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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

    I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

    I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

    An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

    If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.


  • I would be careful about assuming knowledge based on age. Young people might use technology without understanding it, and old people might understand it and don’t want to use it.

    Technology needs to be regulated, and I would not trust people with profit incentives to do so.

    IMO, it is always important to investigate if a regulation wants to prevent a real issue or if they just mention some populist reasons for doing whatever they want.


  • But to install from local storage, you first download or fetch a storage medium from a remote location with the file on it. There isn’t that much of a difference IMO.

    I would not call it side-loading when I download a file and then install it on the same device. Because that is how it has always worked. I never before heard people describing downloading and executing a setup.exe as “side-loading”.


  • Until some time ago, I always though that “side-loading” is something different. Since I first saw “side-loading” used in ADB, so I thought that it means using another system on the side to load and install software onto a target system.

    So to me that seems fitting, but now it seems to be used differently. How is installing software using just one device “side-loading”. What side do they mean?


  • I don’t agree with the generalization here. Sure, it is generally advisable not to rely on security through obscurity, but depending on the use-cases and purpose it can be effective.

    I dislike DRM systems with a passion, but they, especially those for video games like denuvo, can be quite effective, if the purpose is to protect against copying something for a short time until it gets cracked.

    Otherwise I agree that software developed in the open is intrinsically more secure, because it can be verified by everyone.

    However, many business and governments like to have support contracts so want to be able to sue and blame someone else than themselves if something goes wrong. This is in most cases easier with closed source products with a specific legal entity behind it, not a vague and loose developer community or even just a single developer.



  • Protects against what?

    What I read here is just a vague critic from him of the relation between hard- and software developer. Which will not change just because the ISA is open source. It will take some iterations until this is figured out, this is inevevable.

    Soft- and hardware developers are experts in their individual fields, there are not many with enough know-how of both fields to be effective.

    Linus also points out, that because of ARM before, RISC-V might have a easier time, on the software side, but mistakes will still happen.

    IMO, this article doesn’t go into enough depths of the RISC-V specific issues, that it warrants RISC-V in the title, it would apply to any up and coming new ISA.


  • My point is there never will be enough people to leave. Consumer boycotts do not work.

    Between thousands of different factors to consider wherever to buy a product from a certain producer or not, child labor, environmental waste, political attitude of the CEO, etc… it isn’t possible to make any decision on what product to consume.

    It isn’t about 'unless enough people leave" it is about “unless enough people protest to the government for market regulation” and “unless enough law makers care”.

    The free market is not self regulating, at least not with a long term positive effect.


  • This is the “consumer choice” argument.

    The problem is that consumers likely don’t have that choice. The “free market” is really bad in incentivising good long term behavior, they favor short term gains for their stockholders. Thus they likely all switch to practices that seemingly lower cost or raise short term profits. If they can fire employees and replace them with AI, they will do so.

    If they would think long term, they would prefer to hire humans instead of AI, because that way they would give their future customers money to buy their stuff. AI will not be their customer. They would pay them enough money to be a happy and good consumer.

    Customer choice doesn’t matter here, they either just have to buy whatever is cheapest, or die, because their employers (if they even have one) don’t pay they enough for them to have choice, because short term profits.


  • No, it is consistent. Because it is not about the law itself, but about it being applied in a double standard. If a random person copies a product made by an industry, the law will punish them. If the industry copies work of random people, its fine and a sign of progress.

    I would like a copyright to be nontransferable, bound to the individuals that created it, and limited for about 10 years or so (depending on what it is), to give the creators some way to earn a reward back, while also encouraging to create new stuff.



  • Generally, I tend to think more in the direction of that there is some misunderstanding happening, then people being stupid. Maybe that is just the optimist in me.

    What exactly is meant when people say they don’t know git. Do they mean the repository data format? Do they mean the network protocol? Do they mean the command line utility? Or just how to work with git as a developer, which is similar to other vcs?

    I think if you use some git gui, you can get very far, without needing to understand “git”, which I would argue most people, that use it daily, don’t, at least not fully.