Old software like Unix tends to be some of the best-written software ever. Saving these systems gives us a valuable learning resource.

I’ve learned this is not the case. Bryan Cantrill taught me in the talk about tail -f (and about how it was “treasuring up” data in buffers

Ha ha -- but maybe we can finally find the mysterious headwaters of ta?[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gp-RXCLO2M&t=3500s

Software longevity: "a terrific power"

With terrific power comes terrific responsibility. :)

lovely, I hope i can manage to get you to sign my butt one day

I assume you mean "sedan" rather than "saloon"?

It's the British English equivalent.

Qt Creator is the only IDE I'll use for C++, and I only wish that it had the incredibly in-depth language support for other languages (I'm a D fan and would love an actually good IDE for it).

Somebody did: https://x.com/rcivNFT/status/1981318959107289134

In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.

You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.

That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine.

... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.

Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.

Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.

That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.

We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.

isn't beeper non-free? there aren't that many decent matrix bridges.

All the Beeper bridges are open source and self hostable: https://github.com/beeper

Ian, it would be great to see an RSS feed on your website if you want to gain another regular reader :)

Ian is a great writer

Seconding this