 1990s when it was last relevant, and 30 years of stagnation has not made it somehow better. It's terrible for video, really terrible for animation, clumsily accelerated at best... really, the only thing it has going for it is the inherently network-oriented client/server model. Which is both (a) of no interest to the 95% of users who will never have any need for that entire featureset, and (b) detrimental to its functionality as a local client display system, since every feature that can be seamlessly used over the wire is another feature that has to maintain abstractions that prevent it from taking full advantage of the local hardware capabilities.

(And I haven't even brought up security, which is effectively nonexistent both locally and over the wire. No, Xauth does not count as security.)

And Gtk 3 → Gtk 4 makes 2 → 3 look like a walk in the park.

The core dev cabal at least acknowledges that Gtk 4 was a painful migration, and claim that they've finally gotten things where they want them, so Gtk 5 is promised to be a much more gentle evolution of the toolkit.

Which is nice and all, but small comfort to many since there are still plenty of projects that haven't even made it off Gtk 3 yet. (Including the aforementioned GIMP — even in the wake of their big, 10-years-in-the-making 3.0 release earlier this year, still a Gtk 3 app.) Someday, when Gtk 5 actually exists (it isn't even really started yet) the transition from Gtk 4 may be relatively smooth, but nobody's even pretending that it will be any easier moving from Gtk 3 to Gtk 5 than it is moving to Gtk 4.

Heck, Qt 5 to Qt 6 was nothing compared to your average Gtk porting effort, and there are still tons of people who haven't given up Qt 5 yet. (Granted, a lot of that is about QML, since transitioning from Qt 5 + QtWidgets to Qt 6 + QML/QtQuick IS an endeavor on par with a major-version Gtk upgrade.) But at least for your troubles you actually gain something, there; for all its faults QML is apparently a pretty slick tool for GUI building. Creating interfaces in Gtk is not one tiny bit more comfortable or rewarding today than it was 20 years ago. Everything's changed, multiple times over, but little has really improved for all that change.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Standard Units of Bananamagic

The magic banana industry group will form, and the magic banana standard will be ratified, with a standard unit of banana magic, say, the millimusa.

See, now that's just silly. Everybody knows that banana magic is measured in potassia.