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neobrain

344 karma · joined March 15, 2014

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neobrain··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.
neobrain··on NixOS is making me less afraid
One strength of nixpkgs that probably appeals to Arch users too is how much software is available and how easily you can just re-compile apps with custom patches. In fact, the latter is enabled exactly through reproducibility :)

That said, cool if pacman and AUR work for you, no need to change just for the sake of it!

neobrain··on NixOS is making me less afraid
Just adding to this since the point might be lost for people new to nix:

You can assign a value to `services.restic.backups.my_repo.paths = [ ... ]` in multiple places throughout your system configuration. When applying the config, all the values will be merged into a single list.

This is important because other standard tasks besides backup (e.g. firewall, monitoring, ...) also require per-service configuration. If every one of these tasks had only a single place where you needed to put a megalist of services (which is basically how `/etc` works on typical Linux distros!), this would quickly scatter the configuration that pertains to FreshRSS over N different files, making it hard to track where everything lives.

neobrain··on Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Running Cosmic (which is a Wayland-only DE) on a DGX Spark. It just works.
neobrain··on Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?
Can't speak for all countries ofc, but the happy path isn't just the US. I've heard positive reports in Europe where banking apps work without Play services more often than not, and if it doesn't some banks will actually change implemented policy once a customer complains.
neobrain··on Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?
> This comes up every time, I just don't understand the argument. You can fork AOSP when that happens

Hacking on the Linux stack is several orders of magnitude more practical than AOSP though. AOSP's build system is massively unwieldy for individual contributors to work on. You can't easily work on any of the system components without dedicating >100 GiB of storage for a build, for example. Everything is scattered across hundreds of repositories tied together with a bespoke repository management tool.

This all works for a company equipped with entire build infrastructure teams, not for a grassroots project trying to keep up maintenance with (at best) limited funding. It's why Nura (fka postmarketOS) is a thing whereas the various AOSP forks barely ever modify the core experience.

neobrain··on MXC - a sandboxed code execution system
Sounds OpenShell locks filesystem access on sandbox creation - arguably the most important isolation feature, at least for my use cases. Architecturally it looks right though!
neobrain··on MXC - a sandboxed code execution system
Very interesting concept to make permissions specific to individual shell commands though. Certainly good that people are experimenting with these approaches, hopefully ideas will eventually converge so we don't need to know like a 100 different sandbox projects :)
neobrain··on MXC - a sandboxed code execution system
Even for pure research/prototyping, you quickly run into the problem that your sandbox is either prohibitively minimal or overly permissive. Depending on the exact task, you may need GPU access, Docker/Nix socket access, ability to ptrace processes (gdb), run webfetches, etc. If I define a "research" sandbox profile to allow all of these, I might as well not have any sandbox at all.
neobrain··on MXC - a sandboxed code execution system
Do any of these sandboxing solutions have a dynamic component to them that lets you grant permissions, starting with a minimal sandbox and asynchronously adding permissions as they become necessary? Harnesses try to do this when accessing non-project folders, but it's not always strictly enforced and generally not revocable. Harnesses also block agent execution until a decision is made, which requires constant monitoring to ensure progress can happen when the agent could easily proceed with an alternative method right away.

I like the idea of a minimal sandbox that protects against accidental `rm -rf` and against personal data leakage, but such a setup then often gets in the way of the specific task to be done. Ideally the sandbox would be able to aggregate blocked accesses and then expose them in an external TUI dashboard, where I can then enable access (without blocking any running agent on this, since that's prone to "press okay" fatigue).

Does anything close to this exist yet?

neobrain··on Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data
> because it’s the same process of intermediaries accumulating, inferring and sharing data to each other

Except that YouTube doesn't need any of that to recommend Minecraft videos to you. One mundane explanation that seems more likely is that it's the type of content that on average works best on people they don't yet have information on.

Reminds me a little of these "phones listen to everything we say, otherwise I wouldn't have been shown this ad" anecdotes that don't hold up against empiric evidence.

neobrain··on Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data
> Google somehow got to know that I played Minecraft again after a decade. [...] I knew at that point already that probably all my PI is public information anyway

How are you jumping from Minecraft (probably one of the most watchtime-generating content types out there) being displayed on your main page to… your personal information being known to everyone?

neobrain··on I tried the new Fairphone, a phone designed to be repaired
Obviously not ideal, but update latency is much better with other third party distributions like iodéOS or CalyxOS.

At least in contrast to other vendors, FP provides official support for microG, so this has been without noticeable loss of stability/quality for my use cases so far.

neobrain··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
> As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code.

It's an interesting example given that Wine considers deriving code from traces of original components (like hypervisor traces) tainted and also bans LLM contributions for legal considerations: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

neobrain··on Asahi Linux Supports M3
At least equally worth pointing out: Three different people are actively working on it, see https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/12/contributions/532/ .
neobrain··on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+
> I already addressed that in my comment, right after the line you quoted.

Where? You suggested it would go through Murena instead, but you can fully disable third party services by disabling external push providers and by using on-device databases for GPS. e/OS directly offers this configuration during initial setup.

> And what would you say GrapheneOS does of those? Do you know, or do you just assume that GrapheneOS does the worse there?

I'm not necessarily trying to present either as "better" or "worse" since they both have their merits depending what exactly you're after (which I don't feel this is the right time/place to have a detailed rundown of). It was the root comment that posited e/OS was strictly inferior for people who care about freedom.

neobrain··on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+
> I am not sure what you are trying to say here. I have never had an Android system that did not have OTA updates. Everything included... I usually like to install the apps I want?

The last bit of my sentence could easily be misread as an enumeration of three things ("microG", "OTA updates", "everything included"), but it was actually an elaboration: FP is the only vendor to support microG, and (in contrast to "unofficial" microG setups) it doesn't require sacrifices in convenience because standard features like OTA updates work just like with your average Android. Perhaps that's clearer?

(Notably "Everything included" does not mean it ships a thousand apps or something. To the contrary, FP stock OS is mostly vanilla Android)

Point being: I could install LineageOS on my last phone, but it was a poorly documented process, updates were a hassle (having to flash through custom recovery for lack of OTA), and I had virtually no confidence in data integrity when running major updates.

> Is it better to have microG contacting the Google servers or sandboxed Play Services going through a Graphene-powered proxy?

How about microG not contacting Google servers at all?

In any case you're presenting an unnecessarily binary argument though. Letting Google handle push notifications is different from using them as your location provider, and both are different from letting all Play Services lose on your system.

neobrain··on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+
I'm not big on this general line on argument, but one point in particular:

> And of course, fairphone’s hardware and OS are nothing to write home about. For the freedom and security nerds they’re better off with GrapheneOS on Pixel or whatever upcoming Motorola phones will support it.

For the "freedom nerds", FP is one of the only (if not the only?) vendor to have official support for microG-based operating systems, seamless OTA updates and everything included. The Murena e/OS offering in particular is simple enough that the non-nerds that (perhaps less outspokenly) care about freedom can just pick it up with little change in habits.

neobrain··on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+
> If there are tradeoffs, if would be nice if the customers can decide what to have, in a modular product.

A "modular product" has tradeoffs in and of itself (such as size, price, water resistance, …), which presumably would not fly for a majority of customers.

neobrain··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
Where are you getting GPS from? Grandparent commenter talked about bluetooth beacons and parent suggested reading the docs.

The contact tracing APIs very deliberately avoided GPS for exactly the reason you mention.

neobrain··on Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark
Just curious, has suspend (to RAM) been working for you?

For me the nvidia driver just keeps waking up the system instantly - but my setup is deviating from the upstream flake in a few ways, so I'm just wondering if it's worth setting up the system from scratch if it's working for other people.

Other than that, can fully second that the flake is working great. Only gotcha is that CUDA-enabled packages (including Firefox) require using the flox binary cache unless you want to compile them from source, but then the package versions can lag behind a bit (and debugging nix cache issues is surprisingly difficult).

neobrain··on EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track
Yes, this had been temporarily permitted until recently, and AFAIK they continue doing so illegally at the moment.
neobrain··on EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track
For context, this refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law).

This is still problematic, but the far more dangerous Chat Control 2.0 that would weaken end-to-end-encrypted messengers like Signal is not being discussed here.

Not to diminish the gravity of the new development, but the defeatist "no way to prevent this" narratives that are already popping up here are getting old -- when in fact it looks like 2.0 is off the table for good because protest against it has proven effective.

neobrain··on The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
See https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/#speakers

The effect is understated there, perhaps because Apple speakers are actually somewhat usable without this feature. For the X13s, the speakers might as well not exist in the current state on Linux.

neobrain··on The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
Unlikely. I've been daily-driving the predecessor (X13s). While it's usable and technically all drivers are there, it's far from "without pain" due to endless number of small but annoying quirks. Just to give you an idea: boot fails 4 out of 5 times, external displays aren't recognized unless plugged in/out several times, sporadic resets during overnight sleep, etc. On top of that speakers will sound prohibitively tinny due unimplemented software-side speaker protection. I haven't tried T14s, but at least the audio issues will still apply there.

Apple devices supported by Asahi are a far more polished experience.

neobrain··on My main Android phone is now 99% Google free
This seems to be mainly brought up by people concerned they'd lose banking apps than people who actually have issues. It's rooted phones that often get blocked, whereas those that run LineageOS/microG without rooting are largely fine.

Yes, there are certainly banks that block more aggressively, but if you look at e.g. iodéOS's forums most of them work fine: https://community.iode.tech/t/banking-finance-and-insurance-...

Anecdotally, I've also seen a lot of stories of people reaching out to support about overblocking actually seeing success. Apparently there are often enterprise reasons for the block and it literally just needs a customer to complain for engineering to be able to act.

neobrain··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
> Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.

Among the "GPU rendered terminal" options, afaik Ghostty is the only one that has proper search/context menus, tabs, and scroll bars. I'm sure it's easy to get by without, but compared to the overall value-add of these terminals (which exists indeed but isn't tremendous either) I find it quite a significant downgrade, so I appreciate that Ghostty has both.

neobrain··on Deno Desktop
With Dioxus, program logic compiles to native code instead of running it through a JS engine, and it ships its own HTML renderer (Blitz) instead of bundling a whole browser. So it's a lot more lightweight and performant than Electron.

As a minor bonus, the live-reload is also faster than what frameworks like React do. It truly has subsecond latency, which isn't exactly a game changer but is nice when iterating on visual details of an app.

neobrain··on Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
(for context, you're replying to the author of an alternative nix input pinning mechanism, which means... they're probably aware of all that and yet they chose their wording like this anyway)
neobrain··on Proton Meet
They are hiring specifically for that: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonDrive/comments/1spx14d/proton...
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