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laxd

527 karma · joined July 3, 2013

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laxd··on Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
I hear you. We are just not hitting the same notes. And people are dying from Scrooge-affairs of healthcare and eldercare here as well. I guess you have seen elderly turn into a skeleton and die because they stop eating when they hit the elderly-home? Would'nt feed their stuff to my dog. "Worlds richest country". Manhatten apartements.
laxd··on Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
The "democratic" processes in EU seems rather opaque and hidden from my point of view. Not like the rest of norwegian politics. Just ... here's the latest batch of out-of-touch decisions from Brussel.
laxd··on Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
Exactly. Either way would be better. We have no vote but all the rules.

A couple of examples:

* We have one of the worlds best bottle deposit systems. Now that the EU has made their rules. Norway has to spend tons of money regressing to a common system. [1]

* Norway has good cleansing facilities for water/sewage. Now that the EU has made their decisions - based on research from urban regions of southern europe and the pollution of rivers - sparsely populated fjord communes of Norway dont know how the fuck they will pay for upgrades to their already modern systems, other than passing it on to an already strained population. [2] (Norwegiens are not generally rich. Our state is rich. They use the money for investing in anything but Norway. Manhatten real estate is good. Norwegian roads, hospitals and elder care is not*).

[1] https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/eu-vil-tvinge-norge-til-a-innfor...

[2] https://www.nrk.no/vestland/nye-eu-krav-til-avlopsreinsing-k...

* It's arguable that the poor state of many affairs in Norway is due to a spoiled bureaucracy and wastefull economy rather than lack of investement.

laxd··on Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
A temporary measure. Knowing the current regime they will use years & millions on comittees, reports, reviews, expert groups and all kinds of bureaucratic wage labor I don't have english vocabulary for. And then, the EU, which we a not a member of, decides everything behind our back.
laxd··on cp: -r or -R?
Use toor for good measure.
laxd··on Everyone's Packing Up
Robots in my garage doing woodwork would be nice. They'd be auto-orchestrated by all the spywares and spydevices already in place - and who knowns more about me and my ideas than me. And I don't have to learn anything.
laxd··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
Your getting downvoted but it's a natural question. It's like the kernel hacker running windows on a pad. But he's having fun, thats the whole point.
laxd··on OpenAI's Sam Altman to Brief UN Security Council Next Week
Shocking publicity is good publicity. And "my product is so potent it will probably destroy you." I think I´ve heard it from drug dealers as well.
laxd··on I'm Tired of the AI Tone
Would be awfull to be an articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day nowadays.
laxd··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Pardon any corruption in my memory. But I think D in it`s early days had non-optional garbage collection. Which seemed like a bad choice at a time when I think many of us wanted a better C, not a more inconvenient C#. Then they made garbage collection optional, which split the ecosystem into garbage collected and manual libraries. Not a great choice either. Then there was a drama and split because of two competing standard libs. And also the compiler was closed source which turned some people of in a time where open source compilers had become an expectation. So all in all, some wrong turns made it lose momentum and I don`t think it can recover in todays climate.
laxd··on RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
Real apple-people would'nt consider this anyways. Open source geeks is were they can get traction. Seems like there is plenty of us that would like fbsd quality and vertical integration to the desktop level. There is effort but no breakthroughs.
laxd··on Minecraft: Java Edition 26.2, the first version with Vulkan 1.2
My view: The nether update was fabulous with so much new stuff. After that they seemed overconfident and promised way too much. They delivered but it took three new versions rather than one. Each of those versions was awesome in my opinion. But the community got sour because they were promised this stuff faster. I think part of the reason was that certain features, especially the Warden, Deep Dark and Ancient Cities was extended in scope, with awesome results. But then Mojang started promising less and moved to smaller feature drops. The autocrafter seems fun, but all in all, the updates from 1.20 onwards have been so boring that my interest have just dwindled out.
laxd··on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race
Certainly not the only one making things worse. Software has become an enemy of the people in the last 10 years. Remember when the internet was nominated for Nobel Peace price?
laxd··on 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
Absolutely not. These are fundamental concepts in our computer world and a step on the latter towards becoming a programmer or sysadmin.
laxd··on X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.

It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.

laxd··on 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
A thought in the other direction though. A lot of fields don't really have kids playing their way towards skill. Still people find their way to the frontiers and push on.
laxd··on 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
> Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with.

A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.

In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still) Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem? Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).

And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.

laxd··on Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025
Thanks for the effort, that was an interesting read.
laxd··on Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025
I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
laxd··on Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025
"If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus

My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing.

And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.

laxd··on A brief look at FreeBSD
My impression is that ASLR just hasn't been well regarded and prioritized. See for example this tweet by cperciva: https://x.com/cperciva/status/1528971801983823872
laxd··on 52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history
The OG thread: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115504720054699983
laxd··on Zig is so cool, C is cooler
> But before Zig, there was C. For fifty years, C has been the foundation of modern computing.

And for fifty years, language theory has made progress. While C, brilliant as it once was, has given us never ending problems with security and reliability. The software world is saturated anyways. It's time to revise rather than just layering new junk in chase of profit.

> This article does not aim to dismiss Zig. Its focus is on the fact that C never stopped evolving.

It didn't stop but it certainly slowed down to glacial pace. There's plenty of fundamental issues that will never be fixed.

That said. I wish the software world would just keep its cool and not commit to Rust so fast. Rust was the first in a trend of new low level languages. It snowballed and now we may not get to make an informed decision on how the future of low level programming should be. I personally like Zig a lot more. Unfortunately people seem to be neither adequately scared of complexity nor sufficiently impressed by simplicity.

laxd··on Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages
I've worked for a company with a large code base in Visual Basic .net. Product been in development since the 90's, with rich customer that only cares about their software doing its job. It's a surprisingly productive language combined with Visual Studio. Even though, as a language enthusiast, I barfed a bit now and then. Dev team would like to switch to C# but it would have been a multi-year effort taking away from lucrative feature requests.
laxd··on Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
Ports is a meta build system, from which packages are created. Gives a lot of convenient power and flexibility. For ready built packages, the FreeBSD equivalent of dpkg or whatever five different package commands Debian is using now would be pkg.
laxd··on Facts about throwing good parties
Sounds like the knee-jerk rules of some socialite circle in a top floor Manhatten apartment.

Please let me have some of your cocaine.

laxd··on Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
For FreeBSD, given that it fulfills the tasks required:

* Ease of management - more holistically designed.

* Rock solid parts that fits together - more holistically designed.

* ZFS, jails, bhyve, dtrace, ports.

* If it works today, it works tomorrow.

* A more approachable community (which AMD says is the reason why they are developing for FreeBSD before Linux now).

* Transparency and simplicity of how it works - if you can understand it, you can manage it and fix it.

* Documentation.

* Fun! Linux is not fun.

laxd··on Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
My impression:

* PF was imported into FreeBSD from OpenBSD, maybe it had problems at first.

* Both implementations have been actively maintained, further developed, and diverged.

* There is now collaboration in the development of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD implementations.

* PF is the shit. Even though IPFW is the "invented here" firewall.

laxd··on Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
Addendum: I've used FreeBSD as my daily driver (I hate that term) since around 2004. Including through cs/math university. With Windows in a VM for "I need it". The longer I've used it the more I'm annoyed by the trivialities of Linux distro management. And the bugs that happens between ill fitting parts composed by underfunded distro developers.

And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.

My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depends on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.

laxd··on Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
- firewall?

PF seems to me like pretty much the most well regarded firewall there is - with a nice, sensible DSL for config. If you don't like like it, you can use use IPFW or IPFILTER, which are alternative, built-in, firewall front-ends.

- In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks

Maybe you have built your routine around a system that have reinvented the wheel? I think FreeBSD knowledge degrades more slowly than that of Linux distros.

- I'm just not an OS dev.

That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world. Do you think my life revolve around keeping up with this shit? :)

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