PDF reflow is one of the major reasons I am using Koreader. The whole thing is very clever and works extremely fast given the limited nature of these devices.
64 karma · joined June 14, 2024
Actually having a email client software running on your machine is extremely nitch and is mostly in the realm of self-hosters and legacy holdouts that won't let their clients go.
A most advanced modern approach is to just use POP3 to download your emails to a local Maildir and have them indexed there non-destructively. And then sync between your various machines that you want your email accessible using some sort of file sync or P2P solution.
I use notmuch for this. It automatically indexes and tags emails and thus enables much more advanced email management solutions then what can be offered over something like IMAP.
The main advantage of this is that 'folders' are managed virtually. There is no shuffling or copying or editing of emails done normally. I only have to worry about backing up my emails and notmuch config as all the rest can be regenerated relatively quickly.
This is more or less replicating what Gmail and other webmail providers do server side.
Where as the traditional approach shuffling and moving and deleting of emails on some imap server is fairly dangerous and expensive operation. Mistakes can lead to data loss and are often very difficult to reverse.
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
I think it may add a bit of security, but containers are better thought of as mechanism to deploy and manage applications/services.
They can be useful as part of a security posture, but you kinda have to wrap everything up in SELinux or as part of some other system. Which is a lot easier to do with containers then it is to do with normal applications.
Also for most purposes:
If you want to integrate container applications into your desktop you'd be better off with something like Flatpak or distrobox/toolbx.
there are lots of things that these applications do to setup the environment and integrate into your home directory that isn't going to be done with simple scripts like this.
That doesn't mean that these scripts are useless, of course. I you want to run a application with more isolation and less integration then it is a lot easier to do it this way then with something like distrobox.
Like if you don't want to give a application access to your home directory. Or want to emulate a container environment for the cloud locally so you can hack on it.
Get a used mini-pc, install Linux on it, and don't allow the TV to connect to any networks. This is a 50-75 dollar solution. Good if you are on a budget and are not interested in any wiz-bang features like HDR.
There are a few TV-dedicated Linux systems out there, like libreElEC.
Or get a more powerful system with a AMD GPU and install Bazzite on it. That way you get something like "SteamOS for your TV". Pairs nicely with controllers like 8BitDo.
It would be nice to have TVs as open as PCs, but the manufacturers and media companies are ran by dirtbags and would rather have victims then customers.
The only really annoying thing about it is that noises from tv shows or the house sometimes triggers the voice recognition, which fails, and then you have to click through the error message.
Works fine with their ollama:rocm docker image on Fedora using podman. No complaints.
Did some gaming, too, just to see how well that works. A few steam games.
Ideally you use "software raid" or file system with the capabilities do scrubbing and repair to detect bitrot. Or have some sort of hardware solution that can do the same and notify the OS of the error correction.
And, as always, Raid-type solutions mostly exist to improve availability.
Backups are something else entirely. Nothing beats having lots of copies in different places.
The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
Stuff like this:
> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.
The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.
A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.
The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.
Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.
It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.
This wasn't that long ago.
We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)
Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.
But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}
Because that is the purpose of 'bonded and insured'.
I haven't looked at every EULA and license of every piece of software I use, but I bet that "without warranty" clauses are part of every single one of them.
It makes sense because you are unlikely to run production workloads at home.
So you don't really need a half a terabyte of RAM and a 220v power supply for the world's most expensive electric space heater.
Instead people are most often interested in developing infrastructure-as-code or testing deployment strategies or doing tests to see what happens when outages happen. Logging, metrics collecting, simulating network failure, simulating software attacks. etc.
In most of those cases having a number of smaller machines makes more sense then trying to emulate a small datacenter on a one or two big ones.
In practice I think most people end up with 2 or 3 'big machines' for times when they do need the Umph or want to have a big storage array for their "linux ISO collections". Then having a number of Pis or HP mini desktops in arrays is just for good fun.
If I want to simulate full blown workloads and benchmarking then I can just use AWS or Azure for that. A lot cheaper to lease verts for a evening or two, then buy big machines and leaving them idle 99.8% of the time.
Meaning the forests are kept forests and new trees are planted to replace the ones that are cut down. The land the trees are farmed from is kept forested because it provides a income source for the owners. Also the trees tend to grow much faster then they do in natural forests because things like spacing out trees is optimized.
This is a big complaint for wood working folks, ironically. Because natural grown trees grow slower the wood grain is much tighter and ends up being generally higher quality. Where as modern farmed wood has huge rings.
Although it isn't too bad because you don't use soft woods much for things like furniture making. Where as construction lumber is almost all soft wood.
So at least in the USA the ratio of grown-to-cut wood is about 1.92. So we plant trees nearly 2 to 1 versus what we cut down.
This basically ensures that the only people allowed to host online services for other people in the UK will be large corporations. As they are the only ones that can afford the automation and moderation requirements imposed by this bill.
You should be able to self-host content, but you can't do something like operate a forums website or other smaller social media platform unless you can afford to hire lawyers and spend thousands of dollars a month hiring moderators and/or implementing a bullet proof moderation system.
Otherwise you risk simply getting shutdown by Ofcom. Or you can do everything yo are supposed to do and get shutdown anyways. Good luck navigating their appeals processes.
If you are a primitive farmer abstract thinking isn't really useful to you. Everything you deal with in your life, except religion, can almost entirely be dealt with absolutes with little in the way of abstractions.
If it rains at the right time then you can have a good harvest. If the weather is bad then it sucks. If there is animals threatening your crops or herd you need to take steps to deal with them.
There is a lot of logic in dealing with these things. You have to know the seasons, know the stars, know the dirt, etc. You have to understand the life cycle and manipulate the behavior and biology of plants and animals at the right stages in their lives. Things have a logical sequence and there are direct consequences that are predictable from events and your actions.
Where as in modern society you have been conditioned to think in terms of hypothetical and abstractions through being exposed to testing your entire life.
You first need to know how test questions work before you are able to answer them accurately.
For a person who isn't exposed to this then the whole affair of asking hypotheticals and assuming imaginary situations with specific rules that don't actually apply to the present reality is very confusing.
They don't even understand the question. So, of course, they are going to suck at answering them.
And ultimately that is all IQ testing measures.. your ability to take tests.
These are the movers and shakers. Any barrier to entry for people creating businesses and selling products to the public is a innovation murderer.
Big companies are bureaucratic morasses that have very difficult time adjusting to change. They have figured out how to do something successful enough once to get big, but as time moves on the behavior that lead to profitability 20 years ago leads to bankruptcy now.
This is why they rely on buying small businesses for new products and different approaches.
If it is hard and dangerous to start new ventures and be able to find and hire the right people and fire the wrong ones then you are going to have a society with very little in the way of actual innovation.
Big governments love big corporate businesses. It is a lot easier to manipulate and regulate a handful of big businesses then it is for thousands of mostly anonymous unknown businesses that come and go on a yearly basis. But you need that unregulated chaos and competition for innovation to happen.
Speed of sounds is roughly 343 meters per second. Which means translates we can sense the delay difference of about 4-8 meters or so.
Which 100% corresponds with what you are saying. 20 meters is a 58ms-ish delay.
A 200ms is about 70 meters. Which would be like having conversation between people using one of those accidental sound projection features that sometimes happens with large open buildings like sports stadiums.
people talk in a cadence of around 100-200 words per minute. I guess we could say that is 300-600 syllables per minute. So that is about 200-100ms per syllable.
It all kinda lines up.
Take the dollar, for instance. One of the major reasons it is still dominance reserve currency is because major contracts in other countries often peg the value of the contract to the dollar rather then local currency. Even if the contracts have nothing to do with international trade or USA. The reason for this is because the local currencies are far more likely to fluctuate in value thus putting long term projects at financial risk.
This sort of thing isn't so much because central bankers in USA are brilliant, but more to do with that central bankers in other countries are far stupider.
Since the 1970s the USA financial policy is one of exporting debt in exchange for importing goods. Bizzarely the rest of the world has allowed this to work. The upside is that this allows Americans to benefit from making foreign goods much cheaper for essentially nothing. The downside is that it has made industry in the USA much more unprofitable and thus annihilating it.
But it continues to work. China continues to use financial manipulation and central control of the economy to produce massive amounts of goods at a great loss to the wealth and well being of the Chinese people, which keeps the USA economy afloat. EU is obsessed with protectionist policies and using their economy to project "soft power" in a bid to maintain some semblance of European Empire-era policy controls over its former colonies... which makes it even less competitive then USA industry. So much so that it is fairly likely that in 50 years people will be trying to go from Europe to Africa to get jobs.
This isn't what winning looks like. The reason why USA seems like a powerhouse economy compared to EU is because its leaders don't fail as badly.