Badabinski

For me, it’s Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it’s Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it’s always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it’s fast because it doesn’t enable many things by default, and it’s honestly been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

I personally feel like Arch’s unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you’ll likely have a rock solid system.

Again, this is all just my opinion. It’s easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won’t recommend it to you, but I’ll happily say how much I’ve come to enjoy using it.

I wrote a comment about this several months ago on my old kbin.social account. That site is gone and I can’t seem to get a link to it, so I’m just going to repost it here since I feel it’s relevant. My kbin client doesn’t let me copy text posts directly, so I’ve had to use the Select feature of the android app switcher. Unfortunately, the comment didn’t emerge unscathed, and I lack the mental energy to fix it due to covid brain fog (EDIT: it appears that many uses of I were not preserved). The context of the old post was about layoffs, and it can be found here: https://kbin.earth/m/[email protected]/t/12147

I want to offer my perspective on the Al thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. happily generate string- templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

Now, do the higher-ups think the way that do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using Al tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

Basically, I think LLMs can be helpful for some folks, but my experience is that the use of LLMs by junior developers absolutely increases the workload of senior developers. Senior developers using LLMs can experience a productivity bump, but only if they’re very critical of the output generated by the model. I am personally much faster just relying on traditional IDE auto complete, since I don’t have to change from “I’m writing code” mode to “I’m reviewing code mode.”

Yeah, this is source-available, not open source. You have no rights whatsoever.

The tiered storage stuff is pretty cool. You can say “I want this data on this disk, so if I get a cache miss from a faster disk/RAM it’ll come from this other disk first.”

I believe it also has some interesting ways of handling redundancy like erasure coding, and I thiiiink it does some kind of byte-level deduplication? I don’t know if that’s implemented or is even still planned, but I remember being quite excited for it. It was supposed to be dedupe without all of the hideous drawbacks that things like ZFS dedupe have.

EDIT: deduplication is absolutely not a thing yet. I don’t know if it’s still on the roadmap.

EDIT: Erasure coding is deffo implemented, however.

What if you need to file a bug? What if you have a question on the config that’s not easily answered by the docs? If you never, ever find bugs and never, ever have questions, then sure, separate the two. There are genuinely people like that, but they’re not common. If you’re one of them, then I’m genuinely glad for you.

My opinion is this: You use software. You don’t use people, but you sure as hell rely on them.

Because Vaxry (the lead dev) got banned from contributing to wlroots or any other FDO projects.

As for why he was banned, this is the only thing I’ve read about the whole thing: https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html

Basically, he violated the FDO Code of Conduct when being told that a particular thing he said/enabled in a Discord community would not be acceptable if it was seen in spaces covered by said CoC.

This appears to be his response.

Were you using the kernel module? We’re using Flatcar which doesn’t support their .ko, and we haven’t been getting panics on any of our machines (of which there are many).

Falcon uses eBPF on Linux nowadays. It’s still an irritating piece of software, but it no make your boxen fail to boot.

edit: well, this is a bad take. I should avoid commenting on shit when I’m sleep deprived and filled with meeting dread.

The other person may have responded with a fair amount of hostility, but they’re absolutely correct. I run Kubernetes clusters hosting millions of containers across hundreds of thousands of VMs at my job, and OOMKills are just a fact of life. Apps will leak memory, and you’re powerless to fix it unless you’re willing to debug the app and fix the leak. It’s better for the container to run out of memory and trigger a cgroup-scoped OOM kill. A system-wide OOM kill will murder the things you love, shit in your hat, and lick your face like David Tennant licked Krysten Ritter.

I don’t bother with those unless I’m specifically going for all the orbs. Like, I’ll get the closest one, but I don’t bother with the one you mentioned or the one that makes the boss spawn. There’s usually enough health to be had once you know your formations, and if you want mondo amounts of health, there’s always the heart mage trick. I don’t go out of my way to dig gold in the mines for the same reason. You can win without doing it, and it just breaks up the flow too much imo.

Noita is probably my favorite game of all time, and it’s an excellent rougelike.

Ahhh, I’d love it if I could tie that in with a Bluetooth OBD dongle and Home Assistant. It’d be awesome if I could set up a BLE proxy in my carport to automatically update stuff. It’d be especially handy if I could get alerted about check engine codes.

The article mentions this, but this is the second time this piece of software has been in the news in as many years. Last year they had an SQL injection vulnerability on an unauthenticated page that was widely exploited to grab all kinds of juicy data. This year, it appears like their dumb, closed source SSH library may be responsible for allowing unauthenticated access.

I’m excited to see what vulnerability 2025 will bring. Maybe this will push more people to use audited open source code like openssh and the tooling built around it. I’m pretty sure sshd is compliant with HIPAA and PCI.

Which mouse and which distro? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve plugged my MX Master 3S directly into my work laptop running Arch many times and have never had to do anything to make it work.