Ronald is indescribably more important than any tech billionaire could ever hope to be. So let's raise a glass and give out a hardy thank you to all the Ronalds of the world!
Written in hand-optimized assembly with individual implementation for every CPU on the planet, with integer division function in 10000 lines of code impelented with XOR and bit-shifting which is somehow 0.3% faster than CPU built-in division operation.
He had to de-optimize the init sequence because the little trick he added that caused the init sequence to return a little power to the grid instead of taking it was causing grid stability issues because the returned power from offices starting up was a bit higher than the extra power required for factory startup weekday mornings.
The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.
It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.
There is a video where a real game dev was showing how bad a specific benchmark was. It was basically read arguments, get a random number, do a for loop 10,000 times, inside there do another for loop 10,000 times, do some equation with a modulo, put result in array, pick a number from array and print to screen.
The biggest time cost was the modulo as that's the hot path. He basically went through and typecast all the ints to double. He got 4x the speed. It went from almost 2 seconds to less than 0.5 second just on that change. This is mostly due to cpu and compiler now using simd instructions.
Yeah, I've actually written quick and dirty code that used both a division and a modulus, but then went back later to use the former to calculate the latter with a multiplication and a subtraction to get a speed improvement.
There have been other occasions where I've been able to replace something like average = sum / count; if average > y with if sum > count * y, when it's not entirely obvious that y could be multiplied by anything and remain meaningful.
But when a division can't be avoided, you still want that genius-written magical library to take some of the sting out of it.
Calling ffmpeg a failed project is exactly what the comic is talking about lol. It's a fantastic project and people don't know how much water it carries
Sounds about right. Those things that are worked on by people who for whatever reason have unlimited free time and can hence afford to reinvent the wheel. SerenityOS is another example
Most likely is. Many open source projects have a joke as a name, often containing some form of innuendo or a double meaning. Helps in maintaining the free nature of the tool (corporations don't want anything to do with it) as well as lower expectations on professionalism. Plus it's funny, especially if it's an in-joke of a niche language.
On the topic of "runk", it's also been loaned from Swedish to Finnish as runkata, or to runk = to jerk off. The actual act of it would be runkkaus or runkkaaminen. Can also be encountered in the form runkkari, aka a wanker (I'd assume Swedish had a matching equivalent). So the joke works in Finnish as well.
XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
I mean, what's the alternative aside from spinning up a MariaDB for your small local app? I can still remember the swamp of .ini files some older programs used for this or the totally overblown Windows Registry. Not a good time.
Pretty sure lots of projects use json files, before that it was probably XML. Are those good or even decent alternatives? Probably depends on the amount of data ...
Also interesting is that it's one of the small number of unquestionably public domain pieces of software. Not open source, but public domain. It's not entirely clear if you can technically put your own work in the public domain, or if you're just freely licensing it to anyone.
Sqlite was initially developed for the US military though, which explicitly makes it public domain.
This is why when Steve Jobs died in 2011 another far more important figure died... Dennis Ritchie. The man who made the C programming language and Unix, without which nothing Apple produced would be possible.
Not to downplay dmr's importance here because he quite literally is the father of modern computing, but without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later. A different systems programming language and a different operating system everything else is modeled after. High-level programming languages weren't a new concept when he wrote C. Before B they already had Fortran. Funny to call any of those High-level in 2026, but that's the whole importance of C, isn't it? It made writing complex systems easy compared to assembly languages or even fortran.
I'm not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.
Oh wow I didn't realize Pascal was even older than C, thought it showed up in like mid-70s or early 80s. To be fair I've ever only interacted with Delphi, not OG Pascal.
While I don't necessarily like C, I am happy for C-style syntax over Pascal-style, which I've also worked with. Give me braces over begin and end any day of the week.
Not necessarily against what you said, but I realized you can kinda say that about anything, with some abstraction. There’s always smart people (thankfully), and they’ll often arrive at the same solutions. Roll over, Gauss.
Well I think it's different for scientific discoveries where something is either found or not. Software and other products... There are niche things that may never exist without the author, and there are generic things that would be created in one form or another anyway. Once programming languages were a thing, general purpose high level languages were bound to happen IMO and there are infinite possible languages.
Sure, but what I’m saying is that at a high level of abstraction scientific discoveries are similarly inevitable as well. I don’t think niche creations are a major difference since as you yourself stated “without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later.”. The majority build on previous findings, often many scientists are working towards the same goals, and truth is truth, whether it be found through physical experimentation or fleshing out applied logic.
There's lots of history you can look at to see how this works. The same thing does get invented more than once, but sometimes there's different technologies that could each become dominant, and then there's a real first mover advantage.
In Russia, they don't really have highways. Everything is built around rail lines. In the Inca empire, they had highways, but highways with stairs because there was no widespread wheel usage (which itself might be down to limited available wagon pullers and rough terrain).
It's basically the best virtualization platform. It can do full system emulation across a number of platforms, or hardware assisted virtualization (using KVM). It's incredibly useful for debug as well as doing real work.
The myth of Steve Jobs needed the actual genius of others to exist. Steve's gift to the world was recognizing and pointing out actual gifts tonthe world that would have otherwise gone unoticed or not brought to their full potential.
If Steve was still around, he would have taken Ronald's idea and had it rebuilt with a little polish and an exorbitant price tag.
For a long time all systems which deal with timezone data (like ability to convert utc to est for example) was reliant on 1 server in 1 random guy's basement which he paid for himself. I heard they were working to correct this situation but haven't been following it.
You sent me down the exact kind of weird rabbit hole I love. Genuinely thank you.
It's maintained by the IANA now (the same people who basically run the modern Internet, saying what domains are allowed and such for those who don't know). Though Arthur David Olson (the man you mentioned) still contributes his expertise and data.
Edit: I was a bit quick to post. The article I linked says Arthur David Olson (mentioned in sibling comment) started the TZ database, with Paul Eggert extending it and maintaining it later. The 2011 lawsuit is also mentioned in the Wikipedia page I just linked.
For the uninformed. It still somehow both boggles my mind and makes 100% sense that people didn't just write this function when they needed something to pad strings.
Something something Unix Philosophy. Write small programs that do one thing and do it well and then re-use that well tested code as often as you can rather than poorly re-implementing it over and over?
The amount of businesses with things you just can't touch for whatever reason is surprising.
The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
Social collapse isn't an exciting day in your life, it's a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.
society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
Reminds me of the Imperium in Warhammer 40k how a lot of the tech they use is barely understood or some of it is not understood at all. Like the adeptus mechanicus believe in the Omnissiah (me too) and a lot of what they do is purely ritualistic.
But lots of those rituals are just stuff like turning something on in the right order. Or other mundane things that have become an arcane ritual after thousands of years that need doing for a thing to work right but nobody remembers why it needs to be done or how the thing works. Just that these are things you must do to please the machine spirits and make whatever random thing work right.
Honestly there is enough complexity in enough tech nowadays that I'm sure almost all of us are doing something similar in many areas of our life. Like I would struggle to explain how the Internet works or even how my television actually creates an image on itself. Maybe a better example would be cars, a lot of people use them but don't know anything about necessary maintenance or basic principles of how they work.
Or more things will happen like the Bhopal disaster where a chemical plant, over a decade or so, laid off or failed to replace everyone who knew what their carefully designed multi-layered safety systems did. When those systems aged and needed maintenance, the remaining production people took them out one by one. Then 500,000 people were gassed with cyanide. 2,200 immediate deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Those were both exploitative business men more than engineers or developers. Jobs wasn't special and there're reasons why Microsoft boosted Gates to be the richest person in the world at one point.
Its almost like his name was Dennis Richie and its a shame a blow hard like Jobs died around the same time as him and overshadowed his passing and his legendary legacy.
I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?)
148 replies
Ronald is indescribably more important than any tech billionaire could ever hope to be. So let's raise a glass and give out a hardy thank you to all the Ronalds of the world!
Too bad all the tech billionaires profit from Ronald's work while he does it for free.
“Ronald” is all of us.
I am Ronald
Ronald should have used a copyleft licence.
If I had a dollar for every copyleft project whose maintainer became Ronald, I could found a tech company.
Bless Ronald
Our math depends on him 🙏
Written in hand-optimized assembly with individual implementation for every CPU on the planet, with integer division function in 10000 lines of code impelented with XOR and bit-shifting which is somehow 0.3% faster than CPU built-in division operation.
He had to de-optimize the init sequence because the little trick he added that caused the init sequence to return a little power to the grid instead of taking it was causing grid stability issues because the returned power from offices starting up was a bit higher than the extra power required for factory startup weekday mornings.
I love that this is an actual possibility.
The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.
It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.
There is a video where a real game dev was showing how bad a specific benchmark was. It was basically read arguments, get a random number, do a for loop 10,000 times, inside there do another for loop 10,000 times, do some equation with a modulo, put result in array, pick a number from array and print to screen.
The biggest time cost was the modulo as that's the hot path. He basically went through and typecast all the ints to double. He got 4x the speed. It went from almost 2 seconds to less than 0.5 second just on that change. This is mostly due to cpu and compiler now using simd instructions.
Small changes can have big impacts.
Yeah, I've actually written quick and dirty code that used both a division and a modulus, but then went back later to use the former to calculate the latter with a multiplication and a subtraction to get a speed improvement.
There have been other occasions where I've been able to replace something like
average = sum / count; if average > ywithif sum > count * y, when it's not entirely obvious that y could be multiplied by anything and remain meaningful.But when a division can't be avoided, you still want that genius-written magical library to take some of the sting out of it.
He didn't do any of that. Just typecast the numbers to be doubles.
The whole benchmark was a mess but that part specifically surprised me.
XKCD #2347: Dependency
An interactive version of the famous comic
Also extremely stable.
What do we think the blocks on the right represent? Projects like TempleOS?
ffmpeg is a good candidate im p sure
Nah that's used by a ton of projects and websites
Calling ffmpeg a failed project is exactly what the comic is talking about lol. It's a fantastic project and people don't know how much water it carries
Sounds about right. Those things that are worked on by people who for whatever reason have unlimited free time and can hence afford to reinvent the wheel. SerenityOS is another example
By gods, the interactive one is great!
All I get is “Browser wants to open another app” which I have never allowed… D:
If you have Wikipedia set to open browser links that's most likely what happened.
That is if you have the Wikipedia app installed.
Nah, I don’t have like any apps, and don’t like things trying to install them :I
Wasn't sure whether you were using mobile or not.
I have Wikipedia set to ask to open links to Wikipedia on my phone. I thought it may have been something like that.
Aha! Nah, I’m seeing that on an iPhone with Firefox Focus.
Wat.
Just loads in for me.
I didn’t know how much I needed the interactive version until now.
I just touched the white void to the right of the structure, and slowly saw all modern infrastructure collapse.
Not sure if it's part of the joke but that word means "jerk" (as in "jerk off") in Swedish.
So a perfect open source name then.
Runk that hog, swedish boy.
pojke/kille/grabb/gosse = boy/dude/guy/kiddo, so have fun with that. 😂
Arööö!
Is that how they climax over there?
Most likely is. Many open source projects have a joke as a name, often containing some form of innuendo or a double meaning. Helps in maintaining the free nature of the tool (corporations don't want anything to do with it) as well as lower expectations on professionalism. Plus it's funny, especially if it's an in-joke of a niche language.
On the topic of "runk", it's also been loaned from Swedish to Finnish as runkata, or to runk = to jerk off. The actual act of it would be runkkaus or runkkaaminen. Can also be encountered in the form runkkari, aka a wanker (I'd assume Swedish had a matching equivalent). So the joke works in Finnish as well.
They are real people
XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
When I last talked to Richard he had company to work on SQLite. It was like four people.
SQLite is still deployed on everything, everywhere. You browser. Your phone. Macs. Half of Linux machine. Your airplane. It's super impressive.
It's lite architecture makes it the only valid option to not having to deploy a full on postgre
I mean, what's the alternative aside from spinning up a MariaDB for your small local app? I can still remember the swamp of .ini files some older programs used for this or the totally overblown Windows Registry. Not a good time.
CSV or a spreadsheet (xlsx/ods)?
You didnt specify it had to be a good optio ;)
db.txt
Now you're just trying to hand-roll your own DBMS. Have fun with that. It won't work out
Pretty sure lots of projects use json files, before that it was probably XML. Are those good or even decent alternatives? Probably depends on the amount of data ...
Also interesting is that it's one of the small number of unquestionably public domain pieces of software. Not open source, but public domain. It's not entirely clear if you can technically put your own work in the public domain, or if you're just freely licensing it to anyone.
Sqlite was initially developed for the US military though, which explicitly makes it public domain.
It doesn't matter, but it's interesting.
Fatfs is also a big one iirc
While those are the main developers neither is alone in maintaining their respective software.
Probably gonna get really bad once AI actors start combing the internet for exploits on a larger scale.
Start??
Also gonna get really bad once these lonely maintainers get into AI. Been browsing https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware, things looks pretty bleak.
Everyone who understands Norwegian love the name Ronald chose for his invaluable tool.
For the uninitiated: well, let's just say. jorkin it.
and by "it".. hehe, well lets just say... my digits
Came here to say this (no pun intended)
But pun gladly taken nonetheless
Yeah, I was just going to be mysterious and write sremoveds in Norwegian, but I guess there's no point in that now :c
I don't know a word of Norwegian but I know the internet.
Now you do. So if you see any Norwegian or Swede, remember to tell them "I know runk".
Whenever Norwegian Football fans are cheering their team on, just join in.
bomp-bomp RUNK!!
bomp-bomp RUNK!!
Ah. He must be a KDE contributor as well.
Kontributor
You know, I was VERY tempted to write it that way, but decided against it at the last moment.
Klearly you are not a KDE Kontributor.
Khx klreno kor kour kontribution!
Seems you're too reserved to ever become a konqueror.
Qrunk
This is why when Steve Jobs died in 2011 another far more important figure died... Dennis Ritchie. The man who made the C programming language and Unix, without which nothing Apple produced would be possible.
Not to downplay dmr's importance here because he quite literally is the father of modern computing, but without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later. A different systems programming language and a different operating system everything else is modeled after. High-level programming languages weren't a new concept when he wrote C. Before B they already had Fortran. Funny to call any of those High-level in 2026, but that's the whole importance of C, isn't it? It made writing complex systems easy compared to assembly languages or even fortran.
I'm not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.
Apple used Pascal up until the System 7 era anyway, C was just one of many choices of the time.
If we didn't have C, we'd probably have eliminated things like buffer overflows and out of bounds memory accesses decades ago.
Oh wow I didn't realize Pascal was even older than C, thought it showed up in like mid-70s or early 80s. To be fair I've ever only interacted with Delphi, not OG Pascal.
While I don't necessarily like C, I am happy for C-style syntax over Pascal-style, which I've also worked with. Give me braces over begin and end any day of the week.
Not necessarily against what you said, but I realized you can kinda say that about anything, with some abstraction. There’s always smart people (thankfully), and they’ll often arrive at the same solutions. Roll over, Gauss.
Well I think it's different for scientific discoveries where something is either found or not. Software and other products... There are niche things that may never exist without the author, and there are generic things that would be created in one form or another anyway. Once programming languages were a thing, general purpose high level languages were bound to happen IMO and there are infinite possible languages.
Sure, but what I’m saying is that at a high level of abstraction scientific discoveries are similarly inevitable as well. I don’t think niche creations are a major difference since as you yourself stated “without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later.”. The majority build on previous findings, often many scientists are working towards the same goals, and truth is truth, whether it be found through physical experimentation or fleshing out applied logic.
There's lots of history you can look at to see how this works. The same thing does get invented more than once, but sometimes there's different technologies that could each become dominant, and then there's a real first mover advantage.
In Russia, they don't really have highways. Everything is built around rail lines. In the Inca empire, they had highways, but highways with stairs because there was no widespread wheel usage (which itself might be down to limited available wagon pullers and rough terrain).
Yeah, Apple would just steal literally every single idea and piece of software from someone else
He made money, and enemies who couldn't actually do anything about it.
Fabrice Bellard is ten Ronalds.
FFmpeg and QEMU? Holy shit!
I had no idea
and tcc, which while maybe not as 'important', is extremely cool.
Is QEMU simply a VM?
It's basically the best virtualization platform. It can do full system emulation across a number of platforms, or hardware assisted virtualization (using KVM). It's incredibly useful for debug as well as doing real work.
I would say so? It's an emulator and I personally use it to manage KVM on Linux. Makes my life easier.
Not really sure about the precise details, sorry
The myth of Steve Jobs needed the actual genius of others to exist. Steve's gift to the world was recognizing and pointing out actual gifts tonthe world that would have otherwise gone unoticed or not brought to their full potential.
If Steve was still around, he would have taken Ronald's idea and had it rebuilt with a little polish and an exorbitant price tag.
There is no Jobs without Wozniak.
One hundred percent, but don't forget Jony Ive. The mythology of Steve Jobs is built on the genius of Woz and the designs of Ive.
And scrubbed it of any mention of Ronald's name before pulling it out onstage. Don't forget that.
My go to real example is curl
Christopher's Universal Request Library
In case anyone thinks you're serious, that's not what it stands for.
Yeah, its just Chris, dude HATES when people call him Christopher.
Crazy Ubiquitous, Raw, and Ludicrous
For a long time all systems which deal with timezone data (like ability to convert utc to est for example) was reliant on 1 server in 1 random guy's basement which he paid for himself. I heard they were working to correct this situation but haven't been following it.
You sent me down the exact kind of weird rabbit hole I love. Genuinely thank you.
It's maintained by the IANA now (the same people who basically run the modern Internet, saying what domains are allowed and such for those who don't know). Though Arthur David Olson (the man you mentioned) still contributes his expertise and data.
You're probably thinking of Paul Eggert.
Edit: I was a bit quick to post. The article I linked says Arthur David Olson (mentioned in sibling comment) started the TZ database, with Paul Eggert extending it and maintaining it later. The 2011 lawsuit is also mentioned in the Wikipedia page I just linked.
I remember when he got sued for copyright infringement or something ridiculous and it was big news
Is this a real example? Or are we just talking about linux here
Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there's several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.
A huge proportion (most?) of server infrastructure runs on linux.
That's what I meant. I phrased it badly, i meant to ask if it was about Linux or something else
It was leftpad. A stupid little function that was used by like 90% of the internet, and it crashed everything during a name dispute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
You weren't there for the Leftpad fiasco, I take it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
For the uninformed. It still somehow both boggles my mind and makes 100% sense that people didn't just write this function when they needed something to pad strings.
Probably got put into a popular example and then everyone uses it because "that's how."
Huh... You know what that makes more sense than anything else I've come up with. I always just assumed it was lazy devs.
Something something Unix Philosophy. Write small programs that do one thing and do it well and then re-use that well tested code as often as you can rather than poorly re-implementing it over and over?
Nope, I was still a little too young
The amount of businesses with things you just can't touch for whatever reason is surprising.
The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
Social collapse isn't an exciting day in your life, it's a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.
Some dude in the year 2345 will be shitposting about how we didn't see it coming because we are dumb.
We did see it coming, but we are dumb
Dumb and selfish, but thats not solely human traits
Yeah, and things can putter on for hundreds of years before they really "collapse"
That sounds like a 'crunch' category risk
Reminds me of the Imperium in Warhammer 40k how a lot of the tech they use is barely understood or some of it is not understood at all. Like the adeptus mechanicus believe in the Omnissiah (me too) and a lot of what they do is purely ritualistic.
But lots of those rituals are just stuff like turning something on in the right order. Or other mundane things that have become an arcane ritual after thousands of years that need doing for a thing to work right but nobody remembers why it needs to be done or how the thing works. Just that these are things you must do to please the machine spirits and make whatever random thing work right.
Honestly there is enough complexity in enough tech nowadays that I'm sure almost all of us are doing something similar in many areas of our life. Like I would struggle to explain how the Internet works or even how my television actually creates an image on itself. Maybe a better example would be cars, a lot of people use them but don't know anything about necessary maintenance or basic principles of how they work.
You just explained the experience of anybody having to properly configure Apache for the first time.
Configure the right incantations and the machine god will serve your web pages, brother.
Or more things will happen like the Bhopal disaster where a chemical plant, over a decade or so, laid off or failed to replace everyone who knew what their carefully designed multi-layered safety systems did. When those systems aged and needed maintenance, the remaining production people took them out one by one. Then 500,000 people were gassed with cyanide. 2,200 immediate deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
That's just gmp. The go-to unlimited precision arithmetic library.
I think it’s worth noting there’s few people like Jobs and more like Gates but they’re all psychopaths.
Those were both exploitative business men more than engineers or developers. Jobs wasn't special and there're reasons why Microsoft boosted Gates to be the richest person in the world at one point.
my impression is that gates was doing some pretty impressive computer programming for a good stint in his early days...
This is peak comedy
How nice of them to provide a Python wrapper for the C library
The first examples are consequential in the same way Voldemort was.
Its almost like his name was Dennis Richie and its a shame a blow hard like Jobs died around the same time as him and overshadowed his passing and his legendary legacy.
thanks Daniel Stenberg!
On top of it all, Steve Jobs wasn't even in tech. He was in sales.
Reminded me of this, that basically every language just have a wrapper around.
Discussed previously (here, there).
Awesome usage of the word "consequential."
Here's to all the Ronalds and Daniels out there.
Thanks.
:)
Marketing>the reason for it
It's more often not the "face" that's the crux, it's the geek. Make nice with the actual casters. 🖖🏼
Oh yeah, I love Ronald Burkiworkowskini
It’s pronounced Brutananadilewski!
What is the other half of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, if they are only half guys?
Runk is Icelandic for jerking off
Billionaires? Yes.
Ronald is just some unpaid Polish immigrant in US, very often.
Not every person is a cunt in this world you know.
Ronald and runk, not Donald
DuckTrump.