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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Probably not what you’re asking for, but I have an impression, that your primary motivation is curiosity and just good feeling of using the open platform, so I figured I’ll mention it.

    I’m using ESP32-C3 boards with some sensors and ESPHome to monitor air quality in my house. The board is RISC-V based and can be bought for real cheap. (single digit $ price generally) ESPHome is quite easy to work with and (If you’re realistic with your expectations around very low power device) also quite powerful.

    Honestly the ESPHome itself is almost too good if you’re really curious as it abstracts the differences between various boards quite well. You’re just editing a yaml file to define your desired functionality.

    Even if you’re hesitant to do some soldering, you can get pretty far if you buy board and sensors with pre-soldered pins and some jumper wires.


  • Correct me if I’m wrong, but VOR can be jammed just as easily? It’s effectively just ground based GPS.

    There are actually devices, that can to a certain extent resist jamming by rejecting signal coming from some direction while amplifying signal from other. Typically they amplify signal from space and reject signal from ground where the jammers would be. So in a way GPS is more resilient against jamming if you can use this device. But AFAIK they are only used for military purposes.




  • Let me be more clear: devs are not required to release binaries at all. Bit they should, if they want their work to be widely used.

    Yeah, but that’s not there reality of the situation. Docker images is what drives wide adoption. Docker is also great development tool if one needs to test stuff quickly, so the Dockerfile is there from the very beginning and thus providing image is almost for free.

    Binaries are more involved because suddenly you have multiple OSes, libc, musl,… it’s not always easy to build statically linked binary (and it’s also often bad idea) So it’s much less likely to happen. If you tried just running statically linked binary on NixOS, you probably know it’s not as simple as chmod a+x.

    I also fully agree with you that curl+pipe+bash random stuff should be banned as awful practice and that is much worse than containers in general. But posting instructions on forums and websites is not per se dangerous or a bad practice. Following them blindly is, but there is still people not wearing seatbelts in cars or helmets on bikes, so…

    Exactly what I’m saying. People will do stupid stuff and containers have nothing to do with it.

    Chmod 777 should be banned in any case, but that steams from containers usage (due to wrongly built images) more than anything else, so I guess you are biting your own cookie here.

    Most of the time it’s not necessary at all. People just have “allow everything, because I have no idea where the problem could be”. Containers frequently run as root, so I’d say the chmod is not necessary.

    In a world where containers are the only proposed solution, I believe something will be taken from us all.

    I think you mean images not containers? I don’t think anything will be taken, image is just easy to provide, if there is no binary provided, there would likely be no binary even without docker.

    In fact IIRC this practice of providing binaries is relatively new trend. (Popularized by Go I think) Back in the days you got source code and perhaps Makefile. If you were lucky a debian/src directory with code to build your package. And there was no lack of freedom.

    On one hand you complain about docker images making people dumb on another you complain about absence of pre-compiled binary instead of learning how to build stuff you run. A bit of a double standard.


  • I don’t agree with the premise of your comment about containers. I think most of the downsides you listed are misplaced.

    First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly “compose pull & up” your way. Easy, but it’s dumbifier and that’s not a good thing.

    I’d argue, that actually using containers properly requires very solid Linux skills. If someone indeed blindly “compose pull & up” their stuff, this is no different than blind curl | sudo bash which is still very common. People are going to muddle through the installation copy pasting stuff no matter what. I don’t see why containers and compose files would be any different than pipe to bash or random reddit comment with “step by step instructions”. Look at any forum where end users aren’t technically strong and you’ll see the same (emulation forums, raspberry pi based stuff, home automation,…) - random shell scripts, rm -rf this ; chmod 777 that

    Containers are just another piece of software that someone can and will run blindly. But I don’t see why you’d single them out here.

    Second, there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that’s bad for freedom of choice

    As a developer I can’t agree here. The docker images (not “containers” to be precise) are not there replacing deb packages. They are there because it’s easy to provide image. It’s much harder to release a set of debs, rpms and whatnot for distribution the developer isn’t even using. The other options wouldn’t even be there in the first place, because there’s only so many hours in a day and my open source work is not paying my bills most of the time. (patches and continued maintenance is of course welcome) So the alternative would be just the source code, which you still get. No one is limiting your options there. If anything the Dockerfile at least shows exactly how you can build the software yourself even without using docker. It’s just bash script with extra isolation.

    I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that’s more an hack than a solution.

    Yeah please don’t do that. It’s probably not a good idea. Just build the binary or whatever you’re trying to use yourself. The binaries in image often depend on libraries inside said image which can be different from your system.

    Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don’t want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so.

    It might be easier (effort-wise) but you’re certainly not forced. At the very least you can clone the repo and just edit the Dockerfile to your liking. With compose file it’s the same story, just edit the thing. Or don’t use it at all. I frequently use compose file just for reference/documentation and run software as a set of systemd units in Nix. You do you. You don’t have to follow a path that someone paved if you don’t like the destination. Remember that it’s often someone’s free time that paid for this path, they are not obliged to provide perfect solution for you. They are not taking anything away from you by providing solution that someone else can use.













  • I think the best way to look at it is to see their side. If your relatives are similar to mine, they don’t really care about Ukraine or Zelensky. Not even in a negative way. They just want simple solutions to their problems that are actually very complex.

    You understand that having a fleet of Migs that depend on russian technicians is not a reasonable thing if the biggest warmonger in the neighborhood is russia itself. You understand that Slovakia can’t depend on russian gas or oil after russia proved many times, that they will not hesitate to use this dependency every opportunity they get. You understand that making concessions to russia for a promise of peace isn’t going to stop them, because we tried that many times before. You understand that none of these problems have simple solutions.

    But many people choose to be ignorant and believe politicians that promise simple solutions. “We will stop supporting war, negotiate peace in Ukraine and buy cheap reliable russian energy again” It sounds good, it sounds easy. So they will believe any lie that supports this “solution”. Or pretend they believe it, because frankly in many cases I know they aren’t really that stupid to believe some of the lies. They just choose to be ignorant and don’t ask questions.

    How can you depend on russian gas again if you saw them draining EU gas storage year before the invasion and after you saw them cheerfully proclaiming that your family will freeze to death? You can’t. But people choose to ignore reality, because they don’t like how it looks.

    When you look at it this way, you understand that there’s no reason to discuss Ukraine with your family. Because it’s really not about Ukraine. It’s about how much they pay for their groceries. And it’s easier to believe that corrupt Zelensky is to be blamed for expensive bread rather than the fact that we trusted corrupt unstable country with our energy dependency and now have a lot of work, tears and blood ahead of us to dig ourselves from the hole we dug for decades.