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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • shirro@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.ml•The king is back
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    3 days ago

    I ran sid in serious production when I was younger and more foolish. The trick with unstable distributions is to test before you deploy and know the incompatibilities and have the fixes ready in advance. The problem is you are basically taking a snapshot approach and doing the work of the debian release system yourself and doing it half-arsed. An urgent security update comes out and you can’t rush to deploy it without risking a dependency being pulled in that breaks under your config. For servers it ends up being a huge amount of work for no gain and you can actually miss out on security updates.

    BTW this approach is why Valve can release Steam OS based on Arch or Google can base ChromeOS on Gentoo and release them to millions of consumers safely. They freeze updates to create a release candidate and test it and they deploy a limited subset of packages.

    At home I update one arch desktop machine to work out what breaks, how to fix it and seed the package cache on our server before I do the rest and break everyone’s systems. I could do the same with Sid but Arch, despite being unstable intentionally isn’t all that unreliable compared with Sid though my experience with Sid is dated.


  • shirro@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.ml•The king is back
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    3 days ago

    I only ever deploy and develop on Debian. Community run distros all the way. I had bad experiences with Redhat decades ago and do everything I can to avoid it or its siblings.

    Debian has faults but it is often a taste thing. I like systems that give me upstream with minimal patches, like Arch. I moved to Arch on all desktops/laptops. The Debian devs repeatedly doing dumb shit with ssh patches was part of that. Arch is not unreliable but it is unstable. All that means is that software updates which aren’t backwards compatible sometimes require intervention . To be clear that is not a fault with Arch but it does make it much less suitable for long hassle free server deployments. Also Arch doesn’t have the Debian security announce list or maintain a stable production environment for years with backported security fixes and unnattended security updates.


  • The Linux kernel team has a policy that all bugs are potential security threats and should be assigned a CVE. That does not mean these CVEs are exploitable. Many will be for features that aren’t even enabled on typical systems.

    LLMs are allowing researchers to locate known classes of bugs more easily than an exhaustive search with other tools. Security researchers are driving the bus here. Not the tech companies or their products. Don’t believe the marketing hype. The tech companies want us to be dependent on subscriptions to their products and deskilling is part of their agenda. Good stuff is coming from security researchers using expertise and tooling.



  • In general people have no fucking idea or just don’t want to know.

    You can lay out the evidence of all the ways cigarettes will kill a person and a huge number of people will go ahead and smoke anyway. We are not an entirely rational species.

    People have a massive capacity for self delusion. Even then a lot of people who accept the truth of living under corporate and government mass surveillance think the risks are acceptable or won’t be abused or are unavoidable in modern life. They are wrong but I can understand how their delusion brings them comfort.




  • Linus hasn’t programmed much for years. He is a manager. I imagine lots of managers are seduced by vibe coding. Programming can be a real slog and takes so much time. Why walk when you can drive?

    The problem isn’t with Linus losing his skills but sustainability of the entire FOSS space. I don’t think many young programmers are ever going to learn the lessons Linus did as a young person and those lessons are still very relevant for low level code working closely with hardware. When the pre-LLM programmers age out I think we are going to be treading water for years with LLM regurgitating variations on the same old human code without much direction or innovation.

    It is arguably a different situation for something like webdev which is mostly paint by numbers or enterprise software that is solving the same problems over and over.


  • Honestly I don’t think piracy is great. I would rather pay a fair price for easily discoverable content, own it forever on all mediums, and have the bulk of the money go to the creatives who made it so they can pay their bills and feed their families. I don’t watch a lot and the little I do should be affordable. I don’t feel compelled to collect it all.

    But then I go to introduce one of my kids to all the age appropriate comics/graphic novels I bought on Comixology for an older sibling. But Comixology closed down and all the content moved into Kindle with a heap of all ages content, not all appropriate. And Amazon are too cheap to offer family sharing outside the US. So hundreds of dollars in Bezos pocket with no way to put it on a device for my kid. I could waste time breaking the DRM or pirate but I am leaning towards a return to dead trees.

    Netflix is crap and getting worse, jumped ship ages ago. Disney is killing genre movies and tv with all their marvel/star wars IP. Both are driven by algorithms and greed and recycle IP instead of taking risks.