WhyNotHugo

It's kinda crazy that they're releasing an improved version only in places where it's mandatory by law. You'd think it's cheaper (and definitely better PR) to just release the new version everywhere.

Dot matrix can handle regular A4 paper since the late nineties.

They're noisier than ink printers, but non-industrial quality can be pretty reasonable for office-level noises.

Quality certainly isn't on par with laser printers, but for text (both Latin and CJK), it's perfectly clear.

I have enormous respect for dot matrix printers. They're easy to repair and service, the tech is relatively simple, it's cheap, it's parts are cheap, its supplies are cheap. It's way more sustainable than any other printer: both the printer itself in its manufacturing and the ribbons themselves. The waste they produce is also much less polluting than any other printer.

I think iOS has lots of refinement and polish, but still lots of ugly bugs and crappy UI. The others have the same crappy UI, but with no refinement and polish at all anywhere.

Indeed, it's also great economics for them. Remember the old rule: commoditise your compliment. If you make these kind of accessories highly affordable and people can even refine on them, your product suddenly increases in value.

The other big problem is that all your processes continue running, but your disk is unmounted. I can't imagine how you'd avoid everything crashing horribly.

I mean, I can imagine an implementation where the system pauses all processes related to the user session _except_ the screenlocker, and have a custom screen-locker which can supply the credentials to luks…

But that the screen locker is a desktop application, so the compositor itself needs to stay alive too, but then compositor might try to talk to other applications, and those are frozen. So wouldn't it consider them crashed and disconnect them? Now your compositor needs to understand that the system is in a "disk unmounted and processes frozen" state too.

Not even sure how you'd deal with logs from its stdout, since the file descriptor to the log files is invalidated too.

If anyone is actually using such a setup, I have so many questions. I know that theoretically all this is feasible, but all the existing components don't seem to be ready for just unmounting the encrypted disk at runtime like that.

You can also run docker in rootless mode.

> No idea why Docker is still so much more popular than Podman. Podman is obviously the better implementation.

docker-compose is one big reason. The networking aspect of it still isn't feature-compatible compared to using docker. I keep trying podman+docker-compose again every 6–9 month, and there's also some issue that makes it unfeasible for my use case.

Its IPv6 implementation is also broken, and connections from the host to the container are dropped if the host doesn't have a public IPv6 address (WTF!?). I reported this in June 2024 (#22959). Not being able to reach an HTTP server on a podman container from my host when I'm offline is ridiculous.

Lots and lots of tiny little bugs and quirks which are a nuisance to deal with. With docker, everything just works.

Another recent bug I hit was that the value of the environment variable TMPDIR and XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is persisted to disk with podman's internal state. After a reboot, if either of those has changed, nothing works because podman tries to use directories that don't exist. This… seems to be due to workarounds for wildly broken setups.

I've reported many of these bugs, and have a backlog of a lot more that I haven't bothered to report yet.

What honestly really surprises me is how many people actually manage to use podman for work despite all its issues.

California has had a ban on the Communist Party since the fifties.

No mention of strlcpy (which was the safe replacement for strncpy in the stdlib about 15 years ago when I first heard of the former).

Apparently strscpy handles un-terminated input strings a bit better than strlcpy, but not scanning past the given length.

The issue isn't just the technical dependency.

It's also the fact that it forces each citizen to pay a few hundred Euros to companies which then campaign against their very rights.

Citizens get no support of any kind in case of issues, and has to enter a contractual agreement which is ridiculously asymmetrical, where the company has little to no responsibility of any kind, but has very ample rights to track the other party in extremely creepy ways.

Realistically, there's not any other company selling wireless noise-cancelling earbuds with these features _and_ including documentation for folks to use those feature outside of some locked ecosystem.

E.g.: Bose, Sony, etc don't include any documentation for any non-basic features, and the only way to even enable them is via the proprietary app which run on limited environments (notably: not Linux).

I don't defend the practice at all, but no matter which hardware they picked, the practices are still the same.

People mention these tools each time AirDrop comes out, and they're not at all compatible.

AirDrop allows two devices to find each other and establish a temporary network to exchange data.

LocalSend and all similar tools require that you first set up a network, have both devices join it, _and then_ handles the final portion of the exchange. The key aspect of AirDrop is that it automates all the overhead.

The open/standard equivalent for AirDrop is Wi-Fi Aware (aka: Neighbor Awareness Networking), which still lacks software support.

I'm really curious why some features are tagged "Will not be implemented" for Linux, but "Planned" for Android.

SailfishOS (from Jolla) runs Android applications via Alien Dalvik.

MS-DOS is one of the safest operating systems around: it included no network stack!

It's really hard for new designs to thrive outside hobby/research usage.

Linux/BSD have massive hardware support, where a new OS needs to start from scratch. The same is true of software support: a new OS that truly has new primitives either adds a POSIX layer (and all POSIX-like software can't benefit from many of its improvements).

Even once you get past hardware and software support (both herculean tasks) performance needs years of hard work to be comparable to mainstream OSs.

And don't even get me started on the ever-growing complexity in standard protocols: HTTP2/3? QUIC? TLS? All "doable", but also huge sinks for time and effort when you already have a huge list of things to deal with.

Would love a Bluetooth variant, so I can use Bluetooth HID devices on a host with no Bluetooth stack.

I think it was rushed, and it has some rough edges that are now too late to fix post-stabilisation. But it's neat to have such a runtime.

One annoying thing is that it's optimised for multi-threaded runtimes, so the APIs enforce lifetime requirements which don't make sense for single-threaded async applications.

Maybe that's why the 512GB RAM models are gone: they opt to pull a model without further announcement rather than increase its prices.

Sourcehut _kind of_ pushes for this model. Folks publish their own repositories, and email patches to others. But you can also just email a patch to the author without a Sourcehut account, because email is descentralised.

The Linux kernel and u-boot also follow similar flows.

Honestly, it's incredibly convenient to send a patch via `git send-email -1`, instead of having to create a for, add a remote, push, and then navigate some web-based wizard.

They took the same approach for the Steam Deck, so given that this is a repeating MO, anyone wanting to abuse the system had time to prepare accounts.

The payment addresses sound trickier to work around, but abusers can just invent a fake billing address; many payment methods neither receive nor validate this.

You only need to worry about GDPR and the hoster being in the EU if you're giving the model actual access to production data — which you shouldn't anyway. Use the model to write code that processes or analyses the data, so that process can easily be reproduced with deterministic results.

The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.

This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed.

Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.

Curious why they'd go for DHCP instead of DHCPv6 for something new in 2026.

Is there firmware around that still doesn't support IPv6, or is it simply that PXE over IPV6 isn't that common in general?

If the task is too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot arm to handle, why would a walking, humanoid generaic-use robot do any better?

Never rely a service just because they _hope_ to one day be less decentralised.

> All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear.

It's crazy that the left and green parties are against cheap, sustainable and clean energy for the masses.

> The trouble is that symlinks cut both ways. Every edit on every machine writes straight through the link into that machine’s clone of the repo.

I find this is a key feature. If a file is edited, git shows it as dirty, and I get to decide if I discard of commit the change. No extra steps required.

> By the time Homebrew and a couple of tools have run on a new Mac, files like ~/.zprofile and ~/.gitconfig already exist.

I don't get why you'd manually provision those files instead of just putting them in dotfiles.

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Personally, I found that most tools in this space tried to do too much or were too complex. I previously wrote a minimal one in Rust, but eventually re-wrote it into less than 200 lines of shell, which works pretty much anywhere, without having to install anything at all, and is part of the dotfiles repository itself:

https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/dotfiles/tree/ac97cb196f02cafa...

> The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.

For this particular case, do they really spoof the caller ID on an (expensive) international phone call, or do they actually just re-route via a local phone number?