X11 is an multiple decade old dinosaur, the developer decided it was growing too complex and no longer representing how graphics are done on modern systems and decided a rewrite. While doing so they decided to simplify some things along the way and in doing so they drastically overshoot their target and removed tons of fundamental functions that was present in X11 (stuff like being able to take screenshots, window manager, etc.). Some of that is slowly getting reimplemented and Wayland is getting closer to actually being a feature-parity X11 replacement, but it’s also taken 15 years and is still not done. The whole drama is the conflict between people wanting it as default and the other group of people for which it simply doesn’t work in its current state.

Windows has much better forward and backward compatibility than Linux, that’s why 10 year old Windows is still fine. 10 year old Linux on the other side just means nothing modern will work on it. That’s really only usable in extreme edge cases. Flatpak and Snap somewhat address this, but that also puts you back into the forced-upgrade treadmill, as Flatpak runtimes don’t have LTS support (not sure how Snap handles this).

Time to write some bug reports. ~/.cache is supposed to be disposable.

ls reaction to this is unexpected:

$ mkdir foo
$ echo Foo > foo/file
$ chmod a-x  foo
$ ls -l foo
ls: cannot access 'foo/file': Permission denied
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ?            ? file

I expected to just get a “Permission denied”, but listing the content it can still do. So x is for following the name to the inode and r for listing directory content (i.e. just names)?

Removed by mod

Lame attempt to distract what caused it all.

I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren’t properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you’ll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can’t have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).

Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.

I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).

Removed by mod

NixOS uses a naming convention for packages that keeps them all separate from each other, that’s how you get /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-118.0/. /usr isn’t used for packages and only contains /usr/bin/env for compatibility, nothing else.

The whole system is held together by nothing more than shell scripts, symlinks and environment variables, standard Unix stuff. Making it very easy to understand if you are already familiar with Linux.

“Declarative” means that you whole configuration happens in one Nix config file. You don’t edit files in /etc/ directly, you write your settings in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and all the other files are generated from there. Same is true for package installation, you add your packages to a text file and rebuild.

If that sounds a little cumbersome, that’s correct, but Nix has some very nice ways around that. Due to everything being nicely isolated from each other, you do not have to install software to use them, you can just run them directly, e.g.:

nix run nixpkgs#emacs

You can even run them directly from a Git repository if that repository contains a flake.nix file:

nix run github:ggerganov/llama.cpp

All the dependencies will be downloaded and build in the background and garbage collected when they haven’t been used in a while. This makes it very easy to switch between versions, run older versions for testing and all that and you don’t have to worry about leaving garbage behind or accidentally breaking your distribution.

The downside of all this is that some proprietary third party software can be a problem, as they might expect files to be in /usr that aren’t there. NixOS has ways around that (BuildFHSEnv), but it is quite a bit more involved than just running a setup.sh and hoping for the best.

The upside is that you can install the Nix package manager on your current distribution and play around with it. You don’t need to use the full NixOS to get started.

Quite hard. We had Open Source’ish LLMs for only around six months, if they are even up to the task of verifying a translation is another issue and if they are up to Debian’s Open Source guidelines yet another. This is obviously going to be the long term solution, but the tech for that has simply not been around for very long.

And of course once you have translation tools good enough for the task, you might just skip the human translator altogether and just use machine translations.

2024 headline: “Analyst replaced by generative AI”

Yes. It’s one of the major reasons why the Web turned into a cooperate controlled hellscape. Note, I am not arguing against encryption, just against HTTPS crappy implementation of it. It’s also going to get even worse with QUIC.

And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically.

The joke that the cost increased drastically too. Modern VFX movies are far more expensive than older movies, while also looking worse. As what the studio bosses really want isn’t cheap movies, but movies they can control and micro-manage. VFX makes it much easier to rerender a scene with some changes than a practical shot where you have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. The end result of that is of course a lack of planing ahead, endless reshoots, overworked VFX studios and bad results, but the bosses got what they wanted, so that’s ok.

Things will live up to the hype and easily surpass it. That’s not the issue. The issue is that people take the world of today and imagine how much better/faster/richer they could become if they had AI. The crux is by the time they have AI, everybody else has it too. Thus it loses its competitive advantage. It just raises the baseline.

If I had to create the thousands of images I have generated with AI three years ago it would have costs thousands if not millions of dollar, a gigantic almost insurmountable task. But that doesn’t mean they have any value today. Everybody can produce similar images with a few clicks.

The whole point of AI is after all that it makes work that used to be difficult and expensive, cheap and easy, and nobody is going to pay huge amounts of money for a task that has become trivial.

An online authentication system is quite literally the one central thing your whole digital life depends up on. If it’s broken, it can completely f’up your life and remove you from existence in the digital space. So there is extremely good reason to be skeptical when big-company tries to force you into a new thing. Especially when said big-companies have a history of f’n things up on purpose (remember G+ forcing real names on everybody and bundling previously unrelated accounts into one monolithic one?). Or take HTTPS, which was sold us with “bringing more security”, when what it actually did was kill large chunks of the open and self-hosted Web.

Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with? The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference. Even a review that puts effort into itself, is largely useless when the writer didn’t have multiple competing products at hand to compare. And on top of that you have the issue that products will frequently change under the hood, so even if the product was good a year ago, there is no guarantee you are getting the same thing when you order it today.

The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.

The appeal to “X11 is too complicated, Wayland is much simpler” ain’t holding much meat when we are 15 years into the project and it’s still not done. As it turns out, a lot of that “junk” in X11 is rather useful and cutting out the junk in Wayland just made it unusable. The work to reimplement the missing functionality has been eating up a lot of years.

Those platform exist because the Web is utterly terrible when it comes to discovering content and monetizing it. “Google-bad” is easy to say, but I have yet to see a real alternative.

The cat is out of the bag. Everything what those services do is like child’s play compared to the stuff you can do at home on your own PC. This ain’t ever going to stop, it’s just going to get more powerful.

I recommend playing around with Bing Image Creator/DALLE-3 for a bit to get an idea of what is possible these days. It will filter celebrities and NSFW content of course, but the amount of flexibility it has and quality it produces is mind boggling.

Neat, never heard of that, guess it’s not seeing much use outside the professional setting. It’s called Plantronics QD.