𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Calibre is one of the great pieces of FOSS software, and demonstrates everything good about FOSS: it has regular updates; it’s been around for simply ages; it works really, really well; it gets updates and new features and yet has never in my memory had a breaking, non-backwards-compatible release… it’s stable; and it resists - in its way - the attempt by publishers to steal our rights and ownerships of our media.

I contribute donate to Calibre. I hope that Goyal has a successor lined up to take the helm who can continue such an outstanding contribution when he finally retires from the project.

Edit: clarification

A little later, maybe, but much the same… on the upside:

• we were optimistic.
• we were going to conquer space, and it was going to be real live humans, not semi-autonomous robots
• society (in the US and W. Europe) was (very) slowly getting more progressive.
• Hitler had been killed, and fascism defeated forever. Never again would we have another dictator; never again would we watch a country commit genocide against a people.
• life was slower. TV was the bad influence rotting kids brains. We didn’t have an entire industry focused on commoditizing us.
• computers were fucking incredible. The future we imagined coming from computers was very, very different than what we ended up with. For one thing, we didn’t imagine a single-minded focus of all software and computing power on commercializing every aspect of our life.
• no Facebook, no Twitter, no TikTok
• Income disparity was far less extreme, and class mobility was a realistic dream. You could imagine buying a nice house and raising a family on a single income. If you worked hard and had a little luck you could pass on some reasonable wealth to your kids.
• shit really was - in the aggregate - getting better all around. Technology was advancing and bringing amazing products; science was being discovered that you could basically wrap your head around. Lives (in the Western world) were improving (relatively, compared to previous decades) for most people, and all this happened at a pace that didn’t up-end your world every day, 365 days a year.
• you could get all the news you needed for a fairly rounded world view in a single newspaper, much of which you could read over breakfast. There was no information overload.

On the downsides,

• dad beat us with a belt as punishment
• we were having wars that were disrupting society. The draft was a real worry.
• we were constantly afraid that nuclear war could happen at any time
• commies were hiding under our beds
• minorities of all kinds were fighting for their rights, and fighting to get them enforced. It sucked to be gay, or black, or a woman (but it was getting better, slowly)
• most people didn’t have access to a computer, much less a PC until well into the 80’s, so you had to infiltrate University computer labs.

It was a slower world, with fewer consumer goods, fewer conveniences, and worse medical care. Everybody smoked, all the time. But slower was good, and - best of all - we didn’t realize yet that we were killing the planet; the world wasn’t ending.

When it was first released, I was interested in the decentralized nature of it as a currency. I liked - well, I still like - the idea of a currency that isn’t controlled by a government. At the time (2009-ish?), I also thought it was anonymous, which also appealed to me; cash is mostly anonymous, but it can’t be used online, and even then the fact that society was increasingly moving toward cashless - and very traceable, and usary-heavy - credit cards was clear. Stripping privacy is critical to control.

Bitcoin isn’t anonymous, but other cryptocurrencies are, and bitcoin laid the groundwork. To your question, I, and many other people, paid some money to get some bitcoin - I think I spent $120? Mainly so I had enough to explore the space and play with it, because even then mining seemed painfully slow. Once money was spent on it, by whomever and for whatever reason, it acquired value: the value that, if you had some, you could sell it to someone else, or trade it for goods. In that way, it has the same value as an IOU on which I’ve scribbled “Good for $10 from Ruairidh Featherstonehaugh” and signed my name. Flawed metaphor, but you get there idea - the paper itself has no intrinsic value.

Despite that mining is so horrible for the environment, the concept that motivated Bitcoin still IMHO has value. An entirely digital, cashless system, not controlled by any one organization but rather by the community of participants. If Bitcoin didn’t have the environmental cost - if it has been proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work, or if the computational work was actually something useful to society like gridcoin.us, it wouldn’t be so controversial. Sure, people are still going to be bitter about not buying into it early, but as long as people are willing to trade goods and services for it, it’ll have real value based on market rates.

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.

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.

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.

Did you type that while thing out‽ Go you!

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.

LLMs are good for some things:

dicewithellen Jun 7, 2017 🟠 Follow

It’s time to roll the dice… with Ellen!

fuckersupreme

Man, fucking Ellen. Every so often she rings me up or shoots me a text asking if I wanna play dice with her and every so often I start to try to say no, but she fucking picks up on that so fast and her fun quirky demeanor drops. No longer laughing and being bubbly, she starts to remind me of the file she has in her possession that would simply ruin me if it fell into the wrong hands. And so with tears in my eyes I reluctantly agree to play dice with Ellen. It’s always in a back alley behind some strip mall. Gross and rank. Ellen hunched over a damp piece of cardboard she insists on is her roll the dice on. I always ask Ellen, I say Ellen you’re so rich and famous, can’t we please play dice in like a highrise penthouse or something? Thinking of the nice all you can eat buffet that would surely be there. All highrise penthouses have all you eat buffets. I’m pretty sure it’s like some sort of requirement. If I’m going play fucking dice with Ellen, let me at least get my fill on some slightly warmer than room temp fries. But she always just grunts a no, and then rolls her dice, not looking at me at all. And holy shit, I’m not a man who believes in luck but… Ellen is not just a believer because she has to be the unluckiest person in the world. Every roll she does, pure shit. I don’t even really know how to play dice but fuck, I play like some kinda world champ when I play with her. And fuck, her goddamn temper. It doesn’t take much to set her off. Screaming and shouting and huffing and puffing. This fucking back alley we play in has a number of cracks in the walls from her just pounding her fists into them after each of my rolls. Fucking cracks. Brick walls. Fucking cracks. At the end of the game when I inevitably beat her, she pulls out a knife and just slices or stabs me before running off into the shadows to go fucking goofy white lady dance as she interviews Channing Tatum or something, fuck!

And holy shit, speak of the devil, would you look at this…

[Text conversation]

Ellen(devil): Hey Punk you there? Answer me punk, it’s dice time.

User: Please… Ellen…

Ellen(devil): Cool pic of me showing Famous Actor Chriss Pratt your secret. See him laughing like that? He couldn’t stop. Wonder how other people would react… hmm…

So I guess I’m playing dice tonight, and then paying the hospital a visit to attend to my future stab wounds. But I guess it beats the alternative of having people find out I sit on the toilet backwards, god how embarrassing.

Alligator. Venison. Duck. Butterfish. Trout. Mussels.

Except that one is automatically versioned and would have saved you this pain, and the other relies on you actively remembering to reflexively commit, and then do extra work to clean up your history before sharing, and once you push, it’s harder to change history and make a clean version to share.

These days, there’s little excuse to not use COW with automated snapshots in addition to your normal, manual, VCS activities.

Become homeless, I suppose.

Can’t get into my bank? Work won’t let me in because they don’t recognize me? Nobody’s going to hire me without ID or a background check. So I guess I’m a bum now.

Folks here hoping to reclaim their identity: how, exactly? No birth certificate, no drivers license, no passport… how, exactly, are you going to prove you’re you?

The most popular Linux distros are binary based. Gentoo upgrades build all new software from source. If you don’t want long install times, don’t usr one of these compile-everything-from-source distros.

There’s no option to install Windows from source, and it doesn’t really come with anything more than the OS, anyway, so it’s apples yto oranges. Windows might not even be compilable on consumer hardware.

Yeah, I wasn’t saying it was bad; I meant only that Linux didn’t have to worry about device drivers for it, because the fob handles reading the fingerprint chip.

I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.

I had a roommate who had a python of some sort. It was 6’ long-ish.

I wouldn’t say it was affectionate, but it was fine with being handled. It’d just get comfortable, hang out, and watch whatever was going on. Sometimes it might slither around, but it always seemed to me it was just finding a place to get comfortable. It seemed to spend most of its time sleeping. It didn’t seem to care who it was hanging out with; I never saw it demonstrate a preference between people, even its owner.

It was a really easy pet to keep, all things considered. The worst thing about it was feeding it. It refused to eat dead things, so my friend had to go get live mice from the pet store, put the snake and the mouse in the bath tub, and then leave them alone for an hour or so. It was such a fussy eater - sometimes, it just wouldn’t, so we’d sometimes also have a pet mouse for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t interested in watching it kill the mouse, but my friend said it just wouldn’t eat if anyone was in the room watching it. Thankfully, it only needed to eat once every few weeks.

Honestly, I never saw the attraction. It didn’t do much, you couldn’t do much with it, it didn’t seem to seek out contact with people, didn’t seem to care one way or the other about being pet. I think it mostly liked being held because it like the warmth - but it’d be just as happy on its rock under the heat lamp.

Oh, shedding was cool. Once. After the first time you watch it, it’s kind of like watching paint dry.

But, some people really like snakes, and that’s cool.

Yup! It’s very much like mpd, except streaming without an additional component.

They use the SoundCloud API. You only need either gonic or Navidrome, plus a client (like ostui).