We.Love.Privacy.Club

www.uninformativ.de

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

You will regret complexity when on-call

Stop falling in love with your own code

Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs

Everyone hates code they didn’t write

Don’t use unnecessary dependencies

Coding standards prevent arguments

Write meaningful commit messages

Don’t ever stop learning new things

Code reviews spread knowledge

Always build for maintainability

Ask for help when you’re stuck

Fix root causes, not symptoms

Software is never completed

Estimates are not promises

Ship early, iterate often

Keep. It. Simple.

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

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movq

www.uninformativ.de

Tue, Jun 17 4:28AM (21w ago)

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

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movq

www.uninformativ.de

Sun, Jun 15 6:04PM (22w ago)

↳ In-reply-to » So I was using this function in Rust:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Rust is so different and, at the same time, so complex – it’s not far fetched to assume that I simply don’t understand what’s going on here. The docs appear to be clear, but alas … is it a bugs in the docs? Is it a lack of experience on my part? Who knows.

By the way, looks like there was a bit of a discussion regarding that name:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/120048

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prologic

twtxt.net

Sun, Jun 15 1:35AM (22w ago)

Hmmm 🧐 Not what I thought was going on… No bug…

 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="updating feeds for 8 users"
 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="skipping 0 inactive users"
 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="skipping 0 subscribed feeds"
 time="2025-06-14T15:24:25Z" level=info msg="updating 80 sources (stale feeds)"

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