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ninjin

3,386 karmajoined 15 tahun yang lalu

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A Quarter Century of Unix (Peter Salus, 1994)

archive.org
2 points·by ninjin·2 bulan yang lalu·2 comments

comments

ninjin
·4 hari yang lalu·discuss
As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
ninjin
·4 hari yang lalu·discuss
Well, you can have a look at the commit history to see what changes have been accepted in the past:

https://github.com/openbsd/www/commits/master

My experience is that minor improvements tend to get accepted if they come with a solid technical motivation and fits into the overall OpenBSD mindset and ecosystem. If the change is simply justified by "best practices" and is rather large, then the conservative choice of just leaving things as they are usually prevail.

For example, I think I have seen two proposals for major overhauls of the OpenBSD.org homepage by "outsiders" over the last three years or so and they were both rejected. However, as you can see by the commit log, minor improvements (including presentation ones) happen all the time.
ninjin
·8 hari yang lalu·discuss
Really? A cause of our societal decline is requesting a CD for a repository that is too big to fit on it? Call me a naive optimist, but I would like to believe that whoever is reading the form results on GitHub's end is more than capable to make the call within a few seconds as to whether they also would find some joy in the challenge the size poses or just ignore it and move on with their day.
ninjin
·8 hari yang lalu·discuss
Riddle me this, what was the cost to me in terms of trying? If I feel like treating this like the fun we used to have online, what is the point in sucking all the fun out of it by "going lawyer" on the conditions? If I get a CD (or even DVD), it will be a fun story to tell (like when I asked Schneier to write a true Schneier Fact as opposed to his signature when I ordered a signed copy of one of his books). If I get nothing, well, I guess my life is simply over at that point.
ninjin
·8 hari yang lalu·discuss
Felt the same way initially, but you are very much right that this feels like a throwback to a more playful time about twenty years ago. Put in a request for the OpenBSD src repository, which is too big to fit on a CD these days and I am looking forward to see if/how they square that circle. OpenBSD used to ship their code on CDs up until about ten years ago, so it is a bit of a fun throwback in that way as well.
ninjin
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
Why would we? There are plenty of us that believe in free speech, but would rather not see our money go towards bankrolling further destroying public discourse like you see Allard doing. It is perfectly possible to forward your opinions without setting the public square on fire. The kind of rhetoric that you profess here is dangerous and I see it all too often in the US. If no side attempts to hold the high ground, all we will have is a race towards the bottom and at some point arguing that it is high time to send the other side off to the camps and that is not a future I want to see.
ninjin
·15 hari yang lalu·discuss
Tried to find something from the party itself, but found nothing on their homepage other than that they plan to publish a party programme "gradually, starting some time during the summer of 2026".

https://www.orebropartiet.se/var-politik/
ninjin
·20 hari yang lalu·discuss
> Of course I get downvoted for saying this. HN isn't interested in reality any more.

I suspect that rather many of us are simply just tired of Claude and friends getting shoehorned into any conversation about programming at this point. It is about as fun as the Rust Brigade entering any discussion about C. It adds nothing new to the discussion and it is frankly tiring since we pretty much at any time have a handful of conversations on the front page already covering "AI" topics anyway (counting four at the time of writing this).
ninjin
·22 hari yang lalu·discuss
Hmm, probably beats my default: abuse@$COMPANY.com
ninjin
·bulan lalu·discuss
Yes, that is common though. You have a variety of measurements, from a variety of technologies, from a variety of distances, and from a variety of sources. Given the damage a quake and tsunami can cause, especially the early measurements are estimates that later get corrected in light of new information. In Japan for example, it is very much not uncommon that early tsunami warnings are later cancelled. Yes, false alarms are bad, but the example I usually use in terms of how much time can matter is the 1983 Sea of Japan quake [1], where the tsunami hit in 12 minutes after the quake.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Sea_of_Japan_earthquake
ninjin
·bulan lalu·discuss
As a type-1 diabetic, in my experience it is perfectly possible to end up in a situation like this even if you are responsible. Remember, type-1 diabetes is a condition that requires your attention tens if not a hundred times per day. This is not just on good days, but also on your very worst days when you are juggling everything else that life throws at you and you may not have slept properly for days. So, maybe you had noticed that your emergency glucose was low, but in this instance out of a hundred you forgot to replace it when you came home because you were exhausted and then overslept and had to rush out in the morning. What makes type-1 diabetes challenging is not that you can not technically manage every single one of the decisions and actions that it demands out of you, it is that you must carry them out under all conditions and largely without fail for every day in your life or you will suffer both short-term and long-term consequences. Everyone I know has had a nightmare episode.

Just a final recent anecdote to illustrate some of the complexity. It may look like maths on the surface, but even something like "carbohydrate ratio" is a fluid concept. Yesterday for example I was out and about in the sun and had the very same bottle of sweet tea that I have had for months. Given that I knew I was physically active and it was hot, I reduced the usual dosage for this specific drink by 80% to be on the safe side. To my surprise, on this particular day for whatever reason this was still far too much and I pushed myself into hypoglycemia in little over an hour. We humans are highly dynamic and complex systems and this is me failing with the very best technology we have available: Insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I have run NixOS for about eight years on server and desktop and been a nixpkgs maintainer. Yes, most of the time I would agree with you. The fact that you get warnings in the terminal for a lot of incompatibilities and changes when upgrading is a really nice touch and upgrades tend to be smooth. I do not use rollbacks much, but when you do need them they are really handy. Having every configuration in a single file makes you more bold to play around with configurations, which felt really empowering when I first got into NixOS, as I knew it could roll things back and I no longer had to keep notes on how each box was set up to refer to in the case of a reinstall or migration.

However, I have had one machine become unbootable as it could no longer mount its encrypted disks after an upgrade, forcing me to mount a rescue image remotely, mount the disks manually, lift the data out, and do a complete reinstall (migrated the box to OpenBSD at that time). Similarly, NixOS once messed up systemd (or vice versa) so badly that I could not even reboot without forcing a power cycle. Lastly, I have had a package break for my use cases by maintainers enabling so many custom flags by default for a package that they enabled one I have never seen enabled by any other packaging team and that then broke RTSP in "funny" ways. Ubuntu did tend to break things like graphics between releases at times back when I used it, but I have never had any other distribution or operating system throw curve balls like the three things I mentioned here.

My general impression of NixOS is that the core is solid, but that nixpkgs just has such a large number of things that it supports that the maintainers struggle to test them all and can not anticipate the interactions between all the packages and options. The default Julia package being so broken that it produced incorrect mathematics due to nixpkgs' insistence on allowing you to swap out the Blas library and also having turned off the unit tests for example springs to mind. This was shipped to end users for a long time before I noticed it by accident by enabling the unit tests and stepped in to clean it up. It all feels very "Gentoo", which was indeed an inspiration for NixOS by the way.

Now, return to that last sentence in the first paragraph that I wrote about feeling empowered to tinker, ultimately, I feel like you should try to resist that urge as it is what pushes you into the untested fractal of possible configurations that NixOS allows you to explore. My other main operating system is OpenBSD, where the mentality is "Stick to the defaults or suffer the consequences"; with NixOS, I feel like everyone's box is more or less a tailored suit, which comes with both its ups and downs.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Modern operating system booting on hardware that is closing in on 40 years old in just over three minutes, this is wild to see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s

Kenji Aoyama truly is aligned with the best of the hacker spirit. As for getting your hands on a luna88k, I have no clue. The only thing I managed to find was a broken one that sold for ~USD 750 at an online auction.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
In memoriam: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2026-May/033750.html
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Well, it surely did not help that the government has been drip-feeding us computational resources. First we had about 16 GPU nodes to share between the whole country for over a decade. Then just before Isambard-AI came online they made one open call for about a week where you could get nearly enough to train a sizeable model, but the call was poorly advertised and in the middle of high vacation season. After this, the only big call explicitly cut out training large language models by its scope and the general calls have been peanuts and less than me and the UK-LLM team had access to during the Isambard-AI beta phase! When I gave a talk at White Hall recently my message was clear: We have the team, the knowledge, the data, etc. We just need an open call for enough compute to train the darn thing! Here is to hoping that they listened.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
If I had the time and energy, I would make some sort of simple code language model and generate infinite junk and feed that to them in the hope that it ruins their future training runs. But, I lack the former and some of the latter. Alternatively, maybe I would actually read one of those "backdoor papers" and try to inject something like that.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I can report that Facebook does not respect robots.txt. Heck, I even mailed [email protected] with the specific IP ranges and log samples three times over a month and they of did not even respond. Keeps on wasting my CPU cycles to this day by crawling massive development forks (I hope they choke on the data...):

    $ (cat /var/www/logs/access.log; zcat /var/www/logs/access.log*.gz) | grep 2a03:2880: | wc -l
    626396
About three hits per second for months now.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Use whatever gets the job done. As for scaling and cropping, to the best of my knowledge, ffplay(1) supports all the options that ffmpeg(1) does. Here is what I for example use when capturing my Famicom: ffplay -sws_flags fast_bilinear -framerate 60 -video_size 1920x1080 -vf crop=iw-360:ih,scale=-1:1080 $DEV.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
My preferred way is ffplay(1). Last time I checked I get lower latencies than OBS at that, at least when I use `-sws_flags fast_bilinear`, which is the same scaling OBS uses by default.
ninjin
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
> Nvi 2 (nvi under openbsd) has Unicode support. It's like BSD Vi but with Iconv. Perfect for my needs.

My primary editor for text (not code) editing and e-mail. I just wish Unicode support made it into base vi(1) on OpenBSD, but for now I can at least use it for all other purposes other than the ones in the previous sentence.