jabl

If Rust and static linking were to become much more popular, Linux distros could adopt some rsync/zsync like binary diff protocol for updates instead of pulling entire packages from scratch.

I thought the entire point of Ladybird was precisely to reinvent the wheel?

There's https://himmelblau-idm.org/ for a Linux client for Entra. Haven't tried it myself though.

Does this evolution of the Vulkan API get closer to the model explained in https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api which we discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46293062 ?

Kind of, but not really.

Rayleigh scattering is elastic (only the direction changes), whereas Raman scattering is inelastic (energy, that is color changes in addition to direction) scattering.

Some Fortran compilers also did this. MS Powerstation Fortran at least, IIRC.

If you want to make an argument for something else being the representations of boolean variables than 0 for false and 1 for true, one could make the case for true being all bits set.

That would make it slightly easier to do things like memset()'ing a vector of boolean, or a struct containing a boolean like in this case. Backwards compatibility with pre-_Bool boolean expressions in C99 probably made that a non starter in any case.

The (minor, but still) optimization that is enabled by assuming _Bool can contain only 1 or 0 is that negating a boolean value can be with x^1, without requiring a conditional.

That being said, for just testing the value, using the zero/nonzero test that every (?) cpu has is enough; I'm not sure what is achieved here with this more complex test.

Amusingly(?), the Juha Sipilä character mentioned in the article later became prime minister in Finland from 2015-2019.

In the sense of a farmer being more likely to have access to a local supply of firewood, and that tractors are probably more used for longer stretches at a time than running down to the grocery store, sure.

Historically, they weren't that common, as large-scale use of wood gas was mostly a thing in Europe during WWII, and during that period continental European agriculture was still mostly horse-driven. After WWII when agricultural mechanization really picked up, fuel was again available so there was no big motivation to put up with the disadvantages of wood gasifiers.

Maybe when the doors open the characteristic smell of that station enters the cars?

If I had to make I guess, I'd go with the dogs recognizing the smell. Dogs apparently don't have terribly good vision, but as I'm sure we all know, a very good sense of smell.

Would be nice if the OrioleDB improvements were to be incorporated in postgresql proper some day.. https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/solving-postgresql-wick...

Because the heat and pressure from the propellant and rifling vaporizes or rubs off some of that lead. A very small percentage, granted, but still.

Particularly for unjacketed bullets like 22LR. Even jacketed bullets tend to not be jacketed at the base.

I recall there's one factory on the planet still producing TEL, so once they decide it's no longer profitable it's over.

Aviation gasoline is probably the one market that still keeps it afloat, when/if piston aviation switches over the remaining market is small and insignificant.

That's true, and without any legislation or such prohibiting lead they would most likely have continued to use it as anyone who would have phased out lead would have been at a competitive disadvantage. But once it was banned, everybody was again on an even playing field, and as OP explained fuel is a commodity so the higher cost just flowed through to the end user prices, refinery margins stayed about where they were.

Good point. Though too late in this particular case, since the battery was also busted, I ended up e-wasting the machine.

AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work?

But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my AP, so I had to downgrade security for the experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays (AV1?), or whatever.

Someone was still working on some minor cleanups in August 2025: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250825163545.39303-1-andriy.s...

(That mail also mentions the floppy driver is "basically orphaned" though. But evidently it's still there and builds.)

Maybe you're thinking of the floppy tape (ftape) driver, which was removed back in the 2.6.20 kernel. Though there's a project keeping an out-of-tree version of it working with recent kernels at https://github.com/dbrant/ftape

Sounds like the creative commons attribution scam as detailed by Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/01/pixsynnussija/

To comment on using direct current rather than alternating current, at least NVIDIA is working on 800VDC:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosy...

More generally, a bunch of the electrical industry heavyweights are involved in a standard for DC microgrids called Current/OS: https://currentos.org/

There are certainly advantages to DC vs AC, but there's of course a huge amount of sunken cost in contemporary AC networks.

The real thing is open source since 2012 https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

> I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives.

You can? The system where I'm writing this uses systemd, yet networking is handled by NetworkManager and not systemd-networkd. Time keeping is handled by chrony and not systemd-timesyncd (or whatever the systemd NTP client was called). Etc. Systemd in fact has many components that are optional. Of course, there are also parts of it that are non-optional, just like many other collections of related software.

> Isn't linux about choice?

Linux is "about choice" to the extent that the source code is freely available, and if you don't like what upstream is doing, you have the choice to fork it and do whatever you want. "Linux is about choice" does not extend to upstream maintainers being obligated to cater to every whim of every end user.

Case in point, Devuan: Not being satisfied with the path Debian was taking, they exercised their choice and are now doing their own thing. Good for them! And to the extent this has reduced the frequency of systemd haters starting yet another anti-systemd flame war on the Debian mailing lists, it seems to me Debian has won too. Hooray!

> You're right about getting industrial lubricants in bulk for cheap. But I don't need 55 gallons of lubricant. I'd never use it all nor do I want to store it.

Well, the corollary to that is that if it's just small case usage then if you buy a 1L bottle of some general purpose lubrication oil for, say, $5, then it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things that the price/L is a lot higher than if you buy an entire drum of the stuff. ;-)

> Used engine oil isn't really suitable for lubricating an engine anymore but it's fine for a temporary lubricant of a drill bit, some random hinge on a gate, or stubborn bushing on a piece of equipment. Engine oil is only really replaced on an engine because at some point it degrades enough that things like oil film bearings in the crankshaft would start to fail. A bushing on something like a small dump trailer doesn't rotate at 2300 rpm.

Fair enough. I guess I just don't see the benefit here vs just having some bottle of cheap unused lubricant. Except if used engine oil is the only thing you happen to have at hand.

> If I need a universal lubricant that is readily available and cheap, I just use used motor oil.

Why? Used motor oil is, well, used. It contains metal particles from the engine and combustion byproducts, which is why it was replaced in the first place. Granted, most lubrication applications aren't the marvels of precision parts moving at high speed that a modern engine is so can probably make do with poorer oil, but still.

You can buy industrial lubricants in bulk for pretty cheap so that unless you use huge quantities of it, it shouldn't make much difference.

As an aside, my aunt's husband worked more or less his entire career in a heavy truck repair shop. And he had an oil burner heating his house (you can see where this is going, eh?). So he got used engine oil for free, the shop was happy to get rid of it as disposing of it properly cost money. I think burning used engine oil was illegal already back then due to the pollution, and nowadays I think they have some government mandated accounting system to ensure that the same amount of oil is sent to proper recycling as comes in.

At least soot from ships is an issue in high latitudes, as it turns out that the soot reduces the albedo of the ice and it thus has an outsized global warming impact.

The podman kube support? It provides similar functionality as docker-compose, using a yaml file which is a subset of the Kubernetes pod definition syntax.

Then you can just create a few line systemd unit definition, and it integrates as a normal systemd unit, with logs visible via journalctl etc.

You can actually count to 12 on your fingers using one hand. Use the thumb as a pointer, then for each of your other fingers you have three joints. So 3*4=12.

As long as we count in base 10, it makes sense for the unit system to also be based on base 10.

As for changing the world to counting in base 12, yes there would be some advantages, but really, good luck with that.

Quick AI search suggests average car age in Norway to be 11.1-11.3 years, so indeed quite similar.

As for what would happen with gas station when EV's dominate, what already seems to be in progress here (not due to EV's, but other factors in the market) is that the "traditional" gas station serving stale coffee, snacks, and windshield wiper fluid are on the way out, replaced by either unmanned cold stations with just the pumps, or then by major roads large full-featured mini shopping malls with groceries, half-decent restaurant (sometimes several), and other shops. I think in a future EV world the cold stations would disappear but the higher end service centers would do fine.