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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • Cost to manufacture is not more than wages, but cost to purchase a good is always more than the total cost of labour needed to produce it, so long as profit exists.

    The money isn’t free so much as redistributed from taxation elsewhere, think of it as the same as subsidising industry except only to the workers of that industry (instead giving it to owners and expecting the savings to trickle downwards). You could also consider it an income tax rebate with more fine-grained control of who gets it.

    It doesn’t seem particularly ground-breaking of a concept; I see the value in investing money into necessary but unprofitable industry though my concern is that if you subsidise wages of a business with a profit incentive, management may lower wages to compensate.


  • I used ZFS with Arch for a while, the volume manager was what I’d call the largest benefit; in my opinion nothing else comes close to being as useful and well integrated.

    I stopped because ZFS incompatibility with recent kernels (which I needed for GPU reasons) made me have to rescue my system more often than was ideal.

    Some other minor downsides:

    • boot can take ages due to ZFS using udev-settle.
    • deduplication status is… Complicated.
    • you’re kind-of stuck with the performance of your slowest vdev; L2ARC & a metadata device don’t really compensate well for a zpool that is predominantly a raid-z2 of spinning rust.

  • What you’re after, transparent wifi roaming, is actually mostly handled by the client; what you need is wifi access points that don’t get in the way.

    I don’t have much experience with new OpenWRT supporting products, but the kicker is you only need one of them. If you have multiple routers, they will require some setup to play nice with each other. An “Access point” is just the wifi provider, can be hooked up to provide whatever the one router manages, and are generally cheaper than a router.

    To that end, I’d suggest a single router, and multiple access points. I do this with Ubiquiti access points in my home, their PoE has been nice and they have been pretty “setup once and forget” for a few years now. I’m sure there are some other brands that’ll do well; Ruckus and Mikrotik come to mind.


    1. Get kicked from freedesktop for fostering a toxic community.
    2. Ditch wlroots for your own compositor.
    3. Shit on other compositors in your spare time.
    4. Tell people they should just be plugging into Hyprland instead of rolling their own compositor.

    Man if I was concerned about sinking the time to make a configuration for the compositor with a bus factor of 1 man-child, and a toxic community; I can’t imagine anybody investing the time to make a compositor is going to want to hitch themselves to that cart.

    The compositor is really solid and makes for a great user experience but I’ll be fucked if every word vaxry writes doesn’t make me want to move to sway or niri.


  • Nixpkgs has more and newer packages than the aur.

    The initial time to get shit done is longer; you can’t simply make install, but honestly you shouldn’t have been doing so on arch anyway.

    Making your own derivation is much easier than making your own PKGBUILD and should be considered in those terms because you’re not just shoving some binary into /usr/bin for it to explode later when glibc updates.

    When things fuck up, reverting to your previous config is at worst a reboot away.

    I have much less time than I used to, so moving from arch to Nixos has prevented the time otherwise wasted in an arch-chroot trying to fix issues like the kernel upgrading past what the zfs-dkms supports.

    If you’re using specialised proprietary tools, working them in with Nix can be an absolute nightmare, but I use a debian container for them.




  • My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.

    They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.





  • I work with SoC suppliers, including Qualcomm and can confirm; you need to sign an NDA to get a highly patched old orphaned kernel, often with drivers that are provided only as precompiled binaries, preventing you updating the kernel yourself.

    If you want that source code, you need to also pay a lot of money yearly to be a Qualcomm partner and even then you still might not have access to the sources for all the binaries you use. Even when you do get the sources, don’t expect them to be updated for new kernel compatibility; you’ve gotta do that yourself.

    Many other manufacturers do this as well, but few are as bad. The environment is getting better, but it seems to be a feature that many large manufacturers feel they can live without.








  • I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:

    • your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the “will one day unknowingly modify” category.

    • use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.