superluserdo

If the programs in question implement the XDG base directory spec properly, then putting `export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.program` in your .profile will make them put config files in .program, not .config.

To be pedantic, if we're going to cite Unix history, then technically there is no such thing as a "hidden" file. As I understand, the original implementation of tools like ls would not show the current directory "." in the listing. The quickest way of doing this in C was checking whether dentry.name[0] == '.'

This also had the side effect of hiding entries that had names beginning with ".", and over time an implementation bug/quirk became accepted behaviour, and was post-hoc rationalised as "hidden" files.

Plug: I made a small set of shell scripts to achieve something similar to this a couple of years ago, but with symlinks:

https://tomwh.uk/blog/posts/2020/03/28/fake-home-prison/

https://tomwh.uk/git/fake-home.git/

It's a simple command that shadows the binary names you want with a wrapper in ~/.local/bin/ that calls the original binary after redefining $HOME to be somewhere else (by default inside ~/.local/share/fake-home/).

So if you have a program foo that dumps stuff in ~/.foo, then running `fakehome-banish foo` will create a symlink "foo" inside ~/.local/bin/evil-software (which is added to $PATH) that points to "fakehome".

"fakehome" is a simple wrapper script that, busybox-style, gets the binary name that it's being called as ("foo"), and then sets $HOME to be ~/.local/share/fakehome and calls the original foo binary.

Without taking a side on sulphur injection, it should be noted that we are already doing very rapid planet-scale terraforming.

What I think (or at least hope) that this post is missing, is the ever-growing opportunity cost of having a population of people that are flat out unable to access your service. Google's IPv6 page currently has almost all of Africa at near-0% v6 adoption, but this map https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?view=map shows a lot of African countries that still have low internet access. With such a long way to go towards full access, and in a lot of countries, exponentially rising populations, could a lot of African ISPs give up on the cost and/or CGNAT complexity of trying to magic up so many new IPv4 connections, and go all in on v6? That's only my layman speculation though.

Short .com domains actually have an intrinsic value to their prospective owners though, since the domain is the human-readable address, and a shorter address is more memorable to customers. The version of the underlying network protocol is just an implementation detail that the vast majority of companies (basically everyone besides possibly 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8) would happily drop if it became totally unnecessary.

>If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade.

The only real reason v4 is being replaced after decades is that it has a single showstopping flaw - the lack of addresses. v6 solves this forever with its massive address space. We've seen how incredibly hard replacing v4 has been. Without a similarly huge flaw to drive a replacement it's very possible that v4's successor could be the universal internet protocol for hundreds or even thousands of years. With that in mind, even though progress has been frustratingly slow, going for something closer to the global maximum in design and avoiding ease-of-adoption hacks might be the right thing to do.

That's not necessarily to say that your suggestion of still using dot-separated numeric values would be objectively worse, but bear in mind that doubling the number of fields from 4 to 8 as you've done only gives you a 64-bit address space, whereas IPv6 as it exists has a 128-bit space, so would require something like 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4.

I was a bit disappointed to see that this article mostly fell back on the trope of British English being extremely verbose and indirect. I think a much more interesting counterfactual would be, If PHP Were Anglish.

"Anglish" is the name given to a kind of hobbyist-led reimagining of English that is as close as possible to modern English, but in a parallel universe where the 1066 invasion of England wasn't successful, and English didn't adopt a huge number of French words. https://wiki.anglish.info/wiki/Main_Leaf

Here are some English words used in computing that are derived from French, and their Anglish equivalents:

Binary | Twile

Clone | Betwin

Command | Bid, behest

Concurrent | Bytimely

Computer | Reckoner, arimer (from "rime" meaning "number")

Engine | Gearwork

Event | Happening

Multiprocessing | Manyworking

Polymorphism | Manishapliness

There are also quite a few words that are already Germanic with no French influence:

Backup, bandwidth, bit, bookmark, boot(strap), broadband, browser, bug, cookie, download, flash, framework, inbox, keyboard, laptop, mainframe, motherboard, online, output, root, runtime, shell, software, thread, web, wireless.

>IPv6 is a straight connection from the Internet through everything in the network, right to the individual machine.

It's not though. It goes through a router which has a firewall, which is the exact feature you're presumably wanting from a NAT but without any of the annoying downsides.

All that stuff you're describing would still need to be sent to space, for no upside. That includes the 27km+ long collider ring. I haven't even mentioned the fact that this stuff is built 100 metres underground precisely to avoid noise from cosmic radiation.

Space won't work for the kind of physics the LHC does.

The fundamental problem is that collider physics relies on being able to create collisions of exactly known quantity as your input (eg in the LHC's case, proton-proton collisions at a 14TeV centre of mass energy). If you don't control the input, you can't extract any information about the output you detect, in the same way that you can't create a simulation of snooker by looking at the balls on the table, without knowing how they were set up before being hit.

The other problem is that to probe the frontier of particle physics, you need truly immense statistics to get enough of the incredibly rare collisions. Think bunches of hundreds of billions of protons colliding tens of millions of times per second. The upshot is that you'd not only need to build the detectors in space (which are thousands of tonnes with extremely precise electronics that need whole server farms plugged directly into them to process the terabits of data coming out each second), but you'd also need to build the entire collider in space too.

Even then it's a rather pointless endeavour, since the colliders require a colder temperature and higher vacuum than even interstellar space, nevermind within the solar system.

I pair this with imapnotify (keeps a constant connection to each of the IMAP servers for the email addresses I have) that calls mbsync the moment I get a new email. It was a bit annoying to set up at the time but now my (neo)mutt client updates pretty much instantly with any new email.

They already have Harvey of Harvey and Sheila on the case

Indeed https://memeslayerx.github.io/nonfree-pizza/

>Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story.

This is very much an "in principle" thing. In practice, many of these traditional stories have (sadly) become synonymous with the Disney version, so Disney's work is basically the canonical version. This gives Disney a very good sword of Damocles to hang over the heads of anyone else trying to adapt these folk stories: to my understanding if you include a single copyrightable adaptation or embellishment of the original that was written by Disney without "prior art", you're liable to be steamrollered by the lawyer army and be ruined.

Re software: While not necessarily fundamentally anti-copyright, the basic point of "copyleft" licensing like the GPL is to use the system of copyright against itself. I can't imagine the FSF/GNU project would be against a massive reduction of the extent of copyright limits. If there was no concept of copyright, copyleft would be somewhat moot.

I run my own personal SMTP and IMAP server and haven't found it too hard to maintain after the initial setup phase. The main problem I had with getting emails accepted was my lack of reverse DNS PTR records on my domain. If you're unable to fix that (eg, you're not using a commericial internet connection that allows this) the solution is just to use another SMTP relay service. Some, like SMTP2go, are free if you're only sending a personal-use number of emails a day/month. That way you're still in charge of everything except the relaying of outgoing mail, which is easy enough to swap out.

I hope you meant "public universities" :)

I always used to think ln's argument order was totally counterintuitive too. Then I realised that they might have done it that way to account for the case where you only give one argument. If you use `ln <targetpath>` without a link path, it will make a link in the current directory with the same name as the target file. This way, in both cases, the target is the first argument.

My problem with "endian" is the overloaded definition of the word "end" (does a 1-dimensional object have 2 ends or 1 start and 1 end?), and the ambiguity about whether you're talking about the "end" of the number or the "end" of the segment of memory. If you take "end" to mean "the end of the memory segment" (as opposed to the start) then the two definitions are the wrong way round. I think something like "big-first" and "little-first" would have been much more intuitive.

Does that update include the ability to dynamically update a host's IPV6 address via a request to dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com? The guide [0] mentions that

>It is only possible to dynamically update IPv4 addresses (A records) at this time. Currently, IPv6 is not supported by our Dynamic DNS.

Is there any particular thing blocking this feature from being available for IPV6?

[0] https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

This matches my experience that any UI that says "this may take a few minutes", usually only takes a couple of seconds on average hardware, or even if the actual computation is happening on the same server telling you it usually takes a few minutes.

"ARPA-everything" sounds like what IoT would have been called 40 years ago

Not necessarily.

If you're coming up to the end of a logistic ("S") curve, then assuming a linear growth (or worse, a fixed rate of increase each year, ie exponential growth) is much worse of an assumption than assuming zero change, if you extrapolate too far.

That sounds like a horribly perverse incentive for the world's main free and open source of information.

You can run applications over the network with (edit: waypipe, not pipewire, I mix up the names every time), which works quite well. Technically it's not "transparent", but it isn't on X either because pretty much 0 UIs today draw themselves using X11 primitives, they just draw their own buffer and get X to display it.

Does anyone know if pipewire has its own audio protocol for applications, as well as taking the place of JACK and Pulse? Or will future applications still just decide whether to talk to "JACK" or "Pulseaudio"? (Both actually being pipewire)

It's not unverified if it comes from an actually curated package repository, like the one on any given Linux distro. "Package maintainer" isn't just obsolete busywork, it's an essential part of a robust security model IMO.

It doesn't match my experience but in fairness I was running the server off my home IP. I think it was the lack of reverse DNS that was tripping it.

>Assuming your distro hasn't fixed this antifeature

I was under the impression that changing the default NTP servers was an expected part of bundling systemd in a distro?