Tim

Why the ever loving fuck does an init system even need a user database?

Honest to God, if FIFA were giving out a World “Understanding UNIX” Prize, Poettering would be the inaugural, and only, winner. Never in the field of operating systems has one man driven so much enshittification through sheer force of cluelessness coupled with supreme arrogance. And in a world that Steve Ballmer still occupies, that’s one hell of an accolade.

If you’ve seen how badly specified, documented and behaved OpenAI’s APIs are, you’d guess this was already the case.

Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided ld.so isn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…

But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.

Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)

It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.

That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I’m genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I’ll never use, but otherwise it’s actually good enough to be a daily driver.

Coding is a solved problem; people with zero understanding can do it by copypasta from stack overflow, and similarly skilled LLMs can do it right now, cheaper. If you’re a “coder”, you have a lovely hobby but no career. Sorry.

If you’re a software engineer though, you have nothing to fear from current LLMs. But there is much more chance of LeCun’s models learning engineering - i.e. problem solving, in which writing code is just one of the tools, and not even the most important one - through physical experience and not just text. It is, after all, how all the software engineers today did the vast majority of their learning.

It’s definitely starting to feel like having your rights enshrined on unalterable tablets of stone, but which must be re-interpreted by a half dozen political appointees holding a seance with the founding fathers every few months, may not be the platonic ideal of governance that Americans are constantly telling the world it is.

China does not control the vast majority of rare earths because they’re only found in China (or even because they’re particularly rare, they’re not.)

China controls the market because they were the only people who actually bothered to build extraction and refinement capabilities.

If the US invested half the money it puts into “clean coal” or oil and gas extraction into rare earth extraction and processing, it would have its own supplies. But that would be woke, or something.

The US is battling the environmental and human rights issues that so agitate them about China by promoting ‘clean coal’ and rounding up brown people in concentration camps without due process.

It’s almost as if environmental and human rights issues weren’t their real concern 🤔.

I seem to recall that if the disk had copy protection you could also use this to simulate an earthquake as the 1541 threw its heads against the stops with all its might…

Happy days!

Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

I live in (Eastern) Europe.

That’s an incredibly longwinded way of saying “mahh Tezlur burns three times as much ‘clean coal’ per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw”.

The article is from a UK newspaper. What is and isn’t legal for them to regulate is decided by their Parliament and nobody else. No Kings, and all that.

Meanwhile, you should know that the “free speech” lectures are getting pretty old from the country that checks social media history at the border to make sure you didn’t say anything bad about the Dear Leader, which shuts down TV shows it doesn’t like, and generally ensures the media toes the party line.

(See also - lectures on why kids shooting up schools is a necessary price to pay for that well regulated militia that will be along to save you from tyrants, well, real soon now…)

Shutting down comments and banning everyone who calls them out is standard form for that place these days sadly; I deleted a 13 year old account there a few years back when they posted some godawful transphobic opinion peace and then they doubled down in the comments and started banning anyone who complained.

Shame, it really was once a good site, but the writers who are left are the ones who got high on their own supply years ago.

I worked for Philips Research 30 odd years ago (weeps)… It was a source of great amusement then that we could sell two pieces of equipment that were identical in every way except one had a Marantz label and cost twice as much as the Philips one, and the Marantz would get 5 stars in the audiophile magazines, and the Philips would get 3 or 4.

I just read the manual for the Euro version; basically, they assume you take the power strip/PDU with the computer.

So, you plug the special UPS into a spare outlet on the PDU; it monitors the power supply, and as soon as power from the PDU drops it jumps in and starts supplying. So plug into an outlet, then unplug the PDU from power, and the UPS takes over. Since at this point the pins on the PDU plug are live, they provide a safety cap to put over the end of the cable. The computer itself is never unplugged.

Ah damn, I loved that book when I was a kid. I can probably blame it, at least in part, for my career…

(I was a massive nerd and a FidoNet sysop back in the 80s & 90s, and got my first VMS and Unix experience hopping onto academic networks over dialup and X.25 gateways using, err, “unconventially obtained” credentials… This experience helped me convince my interviewer at Imperial College to overlook my less than stellar academic record to admit me to their Computing peogramme.

That book - and the movie WarGames - were definitely inspiring, if not life-changing.)

Kiwix is the easiest way to do it; if you have Docker/Kubernetes, there’s a Docker image at ghcr.io/kiwix/kiwix-serve, and the K8s manifest to deploy is as simple as:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: wikipedia-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: kiwix-server
  ports:
  - port: 80
    targetPort: 8080
  clusterIP: None
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: wikipedia-server
  labels:
    app: kiwix-server
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: kiwix-server
  template:
    metadata:
      name: wikipedia-server
      labels:
        app: kiwix-server
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: kiwix-server
        image: kiwix/kiwix-serve:3.8.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        command:
        - /usr/local/bin/kiwix-serve
        - --port=8080
        - --verbose
        - /data/wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
          protocol: TCP
        volumeMounts:
        - name: data
          mountPath: /data
          readOnly: true
          limits:
            memory: "128Mi"
            cpu: "2000m"
      volumes:
      - name: data
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: wikipedia-mirror

Then you just need to download a copy of the mirror file wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim and put it in the appropriate place - wget https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim

Annnnnd that’s why I downloaded a snapshot of Wikipedia a few months ago and host it locally.

Sad that it’s necessary, but with modern AI tooling, we have everything we need to destroy knowledge on an industrial scale.

I gave up with MacOS a couple of years ago (after nearly a lifetime of using them - my first ‘own’ Mac was a Lombard PowerBook G3 - lovely machine,) because it became increasingly apparent that Apple had stopped caring about the desktop operating system and were intent on turning it into a mobile phone with a keyboard and bigger screen.

Annoying desktop bugs - like constantly (and randomly) forgetting the resolution and position of second displays, not powering up external USB drives properly after sleep, and (as a developer) endlessly having to fight with “why is my build suddenly broken? oh, MacOS decided it doesn’t trust the linker again” type problems just wore me out. Every time they released some pointless new UI fluff but ignored the fact that the Finder had been essentially unusable since Mac OS X (because why should you be using the Finder anyway, you should just trust that your files are stored in Magic Apple Cloud Land…) just reminded me they really didn’t care about desktop users, they just want desktops as accessories to their mobile phones.

So, I cut the cord and finally switched to Linux on the desktop. Which is a shame, because they do make some really nice hardware…

(Although now that I’m actively trying to cut all US suppliers out of my life, it’s actually been a blessing.)

This is a very good point - in books/dramas it helps the exposition to have a character you can relay half the plot details to. Similarly in radio dramas, every conversation between characters starts with saying each others names and a full recap of whatever the subject is… But nobody in the real world does or wants to talk like that.

Real people just say “hey, is that thing fixed yet?”, not “hello Chris, you remember yesterday we were discussing the il problem with the Thing, and you proposed Cornfootling it; what happened?”

When I want Alexa to turn on the lights, I want to just say “Alexa, turn on the lights”, not have a goddamned debate. And when I want to search for whatever the hell Cornfootling is, I just want to type “Cornfootling” and hit search.