Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Titus is fairly trustable (he’s made a few videos on the dangers of custom Windows ISOs like AtlasOS) but the thing is written in good chunks with AI assisted development and it’s also the dude’s Rust learning experience as well, so the code is not great. Parts of it are meant to run under ArchISO to install Arch (another sin, an automatic Arch installer) so it makes sense to want to just one-liner download and run the prebuilt binary.

    I wouldn’t use it personally but his audience is for it. It targets quick and easy, not proper and secure. It’s mostly meant to easily install and clone his setup, it’s too early in development to really be that useful for everyone.

    On the winutil side he also does the | iex PowerShell sin, but the toolbox do be really useful to debloat a Windows install.


  • I’ve read some posts about editing fstab to mount them at startup, but they don’t cover whether the drives will be available to other users or not. Can I just add them to fstab and mount them somewhere that’s available to all users, then sort out the permissions? If so, where’s the best place to put them?

    Yes pretty much. It just explicitly tells the system where to mount it, and for some filesystems you can even force the UID/GID and modes.

    Usually /mnt/whatever for static mounts and /media/whatever for removable mounts (those appear as drives in file managers, whereas /mnt doesn’t). You can set the users option in fstab and it’ll let users mount and unmount it without sudo as well, or auto to always mount it on boot.

    From there usually you can make a shared group, chown the mount to root:thatgroup, then chmod g+s to make sure the group is inherited. And you should mostly be good to go.


  • You can’t, because normies don’t care about tech other than it benefits them directly in some way. They care about the experience they get and doing the same thing everyone does because normies are like sheeps.

    Normies barely even get how emails work and it’s been like over 40 years. They know if they sign up for Gmail it’s free, they get a ton of space and an @gmail.com address. That’s it.

    And even then, people looked at me weird back in 2007 when I made my Gmail account because “everyone uses Hotmail, why wouldn’t you use Hotmail, everyone uses it so it must be the best”. Heck just yesterday, the teller at the mechanic shop looked at me weird because I used $storename@max-p.me to place the online order, they were utterly confused. They thought I made a Gmail or Outlook for all of those aliases. People don’t think about using emails, they think about using Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.

    Same with Reddit, it didn’t become popular until normies felt like they were missing out by not being on Reddit, and arguably that was Reddit’s downfall flooding the site with the same repeated arguments and opinions over and over. And for that too, I’ve been told my “Reddit looks weird” because I use a third-party app. People want to use Reddit so they download Reddit.

    Normies don’t use Twitter because they want to microblog, they use Twitter because their idols are on Twitter and they want to mimic them. If Taylor Swift opened a Mastodon account and posted exclusively there, we’d get a massive spike of users. And they all would want to register on the same instance as her and it would be the only viable instance to them.

    They just want to fit in and do the same as the others, using the same services and same apps and everything. “Influencers” are everything these days.

    The best way to get normies on the Fediverse is IMO, endorsing Threads and BlueSky, which will effectively force them to integrate because those platforms integrate.




  • The developer benefits from reaching more people, some of whom are likely to purchase the proprietary license. Or sometimes you dual-license just so that licenses are compatible. Each license has pros and cons for both the developers and the users.

    Qt for example, the LGPL means you need to dynamically link to it, and if you ship your own Qt libraries you must provide the source code for it. But if you’re a company that writes proprietary software and can’t dynamically link, then you can purchase the proprietary license which allows you to do a lot more, but you’re compensating the devs for it. And for the Qt devs that’s good because either you pay them, or you use it for free but must share your changes with everyone.

    For ElasticSearch, that makes it so Amazon can’t just patch it up and sell the modified version without sharing what they changed. They wanted to add back a FOSS license to stop the bleed to OpenSearch which many in the FOSS community switched to purely for the license because even separate software should be compatible license-wise if you want a sustainable FOSS project. But the AGPL requires sources merely for being able to talk to it over the network, so Elastic gets the free dev work, or the juicy license payments. The other free licenses achieve similar goals with technical differences that might matter for the user. But as a developer using ElasticSearch maybe you do want to ship your software under the SSPL, so you can pick the SSPL version.

    Dual-licensing MIT/GPL for example, you can build proprietary software, or GPL software where you can vendor it in as GPL-only as well, and thus guarantee your user their GPL rights.





  • I haven’t looked into it particularly deep but it’s not like there’s a ton of stuff a WM can possibly do unless the code base is littered with raw X11 calls everywhere.

    Most of the window placement and tiling logic shouldn’t be tied directly to X11 and only a small part of it should really be interacting with X11 to place and size windows. So one should target that intermediate spot that makes all the X11 calls.

    And if the code is too shit to port, it probably deserves to die.


  • It’s possible to do but also probably not worth the amount of effort to reimplement all of those protocols only for super old WMs that don’t have a Wayland equivalent. None of them are particularly complex, so It’s probably easier to just port those to wlroots than implement the compatibility, and it’s an opportunity to make an API or library to make it easy to write WMs.


  • If your stuff is all Docker then yeah, immutable makes sense as it makes the entire box declarative and immutable: you can get back the exact same operating Docker environment on the server, and then you can get back the exact same Docker workloads going with the Docker compose configurations.

    If you ever need to run stuff you’d run on Debian, you can just shove it in a Debian container.

    That said, if most of the stuff is containers, the risk of just the core Debian breaking is fairly low. Pick whatever is easiest for you to deal with based on your needs. Immutable distros have a bit of a learning curve.


  • From a user’s perspective, yes, but as an instance admin that’s also a DMCA nightmare.

    That’s a great example of the eternal fight between mods and users that ultimately drives admins away: users feel entitled to post that stuff, and mods have to take it down. The user is anonymous and possibly from a country with very lax laws, so they’re protected. The admins have to pay for the servers with real money and their real identity, and thus also an easy target for lawyers.


  • Porn is often really high traffic, which is expensive to run. But a lot of people are weirdos too and tend to push it to the border of legality, which can be challenging for admins if your users keep posting lolis even if it’s not allowed. And they’ll scream at you “it’s not technically illegal”.

    The other thing people do a lot with porn is post stuff from sketchy sources or repost paid content for free stealing from OnlyFans pages and the big porn studios. And lately, AI generated porn of non-consenting celebrities. And of course now the increasing pressure to make sure to keep minors out or heaven forbid they’re shown trans porn.

    It’s expensive to store all that porn, it’s insanely expensive to distribute it, you need lawyers on standby for the firehose of DMCA reports, you need a solid team of moderators scrubbing the site as fast as possible for CSAM, or run AI tools that needs a lot of fast hardware to run at any decent speed (you need to analyze every frame of a video, for example).

    It’s just expensive as fuck overall and that’s why a lot of the porn sites have the sketchiest ads ever, and that’s because you can’t run regular ads as most advertisers don’t want to be shown next to questionable content.

    On the fediverse you have the added challenge that ideally, you scrub things before they get federated due to federation bugs. Or you risk being defederated which you probably will anyway as most admins just don’t want to deal with it.


  • I know, that was an example of why it doesn’t work on ZFS. That would be the closest you can get with regular ZFS, and as we both pointed out, it makes no sense, it doesn’t work. The L2ARC is a cache, you can’t store files in it.

    The whole point of bcachefs is tiering. You can give it a 4TB NVMe, a 4TB SATA SSD and a 8 GB HDD and get almost the whole 16 TB of usable space in one big filesystem. It’ll shuffle the files around for you to keep the hot data set on the fastest drive. You can pin the data to the storage medium that matches the performance needs of the workload. The roadmap claims they want to analyze usage pattern and automatically store the files on the slowest drive that doesn’t bottleneck the workload. The point is, unlike regular bcache or the ZFS ARC, it’s not just a cache, it’s also storage space available to the user.

    You wouldn’t copy the game to another drive yourself directly. You’d request the filesystem to promote it to the fast drive. It’s all the same filesystem, completely transparent.


  • Simple example: my Steam library could be RAID0 and unencrypted but my backups I definitely want to be RAID1 and compressed, and encrypted for security. The media library doesn’t need encryption but maybe want it in RAID1 because ripping movies takes forever. I may also want to have the games on NVMe when I play them, and stored on the HDDs when I’m not playing them, and my VMs on the SATA SSD array as a performance middleground.


  • ZFS doesn’t support tiered storage at all. Bcachefs is capable of promoting and demoting files to faster but smaller or slower but larger storage. It’s not just a cache. On ZFS the only option is really multiple zpools. Like you can sort of do that with the persistent L2ARC now but TBs of L2ARC is super wasteful and your data has to fully fit the pool.

    Tiered storage is great for VMs and games and other large files. Play a game, promote to NVMe for fast loadings. Done playing, it gets moved to the HDDs.