broken schools (Was: Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy)

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
>

It saves all messages in a local spool folder, and since nntp is a
nice and simple retro-protocols, it is trivial to understand the
format. So what you could do, between 2 leafnode servers, is to just
reverse engineer the format and "copy" the spool directory between the
two leafnode installations and all the messages will pop up on the
other leafnode as well.

>
Okay, but the question was to just to confirm my mostly-forgotten
recollections of Leafnode.  I wouldn't mind working on it to make it
peer via NNTP itself.  But I would much rather write a completely new in
a non-C language.

>
I wonder if there are any good C to Go converters out there? Would be
interesting to see how much effort it would take to convert leafnode from c to
go? Maybe then, it would be an easier code base to work with?

I know C a lot more than I know Go---nothing. :)  I've already began
some work in Common Lisp.

I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.

>
I feel the same.  Like you, I feel great learning from the older
generations.  In fact, I often think that they were privileged for being
able to be there first.  I identified this easily enough to develop a
passion for studying the history of computer science, which makes me
look very old now because I use a lot of very old tools, which are
awesome tools despite their age.  I got a web post by Joel Spolsky the
phrase that ``software doesn't get dusty''.

>
True. I have a retro-class on thursday and will show them some nice stuff in the
form of vim, alpine, and midnight commander. Apart from a shell (bash) those are
my main tools in the terminal.

Hey... GNU EMACS. :)

Nevertheless, I feel obsessed by computers and I try to get close to the
hardware by more abstract means.  For instance, I've been reading about
the 6502 and it seems like such a simple CPU that it makes up for a very
great computer architecture first introduction, unlike x86, say.

>
I remember programming for the Z80 when I was young, on my calculator, and also,
of course, assembler on the 486. Those were the days! =)

Lol.  You have more experience than I do.  I did own a 486 DX2 66 MHz
(that was my first), but I wrote no assembly at all---I didn't even know
there was assembly or machine code back then.  I did get to know the
BIOS pretty well, though, but I had not much of an idea how it really
fit into the hardware.  (I took four to five years to realize that I had
to get involved with programming to really understand the computer.)

Pretty funny, though, the first book I read was called ``HARDWARE''.  It
was an x86 computer architecture book, superficial, that explained how
the parts connected or something.  That book was very influential
because it showed me that, by reading it, I could actually make sense of
taking the computer apart and putting it back on.  I consciously
realized---I can read and get knowledge.  (Schools always recommended
reading, but they never really recommended technical reading---they
seemed to recommended only national literature.)

From that point on, I never stopped to read technical books, which gave
me a new realization of how amazingly broken schools are.  And the
problem is not so much in the system itself---it's more in the people
who run that system.

Many years later, as a result, when I was in graduate school, instead of
choosing a topic to write on, I chose an adviser to work with.  I
couldn't care less about any topic; I asked my adviser---what are you
working on?  Let's work on that.  You see?  Anything is interesting so
long as the people working on it are interesting.  When they are not,
no method will do.