Technical

RSS—short for Really Simple Syndication—is an XML-based content syndication format, designed to share content across different platforms. In plain English, RSS is a machine-readable file telling a reader program the list of content entries (posts, podcast episodes, etc.) from a certain site. It’s kind of like the role of “follow” or “subscribe” in modern social media, but in an open and decentralized manner.

People keep saying RSS is dead or is dying. Not really. I mean, yep, RSS/Atom usage is declining, largely thanks to all sorts of social media domination and Google killing Google Reader in the struggle of making their own social media. Still, it’s an oasis in this age of information overload, algorithmic attention grabbing, and deliberate walled-gardenization.

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I had long been using Cygwin as my main operating environment when I needed to use Windows—which helped me keep my sanity level above zero. A little while ago, I migrated from Cygwin to one of its derivatives: MSYS2. Why?

1. Cygwin’s package manager (the setup.exe) wasn’t nice, to put it nicely.
2. MSYS2’s package manager, pacman, was one of the low-headache package managers I liked.
3. I frequently needed to interact with native Windows executables from the command line. Famous ones include go, node.js, and rust, but there were also obscure things like Kerbal Space Program or Monster Hunter modding tools—these would be difficult to interface with from WSL. Cygwin didn’t do too well in this respect—I had a lot of wrapper scripts to convert paths and things.

However, it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer. There were pros and cons—MSYS2 was designed with a very different purpose in mind from Cygwin, after all. This page from MSYS2 wiki describes this in a nice summary (emphasis mine):

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It was many years ago. At my to-be-previous job, we wanted to try some new modeling things. We grabbed the then-latest TensorFlow docker image (Since the model was based on TensorFlow—I forget which one though) and it spun up smoothly. The container even printed a pretty logo in colorful ASCII art as shown in the cover image.

The experiments went well. We eventually packed some more dependencies and an sshd (and some sort of init, of course) in, and asked IT to put the image on a shared GPU box. It became part of our development infrastructure. The shared box had access to NFS, so the sshd was mostly just for getting a remote shell. Everything went well.

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