avhception

Huh, I'm over 10 years in and didn't know about the rightclick-resize either. I really like it! Thanks!

When KDE 4 came out, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 came out in (checks notes) 2011, I switched to XFCE. And that was that. I have a minimal taskbar at the bottom of my screen, with a little tray and a little button for the whisker menu. But I usually launch that using hyper + space. It gets out of my way, it gets shit done, I love it. Let's hope that it will survive the Wayland transition.

I'm on 600mbps fiber with low latency. Some times, I can't be arsed to load the websites linked on HN and simply head straight into the comments. For example, when it's a link to Twitter, I get an endless onslaught of in-site popups. Cookie banners, "sign in with google", "sign in to X", "X is better on the app" and so on and so forth. Meh. I'll sometimes just stick to HN, especially when I'm on my phone on the sofa or something.

Give me a minimal / plain text website every day, it's not just the link speed.

The world at large doesn't care what I love, correct. But my users care about whether they have to remember that they're supposed to use port bla instead of the standard port foo, which is a common scenario with v4. Not enough addresses, and / or you can't get them to the VM or container or VPN client or whatever that needs them. IPv6 can often fix these kinds of issues.

Does the world at large care? No.

Do I care? Yes.

Do my users care? Yes, albeit indirectly.

Does my organization care? Yes, in the sense that it removes friction from what it needs the employees to do.

And that's all the justification that's needed, I'd say. The world very clearly doesn't need to revolve around what I love for IPv6 to be a good thing.

I absolutely love the things that IPv6 delivers and employ it on purpose.

As a "West-German", I'd argue that's also true over here. The 80s and 90s are gone. I even sometimes use the construct "Bonner Republik" to refer to the time before unification.

Interesting, that's a point of view that I didn't consider so far. Growing up in Europe, even the local church often dates back quite a few centuries. My small hometown has residential buildings that are multiple centuries old, still inhabited today. The town itself dates back to 1072. The attitude towards the buildings and history is very different here.

Hello from Germany, and thanks for the blog post. Fascinating read. I liked how you intertwined the personal point of view with the bigger picture.

"Facing a complex past" is a big theme in Germany, too, of course, and I think it's the only proper way to deal with it. Direct witness accounts and retelling are important and add something that a dry history book can't provide. Keep up the good work!

Well, I don't know why it didn't work out for you. But my AMD experience has improved fundamentally since the fglrx days, to the point where I prefer AMD over Nvidia. You said you don't know why people say that AMD has improved so much, but it definitely rings true for me.

I said "LLM lens" because you were talking about hardware typically used for number crunching, not graphics displays, like the MI300. So I was suggesting that the difference between what you hear online about the driver and your own experience might result from people like me mostly talking about the 2d / 3d acceleration side of things while the experience for ROCm and stuff is probably another story altogether.

Works very well for me! YMMV maybe depending on the titles you play, but that would probably be more of a Proton issue than an AMD issue, I'd guess. I'm not a huge gamer, so take my experience with a grain of salt. But I've racked up almost 300 hours of Witcher3 with the HQ patch on a 4k TV display using my self-compiled Gentoo kernel, and it worked totally fine. A few other games, too. So there's that!

Maybe it's just that you're mostly viewing this through the LLM lens?

I remember having to fight with fglrx, AMDs proprietary Linux driver, for hours on end. Just to get hardware-acceleration for my desktop going! That driver was so unbearable I bought Nvidia just because I wanted their proprietary driver. Cut the fiddling time from many hours to maybe 1 or 2!

Nowadays, I run AMD because their open-source amdgpu driver means I just plonk the card into the system, and that's it. I've had to fiddle with the driver exactly zero times. The last time I used Nvidia is the distant past for me. So - for me, their drivers are indeed "so much better". But my usecase is sysadmin work and occasional gaming through Steam / Proton. I ran LMStudio through ROCm, too, a few times. Worked fine, but I guess that's very much not representative for whatever people do with MI300 / H100.

Sometimes it's also possible to simply disconnect the hotel's SIP phone from the Ethernet jack and use that :)

> Because what this AI-generated SEO slop formed from an extremely vulnerable and honest place shows is that women’s pain is still not taken seriously.

Companies putting words in people's mouth on social media using "AI" is horrible and shouldn't be allowed.

But I completely fail to see what this has to do with misogyny. Did Instagram have their LLM analyze the post and then only post generated slob when it concluded the post came from a woman? Certainly not.

I tried local models for general-purpose LLM tasks on my Radeon 7800 XT (20GB VRAM), and was disappointed.

But I keep thinking: It should be possible to run some kind of supercharged tab completion on there, no? I'm spending most of my time writing Ansible or in the shell, and I have a feeling that even a small local model should give me vastly more useful completion options...

"[...] it's probably impossible to find a useful Linux installation without [Perl or Python]. [...]"

Oof. We seem to have very, very different definitions for both "Linux" and "useful". If all Linux installs w/o Perl or Python would cease to exist tomorrow, we'd probably enter a global crisis. Industrial processes failing left and right, collapse of wide swaths of internet and telecom infrastructure and god knows what else from ships to cars and smartphones.

Regarding libcurl: libcurl probably represents the vast majority of curl installations. curl the CLI tool is mostly porcelain on top of libcurl. libcurl is used in _a lot_ of places. For example, inside the PHP runtime. And god knows were else, there must be billions of installations as part of other projects. It's not a weird argument, libcurl is 95% of the raison d'être for curl. If you want a curl-like tool in Python or Perl, you gotta write it in Python or Perl. Somebody probably already did. So maybe just use one of these? Instead of demanding that curl be transformed into something which is incompatible with it's mission statement.

Your comment comes across disingenuous to me. Writing it in, for example, Java would have limited it to situations where you have the JVM available, which is a minuscule subset of the situations that curl is used in today, especially if we're not talking "curl, the CLI tool" but libcurl. I have a feeling you know that already and mostly want to troll people. And Golang is only 16 years old according to Wikipedia, by the way.

Basically the Sysadmin's dilemma.

Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?"

Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"

Are you implying that the "neo-KGB" never mounted a concerted effort to manipulate western public opinion through comment spam? We can debate whether that should be called a "troll army", but we're fairly certain that such efforts are made, no?

I, too, was under the impression that Kea is now mostly out and they're going the dnsmasq route. There were open issues about some basic features with Kea, too: https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/7475

We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take Valve over any of the other players in their market all day every day without even thinking twice. EDIT: You're absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.

Can confirm: that's exactly what we do.

I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that).

I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.

Maybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?

Nice, signed!

Came here to remark about ECC as well.

The remote KVM options from HP and Dell and whatnot are usually so useless they might as well not exist except from remote power up / down, so I don't really care about that.

Well, I read that footnote, but I'm not sure if overloading the acronym is the best idea, is what I'm trying to say.

When I read "PDNS", I will probably always think "PowerDNS".

Ah, ja, this wasn't so much a comment about that guy but mostly a comment about Germany. Could have done without the "that guy" sentence, my bad.

We also had a facility for sorting nuts and bots shut down because the original building permit was for a CNC shop or something, "metal works" or whatever the technical term is in English.

You see, sorting nuts and bolts is not "metal work" because you're not altering the metal. So the permit was revoked, they wouldn't issue a new one, and we had to move shop. That alone almost cost that little sorting spin-off it's live.

Maybe that guy needs a trip to Germany to feel a little better about the processes in the USA. The stuff I've seen over the years is completely insane. And I'm not even working for industries that do any novel stuff, just boring old stuff. Getting permits for building something as trivial as a small storage facility for literal nuts and bolts will make you feel like you've entered Kafkas "Der Prozess".

And if you, somehow, through some miracle, after decades, get said permit and build something (to absurdly high costs), you're under constant threat of being shut down for arbitrary reasons. Again, the nuts and bolts storage is a literal nuts and bolts storage. Just some maybe 200 metal crates with metal nuts and bolts in there, with a roof on top. It was shut down after we built it. "Fire hazard". And we're not talking hot stuff just off the production line or something, no. Just ambient-temperature nuts and bolts in metal crates with a metal roof on top.

The stories that I've heard or sometimes even was somehow involved in would take many hours to write down and have the reader shake their head in disbelief. And, again, I'm not even anywhere near any new innovation. Just regular boring stuff.