balsoft @ balsoft @lemmy.ml

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4

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305

Joined

1 yr. ago

Even though I'm an introvert, I love running into people I know while shopping. It's usually a short interaction (we're both there to get food and not socialize) and it's nice to see a familiar face.

I think it's a bit confusing, but in my view almost all socialists (including democratic socialists) are communists since the end goal they are trying to achieve is communism. Socialism (which can be described as welfare state, majority-publicly owned capital, and planned or market-socialist economy) is almost always seen as a stepping stone towards communism (stateless, classless, moneyless society), even though it is would also be an improvement on its own.

(to confuse matters even further, Lenin's party was initially called Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, even though today's understanding of social-democracy would only apply to the Menshevik wing).

Proprietary = shit. Don't get me wrong, all software is shit, but at least you can make open-source software suck less for your usecase.

Hehe, in the process of updating :)

CC0 (public domain). You're free to use it as you like.

Here's the uncropped image for your convenience too: https://nextcloud.balsoft.ru/s/Zsjii2PfP5ZWFdP?dir=%2F&openfile=true

Kinda mobile-nixos, shame it's semi-abandoned and difficult to get working :(

I've stolen a bunch of Git aliases from somewhere (I don't remember where), here are the ones I ended up using the most:

    
g=git
ga='git add'
gau='git add --update'
gcfu='git commit --fixup'
gc='git commit --verbose'
'gc!'='git commit --verbose --amend'
gcmsg='git commit --message'
gca='git com
gd='git diff'
gf='git fetch'
gl='git pull'
gst='git status'
gstall='git stash --all'
gstaa='git stash apply'
gp='git push'
'gpf!'='git push --force-with-lease'
grb='git rebase'
grba='git rebase --abort'
grbc='git rebase --continue'

  

I also often use

    
ls='eza'
md='mkdir -p'
mcd() { mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1" }

  

And finally some Nix things:

    
b='nix build'
bf='nix build -f'
bb=nix build -f .'
s='nix shell'
sf='nix shell -f'
snp='nix shell np#'
d='nix develop'
df='nix develop -f'

  

Hm, this is interesting - I am indeed "outdoorsy" and could only see "white and gold in shadow". I think this might also be because of the highlight on the right suggesting that it's daylight all around and the dress is in deep shadow, and the blue color is also highly reminiscent of "white cloth in deep shadow". This XKCD helped me clear up the confusion and now if I squint I can see both color schemes:

https://xkcd.com/1492/

True enlightenment is realizing that variables don't exist, it's all just a sequence of bits in RAM that we assign meaning to as desired.

Ascension is realizing that bits don't exist, it's all just trapped electrons in transistors which we imagine to be bits.

Transcendence is realizing that transistors or code doesn't exist, and it's just some quarks and electrons attracted and repulsed by weird forces, vibrating and convulsing in a soup with entropy constantly rising until the heat death of the universe, of which we make futile attempts to make sense or purpose.

I have a question how did you deal with device trees, was that public available

Yes: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/tree/pureos/latest/arch/arm64/boot/dts/freescale

Purism are cool people and they have indeed built a smartphone that's as open as possible. The problem is that it's slow :( Not really their fault.

all you did was hammer out configs

Yeah, that's my point, all the software is there already, with a little bit of persuasion and glue it runs fairly well together. I'm not claiming I wrote actual drivers or whatever. What I did was figured out how to adapt the existing software to work on NixOS, so you can just take your desktop NixOS config, add a couple lines to it, and run it on the phone.

Now you have a phone where half the hardware doesn’t work

All hardware on Librem 5 worked with NixOS as I expected. The reason I'm not dailying it anymore is because the hardware kinda sucks, it's outdated and slow. If I could get the same software stack running on more modern hardware I'd gladly use it. Perhaps the battery life could be improved if the power management was better, but that's about my only complaint software-wise.

Without a solid BASE, and a DRIVER LAYER, you won’t have a successful project to push a UI of anything

I'm not sure what you mean by "solid BASE". Do you want to rewrite all of the existing software that implements the "desktop Linux" userspace? Who would be doing this and why, when existing stuff mostly works?

"DRIVER LAYER" in the FOSS world is just Linux. Drivers can live in the Linux tree or as small patches on top of it, with common open interfaces allowing compatibility between software and hardware. Just like they have been doing on the desktop for the past 30 years. The problem is plain: there are no open-source drivers or documentation for most phone hardware. Vendors don't have this issue because they have access to private documentation and the sources of proprietary drivers. Writing FOSS drivers requires reverse-engineering the proprietary drivers, which is very resource-intensive. The proprietary drivers that are there lock you into a particular Linux version (usually a very particular Linux version, and there's no way to solve this with any driver layer, at least without sacrificing performance and resource usage) and sometimes have proprietary interfaces with the userspace as well, which aren't easy to write a compat layer for (if that's what you're proposing). And in any case, if you are fine with proprietary stuff running in EL1, why not just run Android?

All this is completely orthogonal to making a DE on top of open standards, which is the point of open standards. For hardware that works with (mostly) mainline Linux, desktop userspace with plasma-mobile/phosh on top work well enough already. For hardware that doesn't, adding support is a lot of work, not because of any issues with the DE or userspace, but because hardware manufacturers don't publish the driver sources.

I've built and run Mobile NixOS on my OnePlus 6 (without modem, fingerprint or GPU accel support but meh) before it became officially supported (this was relatively easy, compared to most other vendors, but did require a bunch of hacking to get the Linux fork OnePlus provides to work with the Nix kernel compilation machinery and the NixOS userspace).

I have also implemented initial support for running NixOS proper on Librem 5, packaged/fixed some stuff 1 2 3 (and more which didn't make it to nixpkgs) to make it semi-daily-usable with Plasma Mobile, and daily-used it for a couple of weeks and then on and off for a couple of months.

I know how mobile Linux works, from the bootloader to the kernel to the userspace to the DE to apps that run on it. I also have a cursory understanding of how Android works, enough to know that it's not feasible to build "a base that replaces AOSP", let alone make it work with vendor-provided driver blobs and proprietary Android apps (which is what you're proposing?). What manufacturers actually do is take AOSP, patch it to fit their needs/work with their shitty drivers, and ship it on the device as a bunch of blobs because it's Apache-licensed.

Elon's companies are the epitome of the hype-cycle-based stock market manipulation. Take something somewhat useful (EVs, self-driving cars, reusable rockets, ...), spend a bunch of VC cash on building an MVP and advertising, make that advertising overpromise every feature by 300% and just send it. People will buy the stock because of the hype, then buy the product (if applicable) because they own the stock, then be forced to "still like the truck tho"/"COLONIZE MARS" for years, regardless of the actual quality (or lack thereof) of the product, because otherwise their stocks might go down.

solid base

GNU+Linux

driver layer

Linux

and then UI layer.

Plasma mobile

The split is already there, the problem is that most Android phone manufacturers never publish the drivers (let alone make them open-source) and the only way to get anything but stock image running is to just rip parts out of the stock image, which significantly limits what you can put below it (i.e. Linux version) and on top of it (i.e Android Java gubbins). And you can't "just replace AOSP", as it's a huge complicated thing (kind of by design) which allows vendors to tightly couple the drivers to the system image. The idea of all these "mobile Linux-es" is to get rid of AOSP entirely, replacing it with "desktop Linux userspace" (systemd, musl, D-BUS, NetworkManager, pipewire, upower, mpris, libnotify, Qt/GTK, Plasma/Gnome, etc etc etc). A DE is an integral part of this; you can't build and run Nova launcher just with Wayland and Pipewire but without Dalvik and Android SDK/NDK, and remaking all of that from scratch would be an insanely hard undertaking.

To put it another way,

Get a good base that is removed from Google, THEN do this project.

This project is required if you want to make a "good base", otherwise that "good base" would just be an empty TTY that you can't interact with because there's no on-screen keyboard; besides, that "base" is already there and has been for 20 years, what's missing is the drivers.

Next time a consumer get stuck with a practically irreplaceable battery because it’s too expensive from a company, they will look at other companies selling equivalent products, AND how much they are charging for batteries.

No. Just look at the current phone market. The average consumer doesn't care enough about repairs down the road, or at least it doesn't affect their purchasing decisions, they are mostly driven by convenience and familiarity. If what you're saying was true, everyone would be buying fairphones.

I also imagine a business of spare parts because just having to give the right data, e.g. specifications like cell, module, pack, C-rate, E-rate, SOC, DOD, voltage, capacity, energy, cycle life, but also connectors and just size, will probably open up dedicated spare part vendors.

Those specs are already widely available for many phones and in fact you can buy aftermarket 3rd-party batteries for most of them. The problem is that battery replacements are painful, require specialized equipment (at least a hotplate, suction cup, spudger for most phones) and skills (not breaking the screen/glass back, unglueing the battery without exploding it, then carefully glueing everything back together etc). This is what the law should be addressing first; if it were easy to replace batteries (like a 1-minute job instead of 30-minute job), you would see a lot more DYI replacements and probably way longer lasting phones on average.

Cool!

However,

1. Plenty of bots here too
2. The reason "low-effort" posts get more views/attention than "high-effort" ones is that humans have a limited attention span and everything is trying to grab it (ads, your phone, etc) to extract money out of it. Committing an hour of your life to watch a long high-quality video and learning something from it requires a lot more concentration and willpower than watching 60 1-minute short videos and laughing at each one - and ad interruptions are not as noticeable. It's not necessarily a bot problem, more of an attention span/capitalism problem. This will also be the case in the Fediverse, to some extent, although likely less because there's no monetization incentive.

While 3D geometry is more difficult for me than 2D, I could almost immediately tell that the answer is no, there are infinitely many points H that satisfy this. The reason it's unintuitive is that our intuition about what "perpendicular" means comes from 2D and poorly translates to 3D.

The most intuitive explanation I can muster is this: imagine all possible planes that pass through both A and P. It should be obvious that there are infinitely many of them (I visualize it as a plane "rotating" around the AP axis). Each of these planes intersects the given plane since it passes through A. Think of the intersection line. It never passes through P (unless P is on the plane), so it is always possible to draw a perpendicular line from P to that intersection line. With one exception (when the perpendicular line falls on the A point), the point where the perpendicular falls satisfies the conditions for H. (I think all such points actually form a circle with AP' as the diameter, where P' is the parallel projection of P to the given plane, but I'm not 100% sure)

Eh, honestly it's, like, functional (you can recognize it and draw a facsimile of it in 3 minutes with two pens). I wouldn't call "it pretty good".

GenAI image generation is OK at text for half a year now, hence thousands of sloppy/unimaginative comics in your feeds. Not sure this in particular is AI because the text is well-aligned and matches with the background, and in general everything is kind of coherent, but it possibly could be.

It means they can find out where it was purchased and by whom.

How? Do the e-waste centers keep track of the shit you take from there? Not where I live, they can sometimes give you stuff for free. Or you can just pick it up on ebay/craigslist/garage sale, that works too. Good luck tracking that.

All of them. Again, this is required by Android ToS.

I strongly doubt that because on my two last phones (OnePlus 5 & POCO M5) I didn't have to log in to a Google account with the default ROM, there was an obvious "Skip" button in the lower left corner when prompted to log in. Can you point me towards that ToS or a screenshot of an unskippable "Sign in to Google" screen on a consumer smartphone?