I used it once, as a last resort when I wanted to try some program that had a ridiculous set of build dependencies that was just too much. It was okay, I guess.

Unless you’re doing something unusual, it’s probably because you’re browsing youtube without being logged in.

Who are all these extremist wackos who don’t already want to abolish capitalism?

My time was wasted by LLM-generated nonsense just yesterday. I wanted to know when whistling tea kettles similar to the classic design we know today first became popular. The first search result I got was a 3000-word essay all about the history of kettles, so I started reading. You’ll know you’ve found the same one I did if at various points it claims that the kettle was invented “ca. 8000 BC”, “4000 years ago”, “around 3000 BC”, “15,000 years ago”, and “approximately 906-1127 AD”.

There are various other inconsistencies and things that make no sense at all by human standards, but it’s written in an authoritative tone, looks pretty nice, and was the first result on my searx instance, appearing in the results from several well-known search engines. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that it’s all bullshit, and there’s probably at least some truth mixed in there somewhere.

It’s not exactly something to panic over I’d say, but it sure is annoying.

the packagers had not changed it as they were asked to do

Were they really? Or were they told “change it if you don’t like it”? Genuine question, and it would make some difference.

But in either case I’m sure not all of them did, and failing that it is all down to the one person (or worse, one team of people) administering the system. Badly configured networks resulting in DNS problems is not exactly rare, but that is beside the point. It’s clearly wrong no matter how uncommon is the situation that makes it materially detrimental.

It’s just one more annoying little thing to go on the big list of items to be corrected when setting up a systemd-equipped system, but more importantly believing that it’s acceptable to just leave it there demonstrates extremely poor judgement to a degree that makes many of us doubt the trustworthiness of the entire project. Perhaps in 2013, or whenever the decision was initially made, substantial numbers of people were sufficiently clueless as to think that adding in the possibility of inadvertently having your system quietly direct all its DNS queries to Google was better than the more obvious alternative of not doing so, but after everything that’s gone down since then it’s quite hard to imagine why anyone would stick up for such a bizarre point of view today.

The main thing that turned it into a serious issue rather than just a stupid thing to joke about was that Poettering refused (as of five years ago) to admit that it was a mistake.

Remember when Google’s DNS server address was hard-coded in systemd-resolved? Good times, what a laugh we all had.

monopolisation of the init system

That’s the one thing about systemd that is sort of nice. We don’t really need to have more than one init system, and it does a sufficiently comprehensive job of being one. If it were only an init system and nothing else, there basically wouldn’t be any remaining complaints about it by now.

MX

I tried to submit it to addons.mozilla.org but they didn’t accept it.

It sort of looks as if they did accept it. If they were hesitant, perhaps it has something to do with the description suggesting that it’s a broken and pointless temporary kludge, as well as calling Firefox “removed”, and the ridiculously irrelevant screenshot.

I didn’t realise it was that easy to build a simple firefox extension like that. Maybe I’ll modify it to disable the whole clipboard api and some other stuff.

The “info” thing was a misguided attempt by a crazed bunch of emacs zealots to usurp the rightful position of “man”. Probably GNU’s worst idea. It persisted in having some popularity for a decade or more but is now mostly forgotten I think. Despite having used Debian for the past ten years straight I’ve only just now found out that info doesn’t even get installed by default any more.

Laptop computers have made significant strides, and in 2023, they’re better than ever. However, there are still individuals perpetuating a delusion: That a powerful gaming laptop is as user-friendly and productive as the Apple iPad, which is what everyone should obviously be using. After a few discussions on Lemmy, I believe it’s important to provide a clear review of where these fancy “laptop” computers fall short as daily drivers for normal people like me.

PC gaming laptops will, most, likely, fail, for:

• People who need the App Store
• People that want everything to work exactly like it does on the iPad
• Anyone who wants a simple way to install Angry Birds without trying to use needlessly complicated things such as a mouse and keyboard
• Apple apps that won’t run because you bought a non-Apple laptop
• The performance overhead of that extra complexity costs at least 5-15% of what you’d otherwise expect from such a powerful machine
• People who need to run FaceTime and whose friends won’t consider any alternatives outside the Apple way of life
• Serious scientific labs with policies that require iPad-only data acquisition
• Musicians, artists, and customer service agents who’ve built their whole careers around iPad-only software
• Developers and sysadmins, because you’re probably administering Apple systems for which the iPad is indispensible

Laptop computers are great, I love them but I don’t sugar coat it and I’m not delusional like you.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with other Apple iPad users then PC latop apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. But once you’ve got to work with other iPad users it’s “game over” — the “alternatives” just aren’t up to it.

iPads aren’t that expensive and they work right out of the box. Software runs fine, everything on the App Store is supported whatever you’re trying to do and you’ll be productive from day zero. There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive laptop computer experience.

It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months? aeons?) you want to spend fiddling with a mouse and keyboard to set up things which simply work out of the box on the Apple iPad for a minimal fee. Buy an iPad! You know it’s the only sensible thing to do and the ROI will be fantastic!

You can buy a second-hand iPad for around €4 that comes with everything you’ll need. And every iPad comes with IOS for no extra charge, so why wait? Buy it! Buy it now!

“They hated him because he spoke the truth. I can’t even get “simple” apps like Apple iMove to run on my PC. And there’s some kind of “video card driver” that needs “updating”? No sane person could ever cope with this. No amount of googling or even the fabled tech support genuis of “chatgpt” was able to help me. It just won’t work. This whole Internet is delusional, if they think that laptop computers are usable for the average Joe and I’m an Apple iPad expert so I know what I’m talking about. It’s too much hassle. I just want to get things done.” — Average Joe

Still thinking that 2023 is the year of the laptop computer? Think again. The Apple iPad is all the computing you will ever need.

*with the exception of some who have specific disabilities

When X.com eventually gets around to making its own window system, they may be in legal trouble. Perhaps the resulting lawsuit can raise enough money to get X.org development going again.

People who find that “frustrating” have led too sheltered a life.

I’m pretty sure the main system startup bottleneck is me typing the disk encryption passphrase.

Ed Is The Standard Text Editor

I’m not saying it doesn’t get a lot of shout outs, but it could always do with one more. I think the last time I used it was to automate the editing of config files on some antiquated telephony system by piping ed commands through netcat. There remains a chance that I might live long enough to find some excuse to use it again.

“bat” seemed interesting, until I remembered that I’d just do a “git diff” if I wanted to see a diff. The rest do not strike me as substantially better than what they’re trying to replace. Enjoy them all as you will, but I would recommend refraining from describing them as “modern unix” in the presence of any old-timers.

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