Software engineer, functional programming enthusiast.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2021

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  • If you get the government to simply declare everyone else “terrorists” then there is no need for rule of law anymore, you can do whatever you want! Because they are by definition worse than anything we do to them. How convenient for those states with plans for committing genocide, it doesn’t count as genocide if you are mass-murdering terrorists.

    This strategy of the government calling every troublesome minority ethnic group anywhere “terrorists” got kicked into high gear when the US government started using 9/11 as an excuse to commit war crimes and remove restrictions from police forces (like the right of habeas corpus), and it has been a constant slippery slope since then. Nowadays the Biden administration officially considers the “Anti Fascist” movement in the US “terrorism,” although no one in government refers to fascist mass shooters as “terrorists.” Gee, I wonder why they would do that?



  • I like it! What I would have done differently: use the original colors, the deep blue color for the window decoration in Windows 98 is quite different from the color you are using. Also I would use a green wallpaper of a shade closer to the default on Windows 95/98, and an icon theme with beige and yellow icons.

    I have actually been wanting to do something like this with the old Mac OS 7 “Platinum” theme, modernizing it for Xfce so it looks like the old Mac OS 7 in spirit, but not exactly like Mac OS 7 the way most immitation Platinum themes try to do.


  • I am also going to recommend the same solution as @matcha_addict@lemy.lol in this comment: https://lemmy.ml/comment/7998407

    You can create a key pair that is specifically just for this kind of backup transaction.

    To limit its affects, create a user and group on each of the devices that are highly restricted.

    This is actually the most secure solution that doesn’t require an interactive password prompt. The passwordless key only serves this one purpose and has small attack surface.

    Basically, you can tell SSH to allow root login on certain devices by setting up a root key pair. You configure SSH on the target device such that when it logs in, the login must run a script or a single command instead of running a shell, this limits what attackers can do if they somehow steal your private keys. You can also keep these private keys in your SSH agent so you only have to enter their passwords once, this will allow you to run remote commands without a password.

    I would recommend also exploring the possibility of setting up an Rsync Daemon on each remote device, it keeps an Rsync process running on a remote device and listens for connections from Rsync clients. https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-setup-the-rsync-daemon-on-linux

    On an unrelated topic: you might also want to look into using Btrfs and making and transferring snapshots to other devices.


  • Someone with more expertise can correct me if I am wrong, but the last I heard about this, I heard that cluster computing was obsoleted by modern IaaS and cloud computing technology.

    For example, the Xen project provides Unikernels as part of their Xen Cloud product. The unikernel is (as I understand it) basically a tiny guest operating system that statically links to a programming language runtime or virtual machine. So the Xen guest boots up a single executable program composed of the programming language runtime environment (like the Java virtual machine) statically linked to the unikernel, and then runs whatever high-level programming language that the virtual machine supports, like Java, C#, Python, Erlang, what have you.

    The reason for this is if you skip running Linux altogether, even a tiny Linux build like Alpine, and just boot directly into the virtual machine process, this tends to be a lot more memory efficient, and so you can fit more processes into the memory of a single physical compute node. Microsoft Azure does something similar (I think).

    To use it, basically you write a program a service in a programming language that runs on a VM and build it to run on a Xen unikernel. When you run the server, Xen allocates the computing resources for it and launches the executable program directly on the VM without an operating system, so the VM is, in effect, the operating system.








  • Thanks for posting your transcript and putting in chapter markers, it is much easier for me to read than to listen to a 90-minute video.

    And in this episode, I’m going to argue that replacing the word “equality” with the much more vague concept of “equity” is largely a way of taking ideas that promote economic inequality and disguising them in the language and style of social justice – and that it’s also a way of keeping people of all races, genders and ethnicities divided in conflict and competition with one another, so that we can’t pose an effective challenge to the people in power.

    It is great that you have shone a light on this recent phenomenon in neoliberal politics, especially from the US Democratic party, of singing the praises of equity over equality, and showing how equity is just a bait-and-switch for right wing policies that focus on a narrow range of economic outcomes rather than the material conditions of peoples lives.


  • Linux does not support ZFS as well as operating systems like OpenBSD or OpenIndiana, but I do use it on my Ubuntu box for my backup array. It is not the best setup: RAID-Z over USB is not at all guaranteed to keep your data safe, but it was the most economical thing I was able to build myself, and it gets the job done well enough with regular scrubbing to give me piece of mind about at least having one other reliable copy of my data. And I can write files to it quickly, and take snapshots of the state of the filesystem if need be.

    I used to use Btrfs on my laptop and it worked just fine, but I did have trouble once when I ran out of disk space. A Btrfs filesystem puts itself into read-only mode when that happens, and that makes it tough to delete files to free-up space. There is a magic incantation that can restore read-write functionality, but I never learned what it was, I just decided to stop using it because Btrfs is pretty clearly not for home PC use. Freezing the filesystem in read-only mode makes sense in a data-center scenario, but not for a home user who might want to try to erase data so one can keep using it normally. I might consider using Btrfs in place of ZFS on a file server, though ZFS does seem to provide more features and seems to be somewhat better tested and hardened.

    There is also BCacheFS now as an alternative to Btrfs, but it is still fairly new, and not widely supported by default installations. I don’t know how stable it is or how well it compares to Btrfs, but I thought I would mention it.


  • Linux exists solely because he made it a collaborative endeavour from the start.

    That is the important part. If Linux had tried to compete with Microsoft as a closed-source operating system, no one would have used it – who would use a tiny, buggy (back then), incomplete, closed-source operating system made by a few guys in their spare time against a very popular, feature-complete, close-source operating system with billions of dollars funding its engineering effort?

    What makes Linux popular is that it is collectively owned, that is as much a feature of the operating system as any technology or algorithm written into the source code itself. That feature is what set it apart from Windows or Mac OS.


  • Ramin Honary@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLinus Torvalds interview Reader's Digest - 2001
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    5 months ago

    Exactly, the neoliberal capitalist religion causes collective brain damage. Especially at that time, since there was a frenzy of propaganda around Bill Gates and how he became the worlds richest man by selling software, in particular operating systems. So from that non-logic it follows that if you have a popular operating system you should become the worlds richest man, but if you just give it all away for free, then you gave away a fortune. It makes total sense in the completely warped, schizophrenic world view of the US neoliberal mainstream media.



  • This article seems to be written by ChatGPT. Confirmed human author.

    If you are indeed a real human, I am sorry. May I ask why you think Cinnamon is better for tech-savvy moms than something like KDE Plasma or Gnome? Do you think desktop environments more similar to Microsoft Windows are better for moms?

    Don’t get me wrong, I love Cinnamon DE, it is my second favorite DE (Xfce is my favorite). But I would think something like KDE Plasma is probably a bit closer to the Microsoft Windows user experience.


  • You’re not missing out on anything. Mint lets you install various desktop environments, they are all very well-configured and stable by default. You can just install the appropriate desktop environment meta-package using Apt:

    • apt install 'task-gnome-desktop'
    • apt install 'kde-plasma-desktop'
    • apt install 'cinnamon-desktop-environment'
    • apt install 'task-xfce-desktop'

    Then you can “hop” from one GUI experience to another by just logging out and logging in with a different session. You might have to add some additional Ubuntu repositories to your Apt config to get all of these meta-packages though.

    Besides the desktop environment, the only other big difference between distros is how you use their package managers, which all do the same thing anyways, just with different CLI commands.

    Probably the most important thing to consider in a distro is which versions of the latest stable releases of the big Linux apps are available in their distros. Arch-based distros (Garuda, Manjaro, ArcoLinux, EndeavorOS) are the most bleeding-edge but these operating systems tend to break after a software update if you fail to update often enough. Ubuntu and Fedora are the most bleeding-edge non-rolling release distros that I know of, and in my experience they never break after a software update.


  • Distros that just work (although YMMV): Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS with the default desktop environments. I have been using Ubuntu and Fedora both (on different computers) for over 15 years now they each always get the WiFi and BlueTooth drivers right, neither ever has trouble with audio or video, they really just work, and they both are pretty well up-to-date with the latest stable versions of the biggest Linux apps in their repositories.

    I have been thinking of switching my Ubuntu computers over to Mint (Xfce edition, though Cinnamon isn’t bad), which uses the same base operating system package set as Ubuntu, but its ownership model is more collective and community-oriented. Fedora is also collectively owned, while Pop!_OS and Ubuntu are owned and operated by for-profit businesses – that doesn’t make them bad, it just might be something to consider.

    Also, if you don’t mind a shameless plug, I wrote a blog post on how to choose a Linux distro, so feel free to read if it pleases you.