enumerator4829

@enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feels more intrusive, more confusing, and less human⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, it’s not perfect, especially not with regards to drivers from some of them. But:

  insights.linuxfoundation.org/…/contributors?timeR…

  I expect that the ability of B2C-products to keep their code somewhat closed keeps them from moving to other platforms, while simultaneously pumping money upstream to their suppliers, expecting them to contribute to development. The linked list is dominated by hardware vendors, cloud vendors and B2B-vendors.

  Linux didn’t win on technical merit, it won on licensing flexibility. Devs and maintainers are very happy with GPL2. Does it suck if you own a Tivo? Yes. Don’t buy one. On the consumer side, we can do some voting with our wallets, and some B2C vendors are starting to notice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do this:

  • Calculate the total power cost of running it at 100% load since 2014
  • Calculate Flops/Watt and compare with modern hardware
  • Calculate MTTF when running at 100% load. Remember that commercial support agreements are 4-5 years for a GPU, and if it dies after that, it stays dead.
  • In AI, consider the full failure domain (1 broken GPU = 7+ GPUs out of commission) for the above calculation.

  You’ll probably end up with 4-6 years as the usable lifetime of your billion dollar investment. This entire industry is insane. (GTX 1080 here. Was considering an upgrade until the RAM prices hit.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nvidia sells plenty of GPUs for actual money, they are good for it.

  No, the real issue is the depreciation for the people owning GPUs. Your GPU will be usable for 4-6 years, and 2-4 of those years will be spent as ”the cheap old GPU. After that time, you need new GPUs. (And as the models are larger by then, you need moahr GPU)

  How the actual fuck do these people expect to get any ROI on that scale with those timeframes? With training, maybe the trained model can be an asset (lol), but for inference there are basically no residual benefits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feels more intrusive, more confusing, and less human⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with your morals and your end goal.

  How do you want to fund the development of Open Source? Because currently most of it is funded by corporations, in turn funded by ”corporatist simping”. The expectations of the average user simply can’t be fulfilled by hobbyist developers, and then we need funding. How do we get the Windows user ”John Smith” to personally fork over money to the correct developers?

  Proton/Wine/KDE would not be in their current state unless they got that sweet proprietary Valve money. In our current world we need to use corporate money to further open source, not fight it. Follow the stream and steer the flow. Given time, we can diversify funding and control.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feels more intrusive, more confusing, and less human⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. Kinda.

  How do you think Linux devs get paid? The devices are locked down, sure, but there are strong incentives to upstream code and fund further development upstream. Linux ”won” because of this. You can’t build and develop Linux for such a wide audience and hardware flora with a bunch of hobbyists.

  As Linus himself said plenty of times - GPL2 was the correct choice. Roku, Tizen, Chromebooks and Amazon garbage are absolutely within what the developers intended, and the devs are doing the work after all.

  From a consumer standpoint, I absolutely agree with you, open everything is wonderful. However - commercial interests currently fund most OSS development. Without those funds, development stops and developers must take other paying jobs (probably closed source). Would be nice to change this, but then we need to completely pivot our funding model. You need to pay devs, either directly or indirectly (taxes, foundations, etc).

  So far, the open source community hasn’t been very good at figuring out funding models for consumer products. It usually ends with the development team needing to put food on the table, so they add a subscription and close down parts of the project. About two seconds later, the project has ten forks and the original author can’t buy groceries.

  ”Buy me a beer” simply isn’t s viable mechanism to fund open source. How should we do it?

  Personal preference: Slowly move the public sector towards open source, and require them to provide financial aid to products they use. Not perfect, but something that could happen gradually, without shocking the system.

  tl;dr: yes, but also no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Look, I’m not saying BitLocker isn’t flawed. I’n m saying the alternatives on Linux are shit. All the primitives are there, and you can do it on Linux, with lots of work, testing and QC of all software updates on all your hardware (or else you’ll do manual entry of disaster recovery keys for the next decade). But on Windows it’s a checkbox to encrypt the entire fleet, along with management of recovery keys.

  Also, on audits: for people doing checkbox security (i.e. most regulated industries), this is very easy to audit. You just smack in ”Bitlocker” and you are done. For some, the threat isn’t really information loss, it’s loss of compliance (and therefore revenue). Stupid, but here we are. If you mean actual security, then you are probably correct.

  A smart cart only authenticates and identifies the user - it can’t do attestation of the boot chain. If we use a smart card for disk encryption, a malicious or compromised user can just pop out the SSD, mount and decrypt (using the smart card) on a separate machine and extract/modify data without a trace. If you use SB, the TPM and disk encryption as intended, you can trust both the user (via smart card) and the machine (probably via a Kerberos machine key). Basically, this method prevents the user from accessing or modifying data on their own machine.

  Again, on Windows this is basic shit any Windows sysadmin can roll out easily following a youtube tutorial or something. Providing those same security controls on Linux will yield a world of pain.

  We really need to make this easy on Linux. systemd-boot and UKIs are trying, but are not even close to enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You need to have secure boot in order to have the disk decrypt without user input, otherwise the chain is untrusted. You can (and probably should) load your own keys into the firmware and sign everything yourself. MS has nothing to do with it, except that BitLocker is much better than anything any Linux distro has to offer today.

  You need to have the disk decrypt without user input, and you can’t have the secret with the user. (As the user is untrusted - could be someone stealing the laptop.) The normal Linux user mantra of ”I own the machine” does not apply here. In this threat model, the corporation owns the machine, and in particular any information on it.

  As for sudo, this is why we have polkit. (Yes, technically root, but you get my point)

  And as for number 7 - this is why most Windows fleets use ”Software Center” or similar. No reason you can’t do the same on Linux, just that no one has done it yet. (I mean, you can, with pull requests into a puppet repo, but that’s not very user friendly)

  Hate RHEL all you want, but first take a look at what distros have any kind of commercial support at all from software vendors. This is the complete list: RHEL, sometimes Rocky, sometimes Ubuntu. Go ask your vendor about Fedora Silverblue and see what happens. The primary reason to run Linux like this is usually to use a specific (and probably very expensive) software that works best on Linux, so distro choice is usually very limited to what that software vendor supports. (And when they say Linux, they are really saying ”the oldest still supported RHEL.)

  Basically, corporate requirements go completely against the requirements of enthusiasts and power users. You don’t need Secure Boot to protect your machine from thieves, but a corporation needs Secure Boot to protect the machine from you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve managed Linux desktop fleets in enterprise-like environments. I’ll modify your list a bit:

  1. Use Rocky or RHEL (because the commercial software you want to use only has support for RHEL and/or Ubuntu)
  2. disallow root completely without exception
  3. do additional hardening
  4. don’t allow sudo for fucking anything
  5. run centrally controlled configuration management (most likely Puppet)
  6. Ironically - disallow any use of Flatpak, Snap and AppImage. They don’t play that well with Kerberized NFS-mounted home directories, which you absofuckinglutely will be required to use. (Might have improved since I tried last time, but probably not. Kerberos and network mounted directories,home or otherwise, are usually a hard requirement.)
  7. Install and manage all software via configuration management (again, somewhat ironically, this works very well with RPMs and DEBs, but not with Flatpak/Snap/Appimage). Update religiously, but controlled (i.e. Snap is out).
  8. A full reprovision of everything fairly regularly.
  9. You most likely want TPM-based unlocking of your LUKS encrypted drives, with SecureBoot turned on. This is very fun to get working properly in a Linux environment, but super simple to do on Windows.

  And as you have guessed, on Windows this requires a bit of point and click in SCCM to do decently.

  On Linux, you’ll wanna start by getting a few really good sysadmins to write a bunch of Puppet for a year or so.

  (If we include remote desktop capabilities in the discussion, I’ll do my yearly Wayland-rant.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want to encode information into only the depth of your recursive identically named folders, you have 128 different depths, one character for the name, one for the slash, per level. Yields about 128 possible levels. Leave one off for the last filename, 127.

  If we want to name our folders something longer than a single character, we can store less files. If we want to store our files on linux, by default we get 4096 characters to play with, so about 2k levels (unless we compile our own linux kernel with PATH_MAX set for this very specific purpose). If we run CIFS we may be able to reach up to 16k levels.

  That was my interpretation of OPs (admittedly bad) idea. Personally, I try to avoid implementing inodes as Church numerals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google CEO: If an AI bubble pops, no one is getting out clean⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Who do you think pays for the bailouts in the end?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You can now have 128 files in your filesystem.

  …microsoft.com/…/maximum-file-path-limitation?tab…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can do anything at Zombocom⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All connectors are compatible given enough violence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can do anything at Zombocom⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The VGA connector is actually reversible! Once. given enough force. It also doesn’t actually work properly when installed upside down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia reveals Vera Rubin Superchip for the first time — incredibly compact board features 88-core Vera CPU, two Rubin GPUs, and 8 SOCAMM modules⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry, no OpenGL support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s literally the same chip designers, production facilities and software. Every product using <5nm silicon fabs compete for the same manufacturing capabilities (fab time at TSMC in Taiwan) and all Nvidia GPUs share lots of commonalities in their software stack.

  The silicon fab producing the latest Blackwell AI chips is the same fab producing the latest consumer silicon for both AMD, Apple, Intel and Nvidia. (Let’s ignore the fabs making memory for now.) Internally at Nvidia, I assume they have shuffled lots and lots of internal resources over from the consumer oriented parts of the company to the B2B oriented parts, severely reducing consumer focus.

  And then we have any intentional price inflation and market segmentation. Cheap consumer GPUs that are a bit too efficient at LLM inference will compete with Nvidias DC offerings. The amount of consumer grade silicon used for AI inference is already staggering, and Nvidia is actively holding back that market segment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I want cheap GPUs at home please!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Normal people aren’t flashing custom ROMs. The audience for some FOSS software will shrink by several orders of magnitude.

  But the pain really kicks in when your government/bank/streaming apps require attestation of a signed boot chain and Google Play services running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You should know how to coil cables⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the record - analog multis can burn in hell. Nowadays, not running all of the show over Cat6 should be criminal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You should know how to coil cables⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone working on or around stages:

  Most sane production companies standardise on over-under. Even if you find some other method superior (nothing is), you’ll get thrown out headfirst if you don’t follow the standard. Having a tech fuck around with a non-compliant cable during a changeover is far too risky.

  Should be noted that there are special cases. For example, thicccc cables (i.e. 24ch analog multi) that have their own dedicated cases often go down in an 8 instead - easier to pull out and you can use a smaller case. Thank god for digital audio.

  (Also, when using over-under correctly, you can throw the cable and it will land straight without any internal stresses winding it up like a spring)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can agree on Apple not really having a properly supported hardware repair ecosystem, and actively working against third party repair.

  But the software? When Samsung and friends had 2-4 years of security updates, Apple had almost twice that. The iPhone XS still has support, 6 years after end-of-sale, 7 years from release. Normal people can’t be expected to flash their phones with LineageOS. The situation is slightly better nowadays, but Samsung still seems to be depreciating 3 year old devices: endoflife.date/samsung-mobile

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tailscale difficulties⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here I am, running separate tailscale instances and a separate reverse proxy for like 15 different services, and that’s just one VM… All in all, probably 20-25 tailscale instances in a single physical machine.

  Don’t think about Tailscale like a normal VPN. Just put it everywhere. Put it directly on your endpoints, don’t route. Then lock down all your services to the tailnet and shut down any open ports to the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Those who are hosting on bare metal: What is stopping you from using Containers or VM's? What are you self hosting?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My NAS will stay on bare metal forever. Any complications there is something I really don’t want. Passthrough of drives/PCIe-devices works fine for most things, but I won’t use it for ZFS.

  As for services, I really hate using Docker images with a burning passion. I’m not trusting anyone else to make sure the container images are secure - I want the security updates directly from my distribution’s repositories, and I want them fully automated, and I want that inside any containers. Having Nixos build and launch containers with systemd-nspawn solves some of it. The actual docker daemon isn’t getting anywhere near my systems, but I do have one or two OCI images running. Will probably migrate to small VMs per-service once I get new hardware up and running.

  Additionally, I never found a source of container images I feel like I can trust long term. When I grab a package from Debian or RHEL, I know that package will keep working without any major changes to functionality or config until I upgrade to the next major. A container? How long will it get updates? How frequently? Will the config format or environment variables or mount points change? Will a threat actor assume control of the image? (Oh look, all the distros actually enforce GPG signatures in their repos!)

  So, what keeps me on bare metal? Keeping my ZFS pools safe. And then just keeping away from the OCI ecosystem in general, the grass is far greener inside the normal package repositories.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  $ su -
  # rm -rf —no-preserve-root /
  

  Should do the trick. (Obviously don’t try it unless you know what you are doing and know what may happen when it hits your EFI variables.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HELP HIM.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Computational biochemistry is slowly getting there. Alphafold was a big breakthrough, and there is plenty of ongoing research simulating more and more.

  We can probably never get rid of animal testing entirely for clinical research, we’ll always need to validate simulations in animals before moving on to humans.

  I do however agree that animal testing outside of clinical research approved by a competent independent ethics committee can fuck right off. (Looking at you, cosmetics industry)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think there is much overlap between the sets of people

  • buying these cars
  • having the competence to hack them
  • having the willingness and finances to potentially brick the car
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder if ancient crunchy low bitrate mp3s will be an aesthetic, the way that dusty vinyl or worn out tapes are?

  wildergardenaudio.com/maim/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most arch users are casuals that finally figured out how to read a manual. Then you have the 1% of arch users who are writing the manual…

  It’s the Gentoo and BSD users we should fear and respect, walking quietly with a big stick of competence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China advances toward tech independence with new homegrown 6nm gaming and AI GPUs — Lisuan 7G106 runs Chinese AAA titles at 4K over 70 FPS and matches RTX 4060 in synthetic benchmarks⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s the thing.

  The gaming market only barely exists at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China advances toward tech independence with new homegrown 6nm gaming and AI GPUs — Lisuan 7G106 runs Chinese AAA titles at 4K over 70 FPS and matches RTX 4060 in synthetic benchmarks⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pheasants gamers buy cheap inference cards gaming cards.

  The absolute majority of Nvidias sales globally are top-of-the-line AI SKUs. Gaming cards are just a way of letting data scientists and developers have cheap CUDA hardware at home (while allowing some Cyberpunk), so they keep buying NVL clusters at work.

  Nvidia’s networking division is probably a greater revenue stream than gaming GPUs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thoughts??⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have fucked around enough with R’s package management. Makes Python look like a god damn dream. Containers around it is just polishing a turd. Still have nightmares from building containers with R in automated pipelines, ending up at like 8 GB per container.

  Also, good luck getting reproducible container builds.

  Regarding locales - yes, I mentioned that. Thats’s a shitty design decision if I ever saw one. But within a locale, most Excel documents from last century and onwards should work reasonably well. (Well, normal Excel files. Macros and VB really shouldn’t work…). And it works on normal office machines, and you can email the files, and you can give it to your boss. And your boss can actually do something with it.

  I also think Excel should be replaced by something. But not R.