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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Put a rescue distro on a USB stick. When you first boot the laptop, use the rescue distro. Write down the USB IDs (lsusb) and PCI IDs (lspci). Read through the kernel boot log (sudo dmesg | less) and write down the names of any kernel drivers that might matter; WiFi, GPUs, USB bridges, and keyboard layouts are important in particular. For laptops, look up manufacturer-specific drivers for keyboards, fans, and power management.

    Linux requires about 8MiB of RAM to boot. The entire netbook movement relied on machines with 2GiB or less; I remember putting Linux onto a 2GiB Sony VAIO that had struggled to boot Windows. Your laptops aren’t too small, but you may be choosing distros with poor hardware support or large monolithic packages. I bet that one of Debian, Gentoo, or NixOS would boot on those machines that still work; of those, Debian is probably easiest.

    Old laptops sucks. Windows use to be very efficient. XP and 7 has held up very well after all these years. And most importantly Linux isn’t a one size fits all solution.

    Nah, Windows sucked back then too. If a machine boots Windows XP or Windows 7, then it can easily be made to boot an out-of-the-box Linux distro. The Asus machine you listed might have some boot issues, but the Acer and Dell do not appear different from any of the Acers or Dells that I’ve put Linux on in the past decade. My daily driver is a $150 refurbished Dell Latitude 5390 running NixOS.





  • I would rather use Magic Wormhole if I have to have an intermediate server operated by somebody else.

    Your protocol isn’t documented enough to allow interoperability. It is important for folks to be able to develop their own clients and frontends; the ecosystem becomes richer and more resilient to attacks when there are many different implementations.

    I’m not sensing an awareness of capabilities. Access to a file is one of the classic examples of a capability and a file-sharing system should be oriented around ensuring that references to files are unforgeable and copyable.

    The terms of service are unacceptable and I won’t be trying out the product. I can point at exactly what’s wrong; talk to your attorney for details.

    Users are expected to respect the intellectual property rights of others when using the app.

    You don’t understand what file-sharing technology is used for.

    We reserve the right to introduce tools and technologies for monitoring the performance of the app and improving its functionality. By using the app, you acknowledge and agree to this potential monitoring.

    Ah yes, because telemetry has never been met with user backlash.

    The company does not collect user data, apart from what is needed for monitoring tools to ensure the app’s stability and to make improvements.

    You don’t need user data for that. Y’know what’s a lot easier? Just don’t collect user data!

    We may also use Sentry.io for error monitoring and NLevel Software for analytics.

    I block those.

    The app may include functionality to report users, and we reserve the right for this functionality to send necessary details for any investigation.

    Ah yes, completely fair that somebody accused of misbehavior gets their local data exfiltrated too.

    Meanwhile Magic Wormhole merely tells us that it is MIT licensed and we can do whatever we like with it.


  • And here we see the self-Godwin in the wild. Masterful play, sir.

    Neither the CFO nor CEO are saying that Google ought to be not broken up. They are saying that Mozilla existentially depends on Google. This is actually more of a central point in the lawsuit than you think; in the original complaint, part 6 of the background is about revenue-sharing agreements (RSAs) between Google and various other companies who would normally compete in search, browsers, and other venues. That is, nobody is disputing that:

    Today, Google has RSAs with nearly every significant non-Google browser (other than those distributed by Microsoft) including Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, and UCWeb. These agreements generally require the browsers to make Google the preset default general search engine for each search access point on both their Web and mobile versions.

    If Mozilla did want to petition the court, then they are welcome to file as amici, but they haven’t! Nor have any court filings included a reference to the CFO’s testimony so far, although to be fair the testimony isn’t yet available to read. There is no evidence that Mozilla will stand in the way of whatever the court decides to do with Google. Rather, in their post, the CEO is asking lawmakers to figure out some way to ensure that the browser market remains competitive:

    Mozilla calls on regulators and policymakers to recognize the vital role of independent browsers and take action to nurture competition, innovation, and protect the public interest in the evolving digital landscape.

    Courts aren’t regulators or policymakers. The complaint before the court is not the same as the underlying principles of antitrust which motivated the complaint. A request to improve the future is not the same as a request to forestall the present.






  • You literally attach a license to every comment you post. The rules which make that license effective are the same rules which make Free Software and open-source licenses effective, too. Show some solidarity; you’re part of the community too, and you should feel comfortable making the same demands as the rest of us. When you say that “open source defenders” are distinct from “developers” you are contributing to a schism for the sake of aggrandizing employment and exploitation.



  • Corbin@programming.devtoProgramming@programming.devWhy fastDOOM is fast
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    4 months ago

    For what it’s worth, most of your comments aren’t eligible for copyright; they aren’t sufficiently original or information-packed. Just like @onlinepersona@programming.dev and their licensing efforts, it’s mostly a vanity to attach a license to unoriginal one-line throwaway jokes. I wouldn’t say that it’s arrogant so much as lacking in self-awareness; a one-liner must be deeply insightful, contain a pun or paraprosdokian, address the current zeitgeist, or otherwise be memorable above and beyond the time and place that contextualized it.



  • Well, here is a very funny one-off commit, but my biggest effort was probably substantial parts of a couple AMD/ATI GPU drivers, well-summarized here. As usual, that was a team effort, with particular credit to Deucher (AMD), Glisse (radeon maintainer), and Airlie (DRM/DRI maintainer). So, put up or shut up. Or, to paraphrase the sentiment that you seem to not grok: talk is cheap; show us your code.

    Let me make it clear. I call out brigading because it is useless noise that distorts and obfuscates the kernel development process. I don’t care that you’re salty that I’m pointing out that your “absolute crickets” comment is not only incorrect, but empty in the sense that your lack of perception is not a substitute for the actual process of kernel development. Additionally, in this case, it seems like you’re still focused on personalities rather than the underlying computer science; I expect “absolute crickets” when asking you about the topic of memory safety.