raffraffraff

Shanling OS is trash. Absolute trash. Hiby OS is decent.

For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music. That means a bunch of things to me:

1. "Touchscreen first" UX

2. Heavier than it needs to be

3. Worse battery life compared to a non-Android device

Using a touchscreen in the rain is impossible. Running out of battery sucks. Going for a run with a 240g brick is no fun, it'll pull your pants down to your knees and trip you.

Compare the specs:

    Hiby R1
    Dimensions: 86.9 x 60.6 x 14.5 mm
    Weight: 118g
    OS: HibyOS
    Battery: 19 hour play time
    Price: $159.00

    Hiby R4
    Dimensions: 129.6 x 68.3 x 18.5 mm
    Weight: 231g
    OS: Android 12
    Battery: 11 hour play time
    Price: $249

These are the things matter to me, in addition to the UX, sound quality, Bluetooth support, expandable / removable storage and sane file-based playlists.

You can write an agent.md file and gradually add to it as you develop the project. The reason junior developers get better is that the context goes from low to high over the time you spend working with them. Yes, "learning".

I've found that maintaining a file that is designed to increase the LLM's awareness of how I want to approach problems, how I build / test / ship code etc, leads to the LLM making fewer annoying assumptions.

Almost all of the annoying assumptions that the LLM makes are "ok, but not how I want it done". I've gotten into the habit of keeping track of these in a file. Like the 10 commandments for LLMs. Now, whenever I'm starting a new context I drop in an agent.md and tell it to read that before starting. Fella like watching Trinity learn how to fly a helicopter before getting into it.

It's still not perfect, but I'm doing waaaay more work now to get annoyed by the LLM's inability to "automatically learn" without my help.

Resizing windows on xfce (most themes) is next to impossible though. You have about a pixel sized border to grab.

I used xfce since Unity came out. Switched to KDE Plasma about 2 years ago.

Plasma is the most "sane" out of the DEs right no IMO. Not perfect by any means but good enough.

That's like xfce!

While it's possible to write an ipv4 address in a bunch of different ways (it's just a number, right?) nobody does it because ipv4 standard notation is easy to remember. Ipv6 is not, and none of these attempts to simplify it really work because they change the "format". I understand it and you understand it, but the point here is that it's unfriendly to anyone who isn't familiar with it.

I used it to get around proxies back in the 2000s

Ok very simple, left wing media lie by omission and push agenda via slanted headlines and opinions, as much as the right do. As a traditionally left wing person I did not know the extent of this. I no longer exclusively read left wing news.

The left, in 2025, have a dreadful fear of seeming Islamophobic, and this is evident in their handling of this current situation and of the unrest in 2022 when a woman died in police custody, arrested for the crime of not wearing specific headwear. BBC headline commented on how the economic situation created the perfect conditions for unrest. How about oppression creating the perfect conditions for unrest? No, we're not allowed to comment on Iran's culture/religion, only their economy.

Think of it like phone numbers. For decades people have accepted gradual phone number prefix additions. I remember in rural Ireland my parents got an extra digit in the late 70s, two more in the 90s, and it was conceptually easy. It didn't change how phones work, turn your phone into a party line or introduce letters or special characters into the rotary dial, or allow you to skip consecutive similar digits.

For people who deal with ip addresses, the switch from ipv4 to ipv6 means moving from 4 digits (1.2.3.4) to this:

   2001:0db8:0000:0000:0008:0800:200c:417a
   2001:db8:0:0:8:800:200c:417a
   2001:db8::8:800:200c:417a

Yes, the ipv6 examples are all the same address. This is horrible. Worse than MAC addresses because it doesn't even follow a standard length and has fancy (read: complex) rules for shortening.

Plus switching completely to ipv6 overnight means throwing away all your current knowledge of how to secure your home network. For lazy people, ipv4 NAT "accidentally" provides firewall-like features because none of your home ipv4 addresses are public. People are immediately afraid of ipv6 in the home and now they need to know about firewalls. With ipv4, firewalls were simple enough. "My network starts with 192.168, the Internet doesn't". You need to learn unlearn NAT and port forwarding and realise that with already routable ipv6 addresses you just need a firewall with default deny, and then add rules that "unlock" traffic on specific ports to specific addresses. Of course more complexity gets in the way... devices use "Privacy Extensions" and change their addresses, so making firewall rules work long-term, you should use the device's MAC Address. Christ on a bike.

I totally see why people open this bag of crazy shit and say to themselves "maybe next time I buy a new router I'll do this, but right now I have a home with 4 phones, 3 TVs, 2 consoles, security cameras, and some god damn kitchen appliances that want to talk to home connect or something". Personally, I try to avoid fucking with the network as much as possible to avoid the wrath of my wife (her voice "Why are you breaking shit for ideological reasons? What was broken? What new amazing thing can I do after this?").

> One of those devices (stove or kettle) transfers more heat per unit of time into the water. Just use that device for the full amount of water.

But.. Applying heat from two sources is better than applying heat from only one?

I have a large open plan kitchen with one counter surrounded by hanging pots and pans, knives on a magnetic wall mount, all chopping boards stored vertically in racks and most of the condiments on a wall rack or in the drawers

Yeah my point about aircon (and to an extent, big vehicles) is that we have the ability, to a degree, to avoid or work around the problems that climate change is throwing at us. I personally take individual action on climate but I don't think it's possible to make other people change their lifestyle so I don't even try. Do what you want to do people. I live my way because of my own conscience, that's all.

I haven't used Windows in years, but surely a clean install addresses some of that? I don't think I've ever used whatever default OS was preinstalled on a laptop or PC that I bought.

Or is the default Windows 11 just that full of shite?

It's a bit like climate change. Every day we wake up in our comfy beds, we have aircon, gore tex, big cars, hurricane proof buildings. We see that there's a big problem unfolding over the next generation or two. Or three. Maybe a crop failure or two will lead to high coffee prices. Perhaps avocados will disappear from the shelves of the supermarket for a month or two and we'll just pause, say "huh?". Someone might mention a species of shellfish we never heard of which is now extinct, or there'll be even more wildfires "somewhere I don't live" that are awful and everything but does this transatlantic flight really make a difference or does it matter if I upgrade my phone/laptop/car every year... Anyways I need to get the kids to creche and get to work. I don't have time to think about this stuff.

Slow burning problems are the worst because they're so easy to ignore until it's to late.

Agree. If you use a rolling release you definitely need a strategy for stability. I turn off automatic updates and schedule planned full updates that I can easily roll back from. I've had two breakages over the years that required snapper rollback. (Rolling back from a major distro upgrade isn't that easy)

It's a tradeoff that I'm happy with. I get to have a very up to date system.

So why bother with v6?

This! I guess a good number of tech people will have IPv4 home networks long after their non-tech parents, neighbors and friends will be using IPv6 (without even knowing it).

IPv4 in the home is dead easy. You only need to remember the last digit (unless you've got multiple networks, but most won't). You can ssh to any device by remembering that ".1" is router, ".2" is NAS etc. Firewalls are simple.

You can buy a cheap domain and use it as your home DNS (eg "router.myhome.net" -> "192.168.0.1") so it works anywhere! In the home or roaming (over VPN). I don't really need to run DNS at home. My domain runs on Cloudflare DNS, my devices use NextDNS (with rebind protection disabled for my home domain).

I run OpenWRT and preallocate DHCP addresses for all known devices. Then I shrink the DHCP pool to a blacklisted range. A script automatically creates DNS records for all preallocated devices. If a new device appears in the blacklisted DHCP pool, I can manually allocate its MAC address a proper IP.

It's easy to get TLS certs for any service in the house using the ACME DNS01 challenge.

Tailscale is sexy and it worked fine until one day while roaming it wouldn't connect without "admin work", so I instantly dropkicked it. I'm now using the very unsexy OpenVPN Cloud (free for limited use) and in over two years it has never failed me. Plus it doesn't fuck with the IP addresses with fancypants tailnet addresses - I access devices directly using their DNS names which resolve to private addresses.

So, from inside or outside the home I can access the NAS to watch a movie, sync photos to Immich, print a document, check my IP cameras or ask my wife to put a document on the ancient scanner and access it via the raspberry pi phpscan website (which is on https://scanner.myhome.net)

I'm sure there's a very good reason not to do this and someone will now point it out.

As an "Old" who was a kid in the late 70s to early 90s, I'm telling young folks that there is no first world poverty like there was then. Not just because "we" were poor, but because you couldn't get "stuff" anyway. Like, the biggest TV I ever saw back them was 25". Nobody had a computer. Unemployment across the board was high. I saw my first kiwi fruit or avocado when I was 10. Clothes were expensive (even thrift / store brand). "Stuff" of any kind was expensive or non existent.

Yesterday my BIL threw a perfectly working tower PC in the recycling because he couldn't find anyone (not even a charity shop) to take it. Last time I was at e-waste I saw half a dozen 42 inch TVs that I'm willing to bet we're working.

However we were wealthy in one way: we had a stable home, and optimism. I may have had old clothes, one pair of worn shoes and a 4th-hand uncool bicycle, but there was no question of ever losing the roof over my head. And there was a future that looked like it was full of possibilities. "Stuff" was getting cheaper and more available. I remember our family being able to afford our first microwave oven. Our first VCR (1991). We didn't get rich, things got cheaper.

Today, it's like we're looking at the future as if we're already post-peak, and it's all downhill from here. There's tons of stuff around but nobody wants it. People have also lost the positive attitude, optimism. It'll get you through a lot of bad times. Years and years of shit. Lose optimism, and it's all bleak no matter how big your TV is.

If I could choose a safe to be reborn in, I'd take "our" poverty of the past over this.

No.

Take at any conflict in the world. Ok, nothing that China or Russia are involved in. IDK, let's keep it complicated and say, "waring factions in some African country that doesn't regularly make the news", or "skirmishing Muslim groups in the middle east" (So a hard no to Israel/Palestine which everybody has strongly polarised opinions about whether they're right or not).

Now, wait for every other npm package in the world to get polarised on whether or not to block your shitty package because you picked the wrong side in some faraway war that, to be honest, you don't give a shit about anyway. Or maybe you didn't even voice an opinion about said war? WHY DIDN'T YOU? WHAT ARE YOUR HIDING? WEAR THE RIBBON! CHANT THE CHANT!

Because that's all some people seem to have time for these days, and it's practically impossible to avoid the purity spiral if you show up on their radar. I've seen well known people (celebrities, academics, billionaires) get cancelled for not supporting some specific thing. Once you make this part of your software license people will rightly run like fuck from it.

What's your stance on:

- veganism

- India / Pakistan

- Climate change (no fly stickers, do you fly??)

- GM

- You country's immigration policy

- Some other country's immigration policy

- Trump (even if you're not American)

- Taiwan

- Taxation

- Houtis

- Sulki racing (Irish travellers)

- Islam Vs Christianity / Judaism / Hinduism

- Communism / Socialism

Or, just maybe, this is a few lines of code that is concerned with X and not (all these things, Jesus give me a break)

The end result of this would be a completely broken ecosystem. Package version hell, but worse.

Not just UI. I just wrote a KDE Plasma 6 widget for systemd-networkd / networkd and it was a nightmare.

I think that everybody looks back with rose tinted specs. Off the cuff, I'd say that the BBC isn't as honest and transparent as I thought it was back in the 80s, 90s.

Then I remember the Jimmy Saville cover-up. Britain's pound shop/ dollar store Epstein.

> senior managers were not told of complaints about Savile because of an "atmosphere of fear" which still exists in the BBC

Written 10 years ago and still true today. It's just that the lies de jour depend on who currently holds political and (to a far grater extent today) cultural power. The elites, in a modern cultural sense, are not necessarily people with traditional money and power (royalty, politicians, famous stars and billionaires). Undoubtedly they have power, but these days that type of power doesn't protect you from the mob. Today, power is wielded by people who claim to have none, yet somehow set the tone on social media (moderation rules), influence rules within universities, influence charities and NGOs, and from there, media outlets. Politicians today are just landing to all. The BBC has is right up there with all the other liars.

TY!

Does the latest version actually work under wine? I remember trying a while back and only v1 was usable.

Still doesn't work on Linux :(

How does this help solve a rubix cube?

But if you got one test saying "Detected a fragment of pancreatic cancer DNA" two days later another saying "Didn't see any cancerous DNA fragments" what would the actual effect on the doctor or patient be? Who'll take the risk and say "the first was a false positive"?

Also, these tests are a grand a pop if I'm reading it directly (which I may not be)

Party pooper?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11886625/

I had the Datel Genius mouse for my spectrum. It came bundled with the OCP Art Studio (which never worked on my spectrum). You could 'peek' into memory addresses to find the position and button state, so I wrote silly little BASIC programs for it.

I asked my question in the wrong place!

"So is the original requirement for O_DIRECT addressed completely by O_SYNC and O_DSYNC"

I'm guessing you'd say "no"

So is the original requirement for O_DIRECT addressed completely by O_SYNC and O_DSYNC?

The way I was told it, if the database engine implements it's own cache (like InnoDB and presumably Oracle), are just "doubling up" if you also use the OS cache?. Perhaps Oracle is happy with its own internal caching (for reads).

I've seen a DB guy insist on O_DIRECT without implementing array controller cache battery alerting, or checking if drives themselves had caches disabled. Nope "O_DIRECT fixes everything!" ... although these days enterprise class SSDs have little batteries and capacitors to handle power loss so in the right circumstances that's kinda resolved too, but like the array controller cache batteries, this is one more thing you have to monitor if you're running your own hardware