Me on the web: https://octet-stream.net/
This is a good point. I assumed here that FS advocates will be basically opposed to a technology that serves to incorporate their code into software that does not provide the fundamental freedoms to end users, more than those who license their work permissively. But yes you could imagine an FS advocate who is quite happy to use the tech themselves and churn out code with GPL attached.
Some thoughts/predictions about how open source developers will be forced to choose their path with GenAI.
Full disclaimer: my own post, sharing for discussion and to find out if anyone has any brilliant ideas what else could be done. It looks like self-posts are okay here but let me know if I'm wrong about that.
Some rambles predicting what might be in store for open source developers who accept pull requests
Fossil has a lot of features and config knobs.
The peacefulness of MDR
I realise this is supposed to be a dystopia but I can't help but notice that the workers are not being bothered by Outlook or Teams/Slack pings. They get to focus for hours at a time on their mysterious and important work, and what's more, they are unambiguously rewarded for executing that specific task well.
Is anyone else just the tiniest bit jealous? Maybe Jame Eagan read a lot of Cal Newport or something.
Why is this LLM trying to teach me about acyclic graphs in the middle of an article about Linux platform support?
AFAICT this is super mundane. Devs added some checks that when run will drop .hdrtest files all over the source tree when you do a normal build. This is really unclean and has practical ramifications even if you gitignore them as Linus points out. Pretty much any lead developer would be upset if someone tried to merge something like this in a software project, and it has essentially nothing to do with the particular drivers or code functionality.
Yep that's me. It's still there, I just wanted more hosting flexibility so I froze that site last year and started using a new domain for new posts
As a rule I don't directly quote bboard messages elsewhere, even if they're mundane or from the admin. Just a bit of respect to folks who aren't posting on the web and might not want to be.
There was a reply that it should be okay now but more disks will be needed soon
There Is No Content on Gemini (2022)
One of the most frequent criticisms about the Gemini network is that there’s no content on it. When I hear that, my answer is always the same :
"That’s the very point".
Reinventing How We Use Computers par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
Nearly two years ago, I put into words the dream I had for a durable computer. A computer that would be built for a lifetime. A computer that would not do everything but could do 80% of what I expect from it. I called this idea the Forever Computer.
I expected to launch a conversation about what we really expect from computers. What do we really want from them? What are some limitations that could free us?
FYI I posted in REQUESTS, so I'm sure it will get looked at sooner or later.
The computer built to last 50 years par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
How to create the long-lasting computer that will save your attention, your wallet, your creativity, your soul and the planet. Killing monopolies will only be a byproduct.
Mythbusters: Wing Commander I Edition
The center of the Wing Commander community features news, information, tech support and conversation about the computer game series.
You've probably heard of the famous 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' story. It claims that a programmer on the original Wing Commander was stuck getting an error message when the game unloaded its memory during a quit. Pressed for time, instead of fixing the issue he simply hex edited the memory manager's error reporting to print 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' instead. A funny and relatable story!
...
Wing Commander I fans, meanwhile, have been understandably cautious about the anecdote and particularly the included screenshot. For one thing, Wing Commander I's default install direction isn't c:/wc1 and the game doesn't actually print "Thank You for Playing Wing Commander!" when you quit. Is the story even real?
Collapse Ready Operating Systems - OpenBSD
From their intro post:
The fictional situation is the following: there has been some sort of social collapse and the Internet infrastructure is gone: there’s no more Internet for us. Now imagine that in this situation we still find value in our computers; how would we operate them now that we don’t have Internet?
I would like to analyze which Operating Systems would be suitable to for this imaginary scenario. In particular I would like to evaluate the Operating System at the following points:
- Can I store a software repository with the programs that I or someone in my area may need?
- Can I store the source code corresponding to the software repository so that I or someone else can fix potential bugs or extends the programs that we may need to use?
- Can I create new installation images from the OS itself, so that I can install it in other computers?
- Can I store the OS source code so that I or someone else can fix
HiDPI XFCE - use DPI, not scaling and life is good. Better than good.
As a grumpy old man who wishes his computer would stop changing I've been trying to get on board with XFCE for a while and the big blocker has been making things work well on my 4K screen. (For the record this post is based on Debian testing = trixie, X11, and nvidia proprietary drivers god have mercy on my soul.)
For a while XFCE only supported the type of scaling that makes things smaller. Understandably IMO this confused a few people and happily this has been upgraded and now it also makes things bigger. However in my experience this also makes things blurrier.
In my latest round of testing it appears that the situation can be fixed with a single setting: font DPI.
Settings Manager > Appearance > Fonts (tab) > Custom DPI setting > I chose 150, and logged out and in to have everything take effect.
From this single change everything is looking good in both GTK and Qt apps. I did also increase the size of my panel through the panel settings, and title bars are kind of tiny, but mos
Helena in the car park in S01E01
I was thinking back to the first episode when Mark nearly ran over Helena in the car park, providing a confirmation "oh hey he really doesn't recognise her".
Knowing what we do now though,
- Did Mark not realise that he nearly ran over one of the Lumon leadership? He acts as if she was just some random employee.
- Why is Helena walking to an old car in the outer reaches of the car park when she is so senior and tends to get driven around? (Maybe the flowers she's carrying are a clue?)
I have to assume that we're in this situation because because the app does not exist in our distro's repo (or homebrew or whatever else). So how do you go about this verification? You need a trusted public key, right? You wouldn't happen to be downloading that from the same website that you're worried might be sending you compromised scripts or binaries? You wouldn't happen to be downloading the key from a public keyserver and assuming it belongs to the person whose name is on it?
This is such a ridiculously high bar to avert a "security nightmare". Regular users will be better off ignoring such esoteric suggestions and just looking for lots of stars on GitHub.
So tell me: if I download and run a bash script over https, or a .deb file over https and then install it, why is the former a "security nightmare" and the latter not?
The security concerns are often overblown. The bigger problem for me is I don't know what kind of mess it's going to make or whether I can undo it. If it's a .deb or even a tarball to extract in /usr/local then I know how to uninstall.
I will still use them sometimes but for things I know and understand - e.g. rustup will put things in ~/.rustup and update the PATH in my shell profile and because I know that's what it does I'm happy to use the automation on a new system.
I realise you're trolling but actually yes. This is why I use Debian stable where possible - if egregious malware shows up it will probably be discovered by all the folks using rolling distros first.
🙅 Write a script or shell alias for important or frequent tasks
👍 Pray it's in my ctrl-r history the next time I need it
I feel this in my soul. With a side of "modern memory-safe languages are great" vs "the consistency and efficiency of shared libraries is what makes distributions great even if they're written in C".
I will mention that I have JS disabled by default and your website shows up as a completely blank white page. You're certainly not obliged to cater to weirdos like me, but you may be interested to know that there are some people who browse the web this way for speed, privacy or security reasons. Most websites I visit this way are fine because they are server-side rendered.
If you are feeling ambitious and want to go "serverless", try out DecSync and a compatible android app for contact sync. This represents all your contacts as files on disk in a way that avoids conflicts, and you can use SyncThing to keep your devices in sync 100% peer to peer. Unfortunately on your desktop you'll probably have to use something like radicale on localhost and the plugin to convert it into CardDAV for your regular email client to understand.
Nostalgic Soundscapes S01E02 | Forgotten | Windows 95 Retro Ambient
Continued not to show me anything AI-related
Microsoft FrontPage (also known as Microsoft Office FrontPage) is a discontinued WYSIWYG HTML editor and website administration tool from Microsoft for the Windows line of operating systems. It was branded as part of the Microsoft Office suite from 1997 to 2003. Microsoft FrontPage has since been re...
(This is meant to be the first entry of a series which will cover individual points more in depth. We’ll see how that goes.) We’re the tech industry. We have ideas. We have ideas all the time. And we’re used to turn our ideas into applications. So, how does it go… here’s the back-end component… here...
There is no mystery over who wrote the Blue Screen of Death, despite what some may want you to believe
No real contradictions in anybody's story.
regreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems (CVE-2024-6387)
The following summary from Debian's security list:
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) discovered that OpenSSH, an implementation of the SSH protocol suite, is prone to a signal handler race condition. If a client does not authenticate within LoginGraceTime seconds (120 by default), then sshd's SIGALRM handler is called asynchronously and calls various functions that are not async-signal-safe. A remote unauthenticated attacker can take advantage of this flaw to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. This flaw affects sshd in its default configuration.