Intralexical @ Intralexical @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Yes, I have sorta discovered this the hard way recently, a couple times. It is why I am so angry about the whole thing.

Usually rated "Gold" or "Platinum" on AppDB:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=12274

Platinum: "Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation"
\ Gold: "Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration"

Click on a version. Apparently it works perfectly, but you need to winetricks corefont, vcrun6, speechsdk, and sapi for the initial install.

Somebody's damned no matter what. The victim deserves justice. The survivors deserve peace. The perpetrator deserves a chance to do better. And the rest of us deserve safety.

And these things cannot be reconciled. But I'm not willing to just give upon on any of them. So yes, if you could guarantee that it would give us a decent shot at having all of these things, I would be willing and honoured to live as that person's neighbour or roommate. .I've repeatedly made decisions before in my life that I think prove this, without even realising it. My life is worth less too if theirs is ruined, and I don't actually innately care about my own safety if I think I can help someone else.

But nobody can currently guarantee that. So, I honestly don't care anymore. Lock them up for good and throw away the key, or kill the survivors too and then kill me too for good measure; I don't care. Just don't make me choose who to damn, because what I want to see is for the victim to be alive, not avenged, and for the criminal to be helped, not brutally crushed— but we can't have that anyway.

And Ffs, don't let a known dangerous criminal have the chance to kill again and pretend it's just mercy or kindness or whatever without a dangerous level of foolishness behind it while condescending at anyone who would want to see a more cautious approach. And don't pretend that ruining one more life for some perverse ideal of "punishment" or revenge is going to fix anything either.

This is a shitty situation, and we've already lost to end up in it. People have already been hurt, and no matter what you choose, more people are probably going to end up being hurt before it's over. Pretending mercy will magically fix everything is almost just as stupid and evil as pretending "punishment" serves any moral purpose other than cruelty.

....I'd want some kind of mercy for the man or woman who murders me. But it's not my place to demand it for someone else's killer, who may well go around being a threat to more and more people.

.No. That's a good place to end it. "You deserved it" is the only line that's honest about what they believe. They just go through the rest first because it's an easier sell.

Yes. Protecting tankies is explicitly part of the original purpose of Lemmy. It's almost like the anti-Parler/Gab/Voat, in that it was made by left-wing people as a haven for political views that would be too radical to be tolerated on the mainstream platforms:

Leftists know that our position on these platforms is tenuous at best; we’re currently tolerated, but that will not always be the case.

…Naturally, this meant that it ended up attracting people who unironically identify as "leftist" while cheerleading the genocidal imperialist war led by the right-leaning conservative United Russia Party of the RF, or the also-rather-genocidal ethnocratic state capitalism of the PRC.

A chance to change, sure. But it would be a mistake to pretend it's not also a chance to kill again. And it turns out people actually can't change, meaningfully, without remorse for their past deeds— And you can't ever actually know whether they feel that. Mercy feels very good until you realize ten years later how much pain you could have avoided otherwise.

Also, you're presenting a false dichotomy between "Set them loose on the world" versus "Isolation and torture for the rest of their life".

…That's a salt, though, right?

If you're counting non-NaCl salts as answers, then basically any "mineral" our body needs would probably be delivered at least partly in salt form. Just reading off some multivitamins here:

• Calcium Carbonate
• Chromium Chloride
• Cupric Sulfate
• Potassium Iodide
• Ferrous Fumarate
• Magnesium Oxide
• Manganese Sulfate
• Sodium Molybdate
• Sodium Selenate
• Zinc Oxide

(I haven't fully checked all of these are salts­— But I mean, a lot of of them are blatantly chemical analogues of stuff that definitely is salt (E.G. "Potassium Iodide" vs. "Sodium Chloride"), plus they're metals bonded to ionic groups so they're definitely not alloys or covalent molecules or ceramics.)

This is probably because in order for our body to absorb stuff, it basically has be water-soluble, which means salts work quite well.

When eating real food (plants, animals, and fungi), I assume a lot of this won't be in salt form, but rather it will mostly be bound up in proteins and DNA and such. For example, iron should be primarily in hemoglobin instead of ferrous fumarate. But some of it, for example the potassium, will definitely be technically in the form of dissolved salts/minerals in the fluids inside the food.

You can of course also rearrange the compounds around. For example, this can of Windsor-brand "salt free salt substitute" I have here further lists:

• Potassium Chloride
• Calcium Silicate
• Magnesium Carbonate

You'll note that these are some of the same components as in the list above, just a different combination. I'm pretty sure any ionic mineral that includes at least one ion that our body needs technically counts as "food", as long as the other half isn't poisonous— They should be basically the same when they dissolve in the water in our stomachs anyway.

Meats can also be preserved by adding nitrates and nitrites to it, though technically I guess that's more of a likely-carcinogenic additive than part of the "food".

Fun fact: Your body sorta knows when it's low on minerals, and will want to start eating dirt and rocks in order to make up for it! Over 100 different types of primate do it too. So in that case, you could probably argue that plain rocks and soil literally are food, in that they provide vital nutrients the body needs and that your brain is smart enough to know that. …These days it's apparently considered a mental disorder, but I swear it made much more sense back when the likeliest thing you were going to eat was some mud, rather than lead-contaminated radioactive refrigerants or whatever it is we've surrounded ourselves with.

Enjoy, also, this lovely video from a chemistry Youtuber and his friends taste-testing which alkaline-chloride salt tastes the best!

I am not a doctor. Don't go around eating rocks unless you're a bird or some other type of dinosaur.

Don’t think people can ever change, eh?

In this case, you're betting future people's lives on a known murderer changing.

Disclaimer: I'm neither for nor against that.

I was gonna have to dual boot windows at the very least. And I’ve had other experiences where Windows updates have broken Grub and forced me to do reinstalls as well, so…

You didn't have to reinstall. You just have to boot from a live USB and then run like three commands to fix it. But yes, that is indeed unironically more work to figure out and safely do.

The concept of a "master copy" has been around and in widespread use for around a century. It has nothing to do with either software nor social (in)justice. It's just the thing you photocopy so you don't end up making photocopies of photocopies. IMO It should make sense to anyone who, you know, has seen and used paper within their lifespan.

Some terminology, like "master and slave" for IO between devices, did always used to make me really uncomfortable whenever I heard it. But the branch name for software was probably fine.

Git is really inefficient for large binary files because of the decentralization. SVN for media and Git for text-based files makes sense. Otherwise— I only used SVN briefly, and then fortunately only for media— But yeah, Git is probably better and more useful overall.

Wait, what? When did this even happen (in general)?

Ah, screw this. I'll probably keep "master" in anything that currently has it, and the next time I start something I'll just go back to calling it "trunk" even though I was too young at that point to actually call it trunk, but it makes the most sense for the organization flow.

The problem IMHO is just that you need a different app for each cities cab companies.

You're on Lemmy. Federate.

The fact that things like Netflix/Uber/AirBnB are useful and good value when they first come out and then turn to shit later shows that they can work and be successful, they just get greedy and go sideways.

Um, no.

You have to turn a certain amount of potential energy into kinetic energy in order to provide a service that drives a customer from one location to another in an automobile. You have to squeeze a certain amount of information into the same or similar coaxial or optical or whatever-it-is-these-days cables in order to deliver a video and audio stream onto a customer's television (and pay enough for the same actors and writers to produce that media in the first place). You have to pay a certain amount in property tax, cleaning, and maintenance in order to provide a clean bed for a customer to sleep on.

Yeah I was gonna say, there’s nothing wrong with the technology itself per se, just the way it’s being used/exploited.

The "technology" itself was at most tangential to the service being provided, and the costs of providing the service. Also, the real technology involved hasn't actually changed. A car is still a car, a co-ax is still a co-ax, and a building is still a building.

An app was never going to change physics. We were probably idiots to think it would.

"Rent seeking" has a nice ring to it in this case, I think. The previous situation was fine, except for not being profitable enough for the right people.

The original crop was probably here mostly because of "FOSS" ideology.

And the users from Reddit are here because a shitty company screwed them over using proprietary code that made it impossible for anybody to hold them accountable— I.E. Because as annoying and toxic and oblivious as "FOSS" advocates can be a lot of the time, sometimes it turns out that they actually had a point.

So, who am I missing?

Fair. He talked about buying Twitter for the power and attention he meant to get from talking about it, both from the cryptobro fans and also any shady financial shenanigans. But he didn't actually mean to go through with paying for it.

Show, don't tell. And get your shots before you go.

Disk space is an issue… I’ve seen the OS take as much as 100 GB. But in a world of 2TB SSDs for $100, is that a big deal?

Yes? Storage used for the OS is space not used for projects, entertainment, docs, redundancy, snapshots, avoiding fragmentation (EXT4), etc. Money spent on SSDs is money not spent on going out, food, meeting people, basic needs, other hardware, etc.

I don’t see why NixOS would be any worse for the lifetime of a disk than other distros.

Untested, but I'd assume high space use combined with high update frequency, plus occasional builds-from-source and multiple simultaneous package versions, means more disk writes.

Biased, maybe, because manual GC means you see disk use tick up more than in other package managers, and also because I personally repeatedly rebuilt a custom gigabyte-sized Derivation dozens/hundreds of times. But I think it's a reasonable point of caution.

I’ve only hit binary cache missed for packages I created, or where I changed build options.

Broken packages are, if anything, less of a problem [than] with Debian. Debian has lots of packages that are…not broken, but incomplete, requiring lots of manual config or whatever.

Maybe this is a NixPkgs vs NixOS thing. Also, using Nix mostly to supplement packages I hadn't already installed through my distro probably meant I hit more fringe areas. But I've even encountered cache misses and failed builds for some pretty big Python libraries on certain commits.

Debian-based out-of-the-box functionality for stuff is indeed also Not Great, IIRC— Stable, but yeah, sometimes maybe a bit "incomplete". Actually, Arch-based has worked well IME.

And on the flip side: you can change package build options! Neat!

But oh man…you should’ve seen how trivial it was to switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire (including Jack support etc), leaving no trace that Pulse was ever installed… Or switching from X to Wayland, on a system that I’ve been doing rolling updates on since 2017, all with a clear conscience… It’s beautiful.

Yeah. I personally don't care about that stuff unless it directly impacts something I'm working on.

And that's why I say Nix is a great tool for package management, but not something I'd personally want to use as an OS base. When you're already elbow-deep in the plumbing anyway, Nix makes it way easier to swap components out. But when you just want to install and use an application, editing Nix configs feels like more work, and it's so much easier to just pacman/yum/apt-get install firefox or whatever and get on with your day.

Plus, some specific red flags surrounding stability and interoperability:

1. ALSA is apparently hardcoded to just straight-up not work with a Nix root. Not sure how NixOS handles it, but in my specific use case, I had to symlinkJoin{paths=[alsa-lib alsa-plugins]} so they could find each other. Pretty sure it took a lot of strace -f -e trace=file and nix-locate for me to figure this one out, just to get sound working.
2. QtWebEngine/Chromium has to be run through some kind of sed -e "whatever.so" to "Patch library paths in Chromium sources" in order to even run, because it's also hardcoded to just not work with a Nix root. IIRC, this one I figured out by just straight-up grepping on the compiled binaries after seeing the errors in strace or whereever. Seems a bit ridiculous, using a RegEx to patch a web browser when installing it so it can even run.
3. Binaries aren't safe either, because they probably need patchelf to be able to run on Nix.
4. Flakes are apparently hosted as user repositories on a Microsoft-owned website, and can just randomly disappear sometimes.
5. Qt generally takes a ton of extra steps to be able to run on Nix. And have you actually ever opened the wrapper the Nix hooks generate to see what it's actually doing? For one of my applications just now, you get a 43kb Bash script with apparently 581 assignments to just a handful of QT and XDG-related environment variables.
6. OpenGL doesn't look safe either. Nix handles the drivers its own way, so to get OpenGL for Nix packages to work on other systems, you have to jump through some hoops. I assume the same amount of work in the opposite direction would be needed to use EG proprietary or statically compiled graphics applications on NixOS too.
7. Running precompiled binaries on Nix looks… Involved, as well. Sure, there's tools to automate it. But that only hides the complexity, and adding an opaque dependency sorta defeats the entire purpose of configurability and composability IMO.

I'm sure most of these problems are "solved", in the sense that NixOS implements workarounds that are the default when you install the affected derivations, and there are wrappers written for most other cases. But all of that adds maintenance, fragility, and complexity. It remarkably works well enough for userspace, but stuff like this still feels a bit house-of-cards-y for the basic OS and desktop. It's not Nix's fault, but so much of the work that goes into Nix seems to be just to force software that was never designed for it to run on it. Ultimately, the Linux FHS has momentum and adoption. Nix's technical design might be compelling, but so are interoperability, stability, and simplicity.

The NixOS enthusiasts are doing a lot of technically interesting work, but I personally find the results of that work most useful outside the NixOS ecosystem. And I do think Nix as a package manager is really great. Ever since I've installed it, I've basically incorporated it as a major component or tool in every sizable software project I've since started. But I just personally wouldn't want to base an entire OS on it.

I'm saying that's a way I might personally consider going if I were to set up a new computer. Rock solid base that you can still get normal packages and binaries to run on without much hassle if needed, plus Nix with more up-to-date packages that you can customize however you find most useful.

Personally I have a mix of rolling/regular repos, AUR, Nix, Flatpak, and static binaries. They all have their uses, TBH.