lazyier's comments

It costs a lot of money to buy a home. I don't know what it costs in a place like San Fransisco, but it could be something like 5-10 thousand dollars in just closing costs.

Because of this it doesn't usually make sense to buy a home unless you are planning on staying there for at least 5 years or so. It'll take that long to effectively break even over just renting.

Keep in mind that instead of feeling bad about losing possible equity in a house you could invest that money instead of spending it on closing costs. So in a short term situation you can potentially earn more money by NOT buying a house, even if the monthly payments are the same.

Housing prices are in a bubble right now. But it's impossible to know when that bubble is going to burst. It could be 10 years from now. It could be next week.

Also keep in mind that 1 million dollar house in Bay area gets you a reasonably nice place. While a 1 million dollar house in the country in the mid-west gets you a small mansion, acres of land, and horses if that is your thing.

So really it boils down to first deciding were you want to be in 5-7 years. Then doing the math.

I don't get it.

You don't like that he is wearing a mask in the github profile?

Are you serious? Am I missing something?

The tower of Babel is a story of how man tried to create their own salvation through technology and was punished by God. The punishment was the fracturing of language.

The fracturing isn't the subject or metaphor. The metaphor is people attempting to create their own salvation in a very ignorant and shallow way and being punished for it.

It should be more than annoying. It is a denial of human autonomy.

> systemd is being adopted because it solves problems well the distributors have, but THEN the distributor ALSO has to bend their distribution to the single enforced world-view the systemd folks have if they want it to integrate.

It is like saying that "It is great that engineers are working to provide a unified rail line across Europe, but they are assholes because they want everybody to use the same rail gauge as well as implementing these changes that will allow the rails to handle traffic going 200 mph. The unified rail folks have an agenda!!"

The problem they are trying to solve is solved by "bending of the will", so to say.

Unified low-level "linux plumbing" architecture is something that a lot of people have realized is needed for a very very long time.

This is a major criticism against Linux distributions from the beginning. Especially from the *BSD camps.

And Systemd project is full of people actually putting the work into solving this major problem.

You are right that it isn't innocent. It is actually very sophisticated and probably very wise thing to do. It is helping a lot of people out.

That is like saying Apache project is subject to not enough review and unrelated subproject bitrot.

https://projects.apache.org/projects.html

or GNU

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU

Or FreeBSD or OpenBSD....

Having a single large overall project that manages a diverse number of individual software products is a common pattern and certainly something that isn't remotely unique to Systemd. There is no reason to denigrate systemd for that.

As all new installs of Fedora, Suse, Mint, Ubuntu, Arch, and most others are using merged /usr he is more right than wrong.

Debian will get merged /usr eventually.

> The opposition's argument seems to revolve around "we always did it this way so we can't do it any other way", really.

My understanding is that the technical objection is that Debian packaging tooling isn't up to snuff to deal with a merged /usr. There are various corner cases and technical debt that cause headaches.

And that the people promoting /usr are not doing the necessary work to get Debian to that point. That is they are not submitting useful patches.

So some patches and fixes have been submitted to correct the issue, but those have been blocked because they are not technically sufficient or high enough quality (??? not sure).

Something like that. I don't follow the drama. But that is my understanding last time I checked.

....

And then there is the issue of dealing with the conversion to merged /usr in existing systems.

For distributions like Fedora this is solved by putting the upgrade logic into the installer; anaconda. This way major changes, like init systems or merged /usr, is handled when you upgrade from one version to another.

Debian doesn't work that way. They want to be able to handle upgrades 100% through the package management system and debconf.

Debconf is essentially "install wizards" to allow people to choose configurations when packages are installed/upgraded and doesn't have equivalent functionality in the RPM world. One of the very few meaningful technical differences between deb and rpm.

Beyond all that there was past goes at attempting merged /usr, which depended on user selected preferences.

So this means that there are live systems that are a mixture of possible "/usr states". So those use cases need to be handled as well.

Which means that...

Yet again Debian politics has caused the creation of a vast amount of technical debt that must be overcome for it to move forward. Technical hurdles that are not experienced by other distributions. And because of that currently existing Debian installs can be in a sort of limbo half way between combined /usr and not, which is pretty much the worst possible outcome from a technical point of view. Ideally the change should be atomic in nature.

This is not terrible as many people place politics as a higher priority than technical excellence. So this state of affairs is actually desirable for many. Which is fine. Putting in extra work to help ensure that everybody is happy as possible with the outcome is not the worst possible thing you can do with your life.

Yeah. I am no expert by any means.

I was thinking of something more along the lines of an integral fast reactor were the heavy elements are removed and reused in the reactor leaving the waste "purified" of those heavy elements. So the really dangerous stuff never leaves the building and is used up to produce energy.

This means instead of having waste that is dangerous for tens of thousands of years you only have to worry about it for a few hundred.

But I guess the some of the output from a IFT then could be used in something like a CANDU reactor?

So you could use the combination of the two to use up most of the fissionable material and until the waste is so depleted that it is useless and is turned into ceramics or glass and safely stored.

Something like that.

Regardless this means that nuclear reactors provide the closest we can possibly get to truly renewable energy source and provide a path forward away from fossil fuels that could meet the energy budget of the planet for the next hundred thousand years or so.

Anybody who really cares even a little bit about the environment and global warming should be clamoring loudly for this sort of tech.

Large scale nuclear power production combined with locally produce small scale (I mean distributed) solar makes a lot of sense, IMO.

> No, it's not. Uranium once used in reactor is literally changed to other elements. And the radioactive waste is sealed in container safe for 100s of 1000s of years.

Sort of. What you are talking about is a technical problem and it has a solution. (and as others pointed out is not directly related to the subject at hand)

Conventional nuclear reactors require a certain level of purity in the uranium to provide stable operation. As the uranium breaks down the fuel becomes less stable. After a while they remove the fuel and then place it into storage.

However that uranium is not used up in that process. Most of it is still there. Which is one of the reasons why it's so difficult and expensive to store safely.

Theoretically you can recover that fuel in breeder reactors. Essentially recycling it. So it can be re-used in conventional reactors. The breeder reactors will still produce usable electricity as well.

And this can be done multiple times. Up to the point were most of the fissionable material is used up and it is much less radioactive and safe to handle. At that point you would combine the waste with clay and bake it into ceramic vessels that can be safely transported and stored indefinitely.

The reason why this technology hasn't moved forward is mostly to do with a couple facts. The first one being that nobody is allowed to do anything with the 'waste' as it is Federally controlled and not owned by the power company. So the operators can't do anything with it even if they wanted to.

And the second one being that during the cold war USA and other countries created vast amounts of purified uranium as part of their nuclear programs. And they have no place to put it and no use for it other than being put through nuclear reactors.

The amount of potentially unlimited power left laying on the table because of politics, paranoia, and fear is mind boggling. If recycling is implemented we currently have many multiple generations worth of fuel stockpiled.

It could put a end to the use of fossil fuels used for energy generation within our lifetime. Which is something that is not possible with wind or solar.

Why do you suppose there are gaps in the first place?

Why don't they make it one solid piece? You can do that with composite construction. Just overlap layers and glue it all together.

It could have something to do with how the fuselage change shapes and distorts under different conditions. The airplane goes through various different shapes depending on things like pressurization and thermal expansion. The body gets a bit bigger, the wings flap up and down, things get wider and shorter and harder, etc. etc.

With composite construction things are glued into place, but they need to be designed to accommodate this movement. The glues and such things have a particular amount of elasticity and fatigue limits.

Could be that a 0.005 amounts to 10% less gluing surface and thus the projected fatigue life of the glue is now much different because there is much less.

Just speculating.

Not attacking you personally, but it's important to keep this stuff in mind when we make choices as customers. Consumers are cattle. Don't be like cattle. Use your money for good.

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The difference between you and North Korea is that nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you can't root.

Which means that it is very likely that you volunteered for it. Unless somebody else paid for it, like work. Then that is their problem. I still recommend buying your own phone.

Why did you do that?

Is it because the phone is a particular brand that is fashionable and you want that to reflect on you when you use the phone around other people? Is it because it is cheaper to buy because the phone company subsidizes the phone in order to sell you spyware you can't get rid of and to lock in reliable monthly payments from you?

There are lots of reasons people do this. Maybe it's just ignorance. Maybe they tell themselves they don't have anything to hide. Maybe having control over the things in they own seems like too much work or too intimidating.

Because it is extremely likely you actually had a choice and your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny baubles.

You didn't have to do that. And you don't have to continue to do that. You have a choice. You have the power. You really do.

This is important because you have the chance to financially reward people that want to preserve your freedom or you can financially reward people that take it away.

This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting. It also matters much more.

More conventionally this is called a "Core Deposit".

The idea is that you are buying new or refurbished products to replace broken parts. So you pay a core fee so you return the broken parts so that they can rebuild them and resell them.

This is common for automparts stores because as long as the cast metal parts are not damaged and within spec then there is no reason they can't be rebuilt. Alternators, water pumps, etc.

You are not obligated to return the parts. You can keep them yourself and if that is the case then they just keep the deposit.

It is entirely possible to host your own email server, I do it for example, there is no way to reliably know that other people are receiving your message.

That is: When self-hosting email you can reliably receive email, but can't reliably send it.

The fundamental problem is that email is a broken protocol and too many people are making too much money mitigating the problem of spam rather than solving it.

Companies that need to keep their email servers working have to deal with extortion from anti-spam companies to attain reliable message delivery. It is a racket.

This means that even if you get everything working 100% with all the perfect security protocols and conventions in place the chances of anybody actually receiving your email at this point is roughly 50/50. There is nothing you can do to ensure reliable message delivery without getting your servers whitelisted by most of the popular spam houses. And even then you have to deal with large public companies like Google and Microsoft that may or may not forward messages to recipient based on secret rules that change constantly.

So while it is possible, I host my own email, I can't rely on it. I use gmail for situations were reliability matters.

It is better to use something like Mastodon for correspondence if you can help it.

Imagine I have never used Emacs before.

However I have been using vi exclusively for 15 years. I have a passing familiarity with Emacs bindings from working shells, but they are an exercise in misery.

So I want to change Emacs to use Evil. That is easy enough, right? Just a simple config.

But I want to use git with Emacs. This is one of those things that people talk about, right? "Emacs as an operating system you can live in". But I never used Magit before. How does it work? I haven't the faintest clue. I don't even understand exactly what is the goal of the software. Is it supposed to automatically check in code when I save a file or something?

And before I can use it I need to make sure it works with Evil.

So how do I modify a piece of software that I don't know how it works and never used before with a programming language I have never used before with a set of key bindings that were not originally intended to be used with Emacs, which I never used before?

And how do I do this without losing all of my productivity?

Now do the same for Python language support, and maybe get email working, and what is this "Ansiterm" crap and why did anybody think that "eshell" was a good idea? How do I make that work with my bash config?

This is the sort of challenge I always ran into with Emacs. I'd spend a weekend struggling with it. Messing around with it. Trying to get stuff to work and trying to figure out Elisp.

Then I would realize I was spending 90% of my time in Vim trying to figure out how to fix my Emacs config.... And then give up.

Rinse and repeat this every 14 or 20 months or so.

---------------

Spacemacs was the first time I actually could use Emacs.

All of a sudden I had the help of dozens, if not hundreds, of experienced Emacs users that have been using and living in Emacs for years. They already worked through the hard part of getting magit working, creating an easy to way to discover functions, ability to get various languages working easily and seamlessly, etc.

Doom provided the same thing and it was even better and faster.

And guess what? None of this excluded benefiting from writing my own configurations and scripts.

And it is not an accident that these things are focused on making Evil work.

-------------

So why Spacemacs? Why Doom?

Because:

1. You get the benefit of other people's experiences. If your config doesn't work you can get help. And when you get good at it you can help other people.

2. It is a lot easier to get started with something that works than something that doesn't.

The alternative, which is Linux, is to grant your calculator app the permissions to read and write to the same resources that your browser uses to store the password for your bank.

Well "grant" is too strong of a word. "By default and there is nothing you can do about it unless you are exceptionally skilled" is more accurate.

Also your calculator app can read your sudo password as you type it, which you do a dozen times a day to carry out complex and security sensitive tasks such as "Connect to printer to print out mom's recipe for brownies" and "restart bluetooth because it's buggy and you want to listen to spotify on your wireless headphones".

> The problem is not so much that selinux is too complicated (it is as complicated as it needs to be), but that we all run software we don't understand.

There are many many problems.

One of the biggest problem with SELinux is that it is trying to graft Mandatory Access Controls on a userland that is not designed for it.

Unix, frankly, is not designed for security. It is designed to get work done by writing a bunch of little buggy C programs that you string together in novel ways.

Security is something that was grafted on it. And it shows.

How many decades of security vulnerabilities have occurred because of a shared /tmp space? 40 years?

How do you graft access controls on a system designed with no access controls and potentially billions of combinations of programs, paths, and various other resources without breaking anything?

The answer is: You don't. You can't.

Were as you have a system designed for security, like Android, and literally hundreds of millions of fully SELinux-enabled fully locked down user-facing Linux devices are out there being used by people who haven't the faintest clue what "audit2allow" is and wouldn't understand it if you tried to explain it to them.

So it's less of an issue of "we all use software that we don't understand". SELinux is complicated enough that you can devote your life to trying to understand it and still fail to craft good rules for other people.

It's more of an issue of "Linux userland follows the basic Unix design from the 1970s which is kinda shit if your goal is security".

It is just bad design. Pure and simple. That is all there really is.

However there is a way out.

The way out is to give each process and each user their own little itty bitty special Unix environment where they can do whatever they want. And then you use strong divisions to keep them mostly unaware of each other. Use a default deny policy and only poke holes in it when required.

> There's no way CRT manufacturing could come back right?

Probably not.

> Is OLED manufacturing easier?

Define "Easier".

Is it easier to manufacture a transistor or is it easier to manufacture a vacuum tube?

If you were stuck out in the wilderness with nothing but rocks, sticks, and a pile of sand and a team of engineers you would probably have a much easier time building a primitive CRT display than a OLED one.

But if you have a goal of having to manufacture a reliable display at minimal cost then OLED wins hands-down.

Depending on your constraints one is 'easier' then the other.

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Old CRT displays were nice (inherent advantages in terms of resolution, refresh rates, color depth, view angles, and color accuracy), but they were fragile and required significant amount of labor to construct. It is unusual for CRT-based televisions to last decades without requiring repairing and tuning.

Where as modern modern flatscreen displays are much cheaper to produce, are much more efficient in terms of resource usage, and are much more reliable. People tend to replace flat screens because they become obsolete. However they replaced tended to CRTs because they stopped working.

I won't buy a phone that I can't run LineageOS on. MicroG.

Life is too short to struggle and play games with the spyware that ships on phones by default nowadays. Better to be able to blow it all away.