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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • What bash scripts are you writing that you expect to run on both a Mac laptop and a production linux server? You can install the newer bash if that’s what you’re used to, but you’re surely going to run into issues like ls . -lah far quicker than differences in bash since 3.2

    Even on a linux desktop you’re going to have differences from a production server, you’d want to be using something like ansible, or replicating production in a local test environment in a container or VM. Exactly like you have done.

    How’d you end up being the only one at your workplace to be given a Mac? Even with a linux VM, being on ARM can cause issues with compatibility.




  • I remember when I was a kid messing with Windows 95/98, I had this intuitive feeling of what was happening under the hood. Just like how you describe your theory. Honestly you’re probably on the right track. In theory on linux you can actually dive into the source code and try to figure out what’s actually happening, but that’s intimidating AF. Hard to say if the problem is between wine and the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), X11, Wayland, KDE, or the GPU driver…

    I had a kind of similar problem with my display not outputting when it was connected. I had to use a DRM file in /sys and udev script to fix it, wrote a blog about it. If your monitors are still messed up after a reboot, it sounds like this won’t help you though.

    Also you made me lol to “wine strikes me more as an emulator”. It totes is. The “Wine Is Not an Emulator” name is a joke, the original name was “WINdows Emulator”, which they changed to avoid Microsoft’s lawyers.












  • Yeah fair. I tried setting it up, but honestly probably not worth the effort in home networks. Problem is browsers don’t know that the other end of the unbound DNS server is DoH, so it won’t use ECH. Even once set up, most browsers need to be manually configured to use the local DoH server. Once there’s better OS support and auto config via DDR and/or DNR it’ll be more worth bothering with.



  • I don’t get the term ‘technical debt’. Most people seem to use it to say “We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly”.

    FIrst, it’s a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to ‘pay back technical debt’ is not making things clearer to them.

    Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don’t say “Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?” It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.

    Instead software is empherial. You don’t need to demolish what’s there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It’s just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.



  • Another aspect is the social graph. It’s targeted for normies to easily switch to.

    Very few people want to install a communication app, open the compose screen for the first time, and be met by an empty list of who they can communicate with.

    https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

    By using phone numbers, you can message your friends without needing to have them all register usernames and tell them to you. It also means Signal doesn’t need to keep a copy of your contact list on their servers, everyone has their local contact list.

    This means private messages for loads of people, their goal.

    Hey, we know this account sent this message and you have to give us everything you have about this account

    It’s a bit backwards, since your account is your phone number, the agency would be asking “give us everything you have from this number”. They’ve already IDed you at that point.


  • ZFS doesn’t have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it’s CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it’s less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I’ve used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn’t a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.

    Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.