What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

Today in it's Inkscape. I've used it for years, for generating meme-type images, for producing my resume, for several portfolio projects, drafting SVG source images for laser-cutter/3d-printer work, and likely dozens of other projects I'm forgetting at the moment.

Having implemented a *tiny fraction* of a vector image editor/viewer (in VB6 for the PocketPC using custom XML data-structures under the hood…so early-2000s), I appreciate all the more the hard work done by the Inkscape devs.

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A project from the future and fantastic readme to boot at github.com/dnr/styx

.

It's essentially a layer of the nix package manager that uses linux userspace file-system mechanisms (but not FUSE) to download data on demand as they're read. As in at posix read time.

And not whole files, mind you, but chunks of files. I.e. segments of a file that are common across others will be deduplicated on disk. Not only that but large files can be partially downloaded as needed.

For example, I rarely use most of the fonts bundled in the widely used google noto fonts package which is above 1GiB on disk right now with the version I'm using. A lot LLM related packages like the cuda family and ollama are pretty big as they tend to bundle together code for each hardware/architecture that they support in one package.

On the other hand, nixos upgrades tend to leave lots of versions of the same package in the store. This is such a big issue that I'm usually forced to "garbage collect" the store or update flakes of unrelated projects in lock-step to benefit from version dedup. The chunking aspect would help here a lot as for most packages, different versions are mostly identical chunkwise.

Hearsay against has me suspicious of the metadata overhead but intuition says package management is a good usecase for this.

I was previously aware of github.com/containers/composef which tries to do something similar for OCI images but very cool to run across this despite how...early days it is.

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For those wondering why I'm making such a fuss about , here's an excerpt from Terry Pratchett's . Susan, a mortal who is Death's granddaughter, has just saved the Hogfather (a Santa/Father Christmas type figure) from a messy death at the hands of those who would prefer a more clockwork universe.

I WILL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK, said Death, after a while.

"Thank you. Now... tell me..."

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?

"Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"

NO.

"Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

...

"Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"

A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

They walked in silence for a moment.

"Ah," said Susan dully. "Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that. "

I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE *HUMANS* LIVE.

"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... *fantasies* to make life bearable. "

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little --"

YES. AS PRACTICE YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

-----

Happy to all who celebrate.

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