irc is the recluse’s gateway drug to talking to more people

so you know how a bunch of split “recycling and not recycling” bins have the same bag underneath right
I like to imagine it’s because they go through the contents and manually pick out recyclables
obviously not but I like to imagine
do you think when someone puts something that’s neither common garbage nor recyclable the person goes “guess we doing triangles now” or do they grab it or what

one thing that’s funny is you can now sometimes tell when a project is slop just from the name
no predictive power but like
AnythingCraft is AI (yes including Minecraft that’s Microsoft now)
you only want artisanal bad names like glorbochev (I should make a software called glorbochev)

you know it's interesting, because being able to run whatever software on whatever hardware is a relatively niche capacity
I don't mean being able to use different software on your hardware, but rather being able to expect a given piece of software to work on arbitrary hardware

at the origins of computing, you would buy the hardware in large part for the software that would be on it
this only changed with UNIX, which as we all know is a historical happenstance that happened due to circumstances that have not been seen since

in networking equipment you select the type of hardware you will buy based on the software you want to run on it (do you want cisco? perhaps openwrt? perhaps mikrotik? or vyos? each of these will support different hardware platforms and you gotta check)

in games, outside of PC, you select the hardware platform based on the games that you want to play, it's why "exclusives" matter so much, because they're what ultimately influences your decision MORE than the hardware itself, alongside what the services are like

even on phones, if you want graphene you pick a pixel, if you want lineage you have a list, if you want sailfish…

currently, for the most part, if you buy a "standard computer" (so amd64 laptop or desktop or server) you will be able to run basically whatever on it
it's a common expectation to be able to run linux on whatever, and to be able to run a BSD on whatever, and so on (though the latter minus drivers, and that's what this is about)

it's important to be aware that this situation is relatively new
linux used to have the same driver issues, I remember, I was there!
what changed was that a lot of people put a lot of effort in and did not fix the issue, but got enough traction (especially in the server space) that companies began to give people money to develop and upstream drivers
this created a LOT of momentum which is how we've been carried into this era of "you can run it on whatever"

what this means is that if what you dislike about linux (as a lot of people are migrating off) is the corporate intervention (becoming stakeholders, pushing weight around, pushing AI usage, whatever you might have), then you MUST expect to NOT have the consequences of corporate-buy in in whatever you may select outside
this will be inconvenient, same as linux used to be, hardware-wise, because ALL hardware is made by companies, and so is optimized for corporate needs (and if it wasn't the case, it would again look different)

for instance, you MIGHT be able to play games on a BSD or Haiku, but you should not expect it to be your gaming pc
games are mostly made by corporations (and when they're not they're very often made for windows anyway) and they require specialized hardware made by corporations and are shipped as blobs etc
you MIGHT be able to get it to work, but you shouldn't count on it, just like how it was on linux before valve put enormous amounts of well-directed (really! they did it right) efforts into turning linux into a gaming platform (which now beats out windows, to the point that microsoft are targetting "equivalent to linux performance for games")

you have to select the hardware (not to as high a degree as elsewhere, but still) to the software you want to run, and you might have to select the software too
we're entering the era of "I have to run linux for gaming", which is really funny to think of (I have said the above sentence like a year or two ago and it's only gone further in that direction)

one of my weird hot takes is that it’s ok for software to have bugs, in part because it’s not possible to define an ontological edge to what a bug is but also in part because it literally is fine
the insane disconnect we’re seeing in free software right now is very interesting in this respect

on one hand, most free software wants to be bug free and receives a deluge of bug reports found by LLMs (which I am now told are real finds with minimal reproducers)
maintainers want their software to be perfect and feel obligated to fix them

on the other hand the companies pushing this stuff are shipping the most buggy software they’ve ever done
I’m forced to use windows for my main client atm and I’ve literally had the notification tray irrecoverably freeze (and render it impossible to reboot even from cli, making me just hold the power button) among other things
for the first time in my life the usage share of windows is dramatically dropping

let’s for one second take Microsoft’s claims that they’ve done a release with nothing but bug fixes seriously: a question is raised of “which ones”
where before fixing everything that came through the door was feasible (though it had a real cost even before), the perfectionist equivalence of “a bug is a bug” could survive
with this situation we are forced to prioritize, clearly including companies, which raises the question of how the priorities are decided

I truly believe that it’s ok for free software to just let some bugs go
hell it used to happen already with issues sitting untouched for years
just make it official, focus on things that truly affect the experience

hey girls what do you all think of bug linux

I've been saying this for a bit: it is undesirable for everyone to self-host everything. Instead, I want every small group to have their own shared services. The material cost for a self-hoster is the *essentially* the same between 1 user, 10 users, and even 100 users, meaning the entirety of the difference in cost is social (effort on the part of the hoster and support network on the part of the rest). This means that making things easy to self host is *still* supremely important, but the REASON is very different.

> pokemon vents

AMONG US????

sometimes I think about people
my immediate impression of them is that they are weak-willed, but I think this is actually more about the distribution curve of the effort they are capable of, where the typical distribution curve is less "spiky" than mine
put differently, most people seem to be able to deal with long term consistent will-exercises much more easily than short term "do a lot of things NOW" kind of things
in large part, this is likely a consequence of the world: most IRL friction is of the long-form; the shitty commute, the boredom at work, the low-effort high-frequency cleaning, et cetera
this means that people as an aggregate will more often fail at tasks that require high amplitudes of will exertion, things like breaking chemical dependence (which is spiky initially and then gets easier and easier), directed/focused improvement (which can be concentrated in the span of a few days/weeks, OR can be very longform, with the results being very different)
it also would imply that I would struggle at things that require lower amplitudes over longer periods : and I do! task persistence after it goes from weeks to months, moderation where complete cessation is infeasible, etc; most people do not appear to struggle with this nearly as much, which just makes my "final" profile very different from theirs, with exceptions taken where I don't care about the thing itself TOO much (esp. past the initial engagement) but enjoy the process in and of itself (for example, my guitar forays, where I am not improving anywhere near the rates I was early on, because I just pick it up and play a little without any major pushes for improvement, but I do still do this regularly)
I don't know what ADHD "really is" (I'm not so sure it's a "single" thing, same as autism), and I don't think anyone can
I would say that this "spikiness" in will exertion (knowing of course that you can train will exertion in *all* directions, this is about the natural propensity) is one potential mechanism behind something you might call ADHD (which I would have, if we were to fit this definition in, and would not have if we didn't)

what people think of when you tell them you have a rescue system that runs from RAM:
1. UEFI
2. bootloader
3. kernel + initrd
4. mount squashfs
5. copy to tmpfs
6. pivot root into tmpfs

what I mean:
1. UEFI
2. bootloader
3. UKI (including kernel + initrd)

you are done, the initrd is the rootfs, just have an overlaymount

then for phones you either have iphone or fisher price. a google pixel is iphone. samsung is fisher price.
sailfish is fisher price, grapheneos is fisher price.
the nintendo switch 2 is iphone. switch 1 is fisher price. steam deck is fisher price.
a kindle is iphone. —helene