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in reply to coldacid 🥛🥓👌

I've seen websites you people wouldn't believe. Attack threads on fire off the shoulder of Usenet. I watched P-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Router. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
in reply to coldacid 🥛🥓👌

In all seriousness, though, with all we were promised, what's happened to the internet in the past 20 years or so has been such a massive betrayal that I think we as a civilization would have been better off if it had never existed, just so that it couldn't turn into this 1984-style panopticon of our own design.
in reply to Phantasm

He's not wrong, the blue LEDs are terrible. Red LEDs were the only kind available for a long time, and then the green ones started making their way into consumer electronics and they were sold as being easier on the eyes than the red ones. The blue ones were just sold with "It is a new color" because they didn't have any discernible advantages. Then they were obligatory for a few years because everyone else was using them, so your design would look dated.

That guy mainly seems to be complaining about light bulbs. CFLs sucked really bad (and were hazardous if they broke) so I hoarded incandescent bulbs until LED bulbs started being easy to get.
design_schools.png

in reply to pistolero

without blue LEDs you don't have the RGB trio required to make a color-accurate screen

and as an extension no normalfag-friendly devices

in reply to 御園はくい

The only color your screen ever needs to be is a nice amber glow from a CRT or a gas plasma display.
in reply to Phantasm

It's beautiful.

I also think the old "dark purple-blue on light blue" backlit monochrome LCDs are nice. (When I have some cash to burn, I think the e-ink monochrome displays look cool.)

in reply to pistolero

cc @jae Hey, you have a favorite archaic display technology or are you gonna be upset when we destroy all current-year OLEDs and retvrn to old LCD/amber CRT/orange plasma to keep the normies from using computers unless absolutely necessary?
in reply to pistolero

ill never give up my oled, my eyes are too rekt. i also won't give up my crt because my eyes are rekt.
in reply to jae[0]™

@jae @hakui @phnt Sorry, the computer is about to go full-monochrome as soon as I figure out who to blow up.
in reply to pistolero

@p @phnt @hakui

> Sorry,

you're not.

> the computer is about to go full-monochrome as soon as I figure out who to blow up.

feel free to consider all systems except my own in-scope. i'll defend the castle with everything i got. and that includes tossing live scene-chix at you.

in reply to jae[0]™

@jae @hakui @phnt

> you're not.

I can be sad that I have inconvenienced you while still recognizing the necessity.

> and that includes tossing live scene-chix at you.

An effective diversion.

in reply to pistolero

@p @phnt @hakui

> I can be sad

you're not

> An effective diversion.

i felt it was more reasonable than say a jar of pickles with a very loose lid

in reply to jae[0]™

@jae @hakui @phnt

> you're not

I will be sad if you have to squint. Anyway, we're blowing up the guy that owns the rare-earth mines, not existing equipment. (They are probably in Africa and they are probably owned by one company.)

> i felt it was more reasonable than say a jar of pickles with a very loose lid

I will definitely be sad if I get covered in vinegar instead of loose girls with self-esteem issues.

The point of the question was less to threaten your gear than to ask your thoughts on older displays that exceed the present year's displays' tolerability.

in reply to pistolero

@p @phnt @hakui

> The point of the question was less to threaten your gear than to ask your thoughts on older displays that exceed the present year's displays' tolerability.

i didn't see a question, but now that i do. i think that older displays still properly displaying are a testament to solid engineering. when i have a 15yo crt that still hums along yet i'm replacing an led every 3 years. it's a smell

in reply to ≠

@amerika @phnt @p @hakui

i had a response for this. but im trying to be more polite these days. ill tell you in person next time.

in reply to ≠

@amerika @jae @phnt @p @hakui I'm only interested in sex with actual living beings for the purpose of procreation at this point, it's gross and messy. Much better to enjoy wonderful 2D
in reply to pistolero

@p @phnt @hakui Old CRTs/LCDs I don't miss but the dedicated brightness/contrast buttons/sliders are one I do tend to miss, the OSDs are so annoying to navigate into (and sadly not all monitors do DDC).
in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @p @hakui I do sort of miss old CRTs mostly because they had a character. They made nice noises, you could see them warm up, etc. Computers nowadays have no character, they are silent with zero feedback of what they do and just sit on your desk or lap.

I don't miss old color LCDs since those were universally garbage with bad contrast , ghosting and they now all have burned out backlights anyway.

>OSDs
I'm thankful to have button only monitors and not those nipple navigation ones that are impossible to use.

in reply to Phantasm

@phnt @lanodan @hakui

> Computers nowadays have no character,

That much is true.

> ghosting

Only sucks if you're trying to play a game. It's actually charming when using the machine to do real things. (During the brief period where I was successfully nostalgia-baited into using `cool-retro-term`--and was trying to not pay attention to the fact that it was eating half a core even while sitting idle--I actually had bleed and burn-in cranked way up.)

in reply to pistolero

@p @phnt @lanodan @hakui My first laptop had one of the dual scan LCD panels in it. God the ghosting was horrible for any usage.
in reply to gray

@gray @hakui @lanodan @phnt I never owned one, but have been subjected to them. Takes a minute to get used to, but they're fine for seeing a screen full of text, and they look cool.
in reply to pistolero

@p @phnt @lanodan @hakui It had Windows 98 on it so it was not pleasant to use. It was cheap for the time though so I lived with it.
in reply to gray

@gray @hakui @lanodan @phnt 98 was the last one that just sat there and didn't do anything if you didn't press anything.
in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @hakui Reminds me of why I hate distros where the packages automatically enables or even restarts services.
(And why I typically mask installing stuff into /etc/cron.*)
in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @hakui @phnt Yeah, that stuff's super annoying. The stupid "man page" triggers in Debian, I forget what you have to do to stop them but it is super annoying to do. "Install these 80 packages. After each of them, make sure you reindex the man pages instead of doing that once at the end. In fact, don't do anything in parallel, either: instead of downloading all of them and installing them as they come in, download, then install, then run a bunch of triggers, then download the next one."

CRUX just runs `ldconfig`. It doesn't even rebuild the font cache unless you go out of your way to run the post-install script.

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @lanodan @hakui another win for pacman, the post-install hooks only run once, when everything's been unpacked and put in their places <img class=" title=":archlinux:"/>
in reply to coldacid 🥛🥓👌

@gray @hakui @lanodan @phnt The win is CRUX's; it does nothing unless you've told it to.

I used to run Arch on small systems where I didn't want to try to compile Firefox. pacman hates me and wants me to die.
why_arch_is_not_my_favorite_distro.png

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @hakui It's not even unique to distros, bugs even when critical get forgotten, even when they are regular, they just need to be in a crowd of other bugs. Which isn't surprising, there's more bugs per day than there is meals, and most of us forget what we've eaten.

And arch users seem to be specially good at that, ended up calling it "works for me".

Also I don't think a statically linked version is really needed, like Alpine has one (official build too) but so far after years of using it it's only been useful to bootstrap a system as you can use apk.static as a seed.
And apk does update itself, but of course with resolving it's dependencies for it (with apk using sonames for libraries) so it just doesn't breaks like pacman.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan@phnt@hakui@p@gray@coldacid what pisses me off about arch in particular is the attitude of “fuckups and breakage are a user skill issue”

there are no safety nets for anything. if anything breaks, get the rescue system and painstakingly fix it manually. why yes, why don’t you just switch out the running kernel with something you’ve never successfully booted!

in reply to mia (developer mode)

@mia @lanodan @hakui @p @gray
>what pisses me off about arch in particular is the attitude of “fuckups and breakage are a user skill issue”
99% of the time they are.

>there are no safety nets for anything.
Good, I know what I'm a doing and anything that tries to be smart about safety usually gets in my way (apt and dpkg being prime examples of that). Seriously, this is one of the reasons why I still use it after 7 years.

And yes, while rebooting into a live iso after an update broke something like once in a year can be annoying, there are packages that do the whole OpenSUSE™ thing with btrfs snapshots and bootable snapshots with GRUB. It's not magic and it's optional (like it should be).

in reply to Phantasm

in reply to mia (developer mode)

This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Phantasm

@phnt@lanodan@hakui@p@gray@coldacid networkmanager on anything that isn’t a roaming device is pretty dumb yeah. it’s practically unusable without mainstream DE frontends to begin with, and also too limited for servers.

suse did its own thing there because the alternatives at the time (essentially shell scripts or systemd-networkd) were too fragile and unpredictable.

in reply to mia (developer mode)

@mia @phnt @hakui @p @gray Well on servers it often can just be configuring the interfaces at boot time and you're done, no events to listen to except maybe interface creation but that can be a hook rather than a daemon.

There's few times where it can be more complex than that but for those I'm pretty sure you'd be explicitly configuring special software (like with CARP kind of stuff).

Meanwhile I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like NetworkManager still flushes interface configuration the moment they go down, so a switch/router rebooting or changing a cable goes from few lost packets to TCP connection cuts.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan@phnt@hakui@p@gray@coldacid suse’s thing is actually a daemon, but it’s there to keep things neat and orderly and exactly as configured.

ifup/down scripts and hooks have a bunch of problems. they’re not declarative, nothing is well-defined, they tend to have side effects and catch fire if something isn’t exactly as expected… and like, if you’re using libvirt, openvpn, wg-quick, lxc and so on, they all can leave your network configuration in an unpredictable state that those scripts will not be able to recover from. on debian attempting to restart the network will usually just take your system offline and then abort due to some error.

like, this network shit is messy as fuck and every single layer of it is a problem. some kind of daemon does make sense there. just… not networkmanager. unless it’s a laptop or something where you want to switch wifi networks and have your VPNs autoconnect on some of them.

in reply to mia (developer mode)

@mia @lanodan @hakui @p @gray

>wg-quick, lxc and so on, they all can leave your network configuration in an unpredictable state that those scripts will not be able to recover from.
I still hate wg-quick for meddling with the default route when a peer has AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0

in reply to Phantasm

@mia @gray @hakui @lanodan @p Also on the topic of meddling with network configuration. Podman is a fun one. When a port isn't published with an IP specified, it will punch a hole in the firewall and act like nothing happened. I wonder how many containers are public because of that on the Internet.
in reply to Phantasm

@phnt @gray @p @lanodan @mia @hakui

many endpoints are exposed just because of this. podman and docker both manipulate the firewall rule chains typically (especially docker) creates its own chain which takes precedence over anything else. there's a few ways around this but its a bit much to manage. i won't run containers anymore because of this. it just goes into k8s cluster where i have full control of network policy that are simple to deal with. the hole punch is considered a feature but to the uninitiated its a risk.

in reply to jae[0]™

@jae @gray @phnt @p @mia @hakui Yeah, it's why here docker stuff for gitlab-ci just goes in dedicated machines/VPS with the firewall being external (like my own router or the VPS hoster's firewall).

And for everything else I use bwrap for container/isolation needs.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @phnt @p @mia @hakui bubblewrap is pretty nice for this and takes the headaches out of namespace manipulation (and other things to think about). also experimented with firecracker (microvm) which is a nice balance between the lightweight nature of containers but uses kvm under the hood. this could be a good pattern for linux. i'm mostly on bsd for systems now i use bhyve (beehive) to managed vm stuffs. i use it mostly for ci targeting from gitea since i can't run containers on bsd. in some ways i prefer this since the vm gives me a lightweight full-system, but there's a small performance tax (minimal)
in reply to jae[0]™

@jae @gray @phnt @p @mia @hakui Well for containers on FreeBSD there's jails, not sure if the other BSDs have it too, and illumos has zones.

And well I usually work with portable stuff I have source code for so I don't need something like linux emulation (although branded zones and probably jails too allows that though).
Reason I'm stuck on Linux is more due to stuff like hardware support and wanting good packages and good package manager, and the ports trees aren't that great.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @phnt @p @mia @hakui

everyone's got a use-case for insert here jails works pretty well, just doesn't match up with some of the research i do for work stuff. it's almost like i have 3 computing setups (bsd for my personal lab, k8s cluster for work research, then whatever work/clients gives me). it's a lot to mentally track but keeps me nimble as an engiener.

bsd is not a great choice for those who need insert here hardware configurations. for me it was a choice of many things to go back to it. (for reference i started with bsd in 1994 and ran it non-stop until 1999 when i had to use linux at work. took a while for me to come full-circle back to more of my unix-roots, but here i am. i'm happier now.

in reply to Phantasm

@phnt @gray @p @mia @hakui Well at least wg-quick can just be ignored, like wireguard on my router is setup like this:
#!/sbin/openrc-run
name="wireguard redacted"

depend() {
	need net
	use dns
}

wg_setup() {
	ip link add dev wg0 type wireguard || return 1
	wg setconf wg0 /root/wg-redacted.conf || return 1
	ip link set up dev wg0 || return 1
	ip a a redacted-prefix::/48 dev wg0 || return 1
	ip a a redacted-prefix::1/64 dev br0 || return 1
	ip r a redacted-prefix::/64 dev br0 # May fail if already added by 'ip a a … dev br0'

	return 0
}

start() {
	ebegin "Starting wg-redacted"
	wg_setup
	eend $? "Failed to start wg-redacted"
}

Probably much better ways to do it, it's a quick script I threw together, but much prefer it over wg-quick.
in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @phnt @p @mia @hakui this is much nicer than people making init script that makes a call to a script which makes another call to wq-quick.
in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@p @gray @hakui @phnt In fact Windows is a great proof of that.
It really has to do a major fuckup like crowdstrike to make headlines.

Meanwhile xz-utils backdoor made headlines and got some people in panic because it pretty much never happens to core system packages or base systems of Unixes.
But on npm it's just another tuesday, just a full moon on pip, normal behavior of drivers and games on Windows, …

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @hakui @phnt

> But on npm it's just another tuesday, just a full moon on pip, normal behavior of drivers and games on Windows, …

It used to be shameful to make software that fucked up this badly.

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @hakui Lack of shame of this feels like guys that would say sorry but then do the exact same thing afterwards sometimes not even 5 minutes later.

Kind of thing that makes me wish we could have the freedom to *not* use some software as it's a social problem.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @hakui @phnt

> Kind of thing that makes me wish we could have the freedom to *not* use some software as it's a social problem.

:ignucius: ...Claim a religious exemption?

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @hakui More like EU privacy laws kind of idea, I want it to be based on something like consent rather than some kind of pre-baked set of refuse/accept-lists like organised religions strongly tend to have.

And well even if it qualifies as Free Software, I'd still want to be able to refuse it.

In fact interestingly, the Free Software definition has:
> “As you wish” includes, optionally, “not at all” if that is what you wish. So there is no need for a separate “freedom not to run a program.”

But it isn't something you get via licences. It's something you get by having the right to refuse a software, possibly even refuse to have your data processed by one, hence why I'm thinking more of GDPR kind of stuff.

That said first step would at least be full rights to refuse EULAs, after all those require you to accept them to waive some rights away.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @hakui @phnt

> More like EU privacy laws kind of idea

It was already annoying when you had to do a EULA every time you installed some software; it is now required every time you visit a website. (fundingchoicesmessages.google.com apparently no longer blocks Tor so I had to kill it from this end.)

I don't know when Python started doing the "just shove binaries onto people's computers, it's fine" but I'm pretty goddamn close to going full-:rms:.

> It's something you get by having the right to refuse a software, possibly even refuse to have your data processed by one, hence why I'm thinking more of GDPR kind of stuff.

Well, I don't think there is a right to ownership over data. I think (but have no hope because of picrel) the solution is to stop letting these companies assume that they can collect it by actively preventing this.
everyonewillnotjust.jpg

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @hakui True, and GDPR sucks for this.

But so far only places where you're directly forced to use software are public services, and sometimes jobs but for those there's contracts and so possibility of negociation (specially when done grouped, like if a team just refuses/doesn't-uses a bullshit software, say MS Teams).

Meaning a large chunk can be fixed by "public services may not force usage of a software on people" but I don't see that happening except maybe in some weird country like Japan where they love their faxes.

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @hakui @phnt For dumb shit I have to use for work, I am able to accept it. For the government, though, I didn't pick the government.

There are occasional rumblings of requiring open-source software in governments in Europe but based on how often they actually do it, those seem to mostly be just negotiating tactics to get a better deal from Microsoft.

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @lanodan @hakui It's mostly just "Hey, we stopped using O365 and switch to LibreOffice, look how good we are". And then they write legislation that would make free and open-source software illegal.
in reply to Phantasm

@phnt @gray @p @hakui After all lawmakers would make anything illegal, like sometimes you really wonder if they're shitposting.
in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @phnt @gray @hakui If everything is illegal then it's a matter of selective enforcement; too many laws effectively creates an oligarchy.
in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @hakui true that said there's a difference between writing a law (pretty much anyone can do that) and getting it fully accepted.
And then actually made into reality, a law that nobody applies is nil and that happens from time to time.
in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@p @gray @hakui @phnt And I feel like FOSS is too much virus-like and widespread to be made illegal, it's like if you'd try to make slang illegal.

Or like making encryption illegal/restricted, when virtually all computers today have and need to have encryption algorithms stronger than can be cracked today (hence why it's reality of hardware, bad implementations, and bad usage that allow cracks).

in reply to Haelwenn /элвэн/

@lanodan @gray @hakui @phnt

> Or like making encryption illegal/restricted,

WE'RE GOING DARK

> virtually all computers today

Nobody has a computer any more. They have appliance devices that are locked down, and most of them are just glowing rectangles. Owning a general-purpose computing device is already weird nerd shit, like paying cash for something instead of letting a bank see and record what you're buying and when.

in reply to pistolero

@p @gray @phnt @lanodan @hakui

WE'RE GOING DARK


weird networking adventures as a mere key away.

Nobody has a computer any more. They have appliance devices that are locked down, and most of them are just glowing rectangles. Owning a general-purpose computing device is already weird nerd shit, like paying cash for something instead of letting a bank see and record what you're buying and when.


s/nobody/normies but yes, they seem to embrace the opaque blackbox approach to computing. although i'd argue that they aren't computing, simply kiosk-zombies. remember when computing required skill? and the elite were just that, elite.