𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @ sxan @midwest.social

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I know logind can't easily be, because I ran Artix for a while and they were using a decoupled version of it, and there was a big discussion about swapping it for something else because it was so hard to maintain.

I also have the prompt set to the host name. I've never understood why people included their usernames; I don't log in to more than one account on each machine.

It is not modular. This is a lie Poettering keeps pushing to defend building a huge edifice of interdependent systems.

Look at the effort required to factor out logind. It can't just be used in it's own; it has a hard dependency on systemd and needs code changes to decouple.

I will repeat that journald is really bad at what it does, and further assert that you can not run systemd without journald, or vice versa. That you can not run systemd without getting timed job control. Even if you chose not to use it, it's in there. And you can not get time job control without the init part. In most unix systems, init and cron are utterly decoupled and can be individually swapped with other systems.

Systemd is not modular if you can't swap parts out for other software. Systemd's modularity is a bald-faced lie.

The one exceptions are homed and resolvd, which are relatively new and were addedlong after systemd came under fire for being monolithic. And, ironically, they're the components most distributions don't use by default.

How are the battery lives of your devices? I have motion sensors throughout my house connected via zwave, and I replace their button batteries about every 18 months. Does Matter run over a low energy technology?

It absolutely is. The typesetting is beautiful, and it's far easier to work with than (LA)TeX. It also doesn't take up 2GB of disk space.

Based on some real-world knowledge, no.

For example, there's this class that military helicopter pilots take as part of training for surviving water landings. They have the body of a helicopter which can be dropped into a big swimming pool. The pilots strap in, they're dropped into the pool, and they have to unbuckled and exit the helicopter.

So many people fail this, repeatedly. Scuba divers are in the pool just to extract the people who can't make it out. The issue is that when you panic, you tend to stop thinking rationally; it's why swimmer lifesaving is so dangerous - a panicking swimmer will do anything to save themselves, including grabbing the lifesaver and trying to climb on top of them, which can result in both people drowning. In the pilot case, people panic and can't unbuckle themselves, straining against the restraints to get out, until they have to be rescued. Even if they start well, trying to unbuckle, if they fumble at the restraints, they can panic and then they stop trying to unbuckle. Even though the helicopter is only a cockpit and a bay with big van-style doors, people panic and get lost trying to get out; they just can't find the bay doors, and have to be rescued. For these night tests, you can't see which was is up, and people panic and forget to take time to orient, and swim toward the bottom of the pool, and have to be rescued.

All of the theory in the world can't protect you from panic; the only thing that helps is experience. You do it enough that you get used to it and have confidence that keeps the panic at bay.

Studying isn't enough, because the first thing that goes when you panic is your ability to think rationally, and the only way to prevent panic is confidence, and that's developed through experience. It's why teaching always includes homework: you have to exercise the knowledge for it to become second nature.

According to election theory, a dictatorship is the only perfectly fair voting system: the only voter wins the vote, every time.

I've been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.

The thing I don't like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the "do one thing, do it well" Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.

My issues with systemd is that it isn't an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it's slow and doesn't seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).

Recently I've been using dinit on a system, and I'm pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I'm running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.

Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?

dinit also has the ability to run user services, FWIW.

As long as it isn't github.

They should have used MacDonalds. That, I could believe.

Publish that puppy. It can't hurt.

Don't do it in github, though. Sourcehut is better; or if you crave that cluttered, JS-heavy feel, Gitlab.

Did you type that while thing out‽ Go you!

Agent Smith wasn't wrong. Most villains have a weak motivation; Smith's was strong, because it is true.

Do you think I'm promoting voluntary extinction? I don't think anyone has to do that - not only would it not make a dent in the race to doomsday, but it's unnecessary since we've probably already passed the point at which we're capable of halting the runaway ecological collapse we've engineered - even if there was any indication of willingness on the part of the biggest polluters to draw down, which there isn't.

What I find funny is those people who are still making more people, as if they're not dooming them to live through a true apocalypse: global societal and ecological collapse, technological regression, famine, and the resurgence of self-perpetuating oligarchies. A dark ages, but one we'll never come out of.

Yup! Of the things we could be, we're most like a virus, but parasite might work. Most parasites don't kill their hosts, and if they do it's a secondary action - it usually isn't the parasite itself that kills the host, but some virus or bacteria the parasite transmits. There are some really nasty parasitic worms that will kill you, or make you wish you were dead.

We're definitely not symbiotic, like most macro and many micro organisms are.

If we consider the the ecosystem as the host, we're killing it; and individually, we're micro-sized to the Earth, so I think virus is the most accurate model.

Maybe! How is it better than keeping a README?

If it's just a command, I put it in a readme. If it's a series of commands, I put it in a shell script. What would your tool bring to the party, and if I'm going to turn to a third party solution, why shouldn't I use Salt or Puppet instead?

The same applies to the human race.

There's a comic in which he gets annihilated and regenerates from a single surviving cell. Or from the ashes, or something. In any car, I remember it implying that his power exists beyond his physical body, because when he regenerates he isn't a mental infant - he still had his memories, even though his brain was destroyed.

However.

In the super-hero genre there's a tenancy to one-upmanship. Later artists amplify the powers of the character more and more until they are like unto gods. Superman may be the best example of this; in one series he goes and hangs out at the center of the sun for a few centuries and comes out omnipotent. If you go back to his roots in the mid-century, he was a super man, but not a god. Wolverine kept getting more and more powerful as the decades went on, until that arc where he regenerates from a single cell. I don't think the original creator imagined him being that indestructible.

This is a really good point.

I've always believed - against all legal definitions - that the theft in piracy was (e.g.) copying music and then selling it. Copying for self-use is not theft.

I freely admit the distinction is morally shakey, and you could argue that in both cases the actual theft is depriving the owner of potential monetary gain, but reselling something pirated - in my mind - crosses an ethical line.

AI companies are unethical not because they pirate media, but because they then resell derivatives. If they trained their LLMs and then gave the models away for free, that would be another matter.

Another example: for decades, I resold my programming skills to companies. However, I paid good money for those skills, via my CIS degree, with the explicit understanding of the instructors and the outrageously priced books, that I would be reselling it. LLM scrapers aren't paying anything for the training data. They avoid what little opportunity they have for moral justification.