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PhilipRoman

1,977 karma · joined October 20, 2018

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PhilipRoman··on Object-oriented design patterns in C and kernel development
Yeah you're right, I meant the other way around. Also another loosely related idea is the container_of macro in Linux kernel.
PhilipRoman··on Object-oriented design patterns in C and kernel development
Field inheritance is surprisingly natural in C, where a struct can be cast to it's first member.
PhilipRoman··on The MiniPC Revolution
Weird, every mini PC I've used has had normal SODIMM slots and removable SSD. CPU is mostly soldered though.
PhilipRoman··on The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)
IME these systems can be quite fragile in practice. All it takes is one pre-signature exploit (like U-boot parsing ext4 and devicetree before verifying signature) and your whole chain becomes useless.

And while the kernel is quite secure against hacks from userspace, the hardware interfaces are generally more trusted. This is not a problem on smartphones or embedded devices where you can obfuscate everything on a small SoC but the whole PC/x86_64 platform is much more flexible and open. I doubt there is a way to get reliable attestation on current desktop systems (many of which are assembled from independent parts) unless you get complete buy-in from all the manufacturers.

Finally, with AI systems recently increasing in power, perhaps soon the nuclear option of camera + CV + keyboard/mouse will become practical.

PhilipRoman··on Nitro: A tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor
One advantage is that if the process has some sort of console on it's stdin, you can do admin work easily. With init systems you now have to configure named pipes, worry about them blocking, have output in separate place, etc.
PhilipRoman··on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
IME it's faster because the queue is shorter. You can fit about 2.5 self checkout machines in the same space, enabling more people to checkout in parallel.
PhilipRoman··on MCP doesn't need tools, it needs code
Can't wait until I can buy a H100 with a DisplayPort input and USB keyboard and mouse output and just let it figure everything out.
PhilipRoman··on SystemD Service Hardening
Having the backing of RedHat certainly didn't hurt... I don't care either way, although I still think OpenRC style scripts are much easier to debug and sometimes have more elegant solutions (templates vs symbolic links).
PhilipRoman··on Modifying other people's software
Lol I remember doing this when I was younger with the `man` command to remove a 5 second exit delay for the browser output.

    radare2 -qq -w -c "wx 01 @ 0xb407" /usr/bin/man
PhilipRoman··on Traps to Developers
In some common implementations if $LANG is set to certain values, it will fail to match some ASCII letters. This is because not all latin character using languages put Z last in the alphabet.

Try this (you probably need to enable and generate the locale first)

    echo y | LANG=lv_LV.UTF-8 grep '[a-z]'
Locales in general should be considered a "trap", just look at Windows CSV separator handling, etc.
PhilipRoman··on Traps to Developers
Honorable mention to [a-z], gotta be my favorite trap
PhilipRoman··on Progress towards universal Copy/Paste shortcuts on Linux
Ok as much as I like keyboard shortcuts, having a shortcut for making calls is just cruel.

The ctrl-c thing isn't a big deal for me since I copy text to clipboard either using tmux (just selecting is enough) or piping the terminal screen to vim (where I've mapped it to just +)

PhilipRoman··on Dumb to managed switch conversion (2010)
FYI Zyxel consumer switches seem to be more secure in this regard (I had a GS1200).

But yeah, even the enterprisey switches have braindead defaults like loading configuration from tftp at startup.

PhilipRoman··on Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils
Do you do any edits for previous days? Seems like it would be difficult with email.
PhilipRoman··on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
wtf what provider is this? I used cellular internet for a year with remote desktop for work, so this is shocking to me.
PhilipRoman··on The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report
One of the biggest security holes is the JIT engine, rewriting it in Rust or any other language wouldn't make a difference, since it is effectively an inner platform.
PhilipRoman··on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I've seen it a lot in older people's writing in different cultures before trump became relevant. It's either all caps or bold for some words in middle of sentence. Seems to be pronounced more in those who have aged less gracefully in terms of mental ability (not trying to make any implication, just my observation) but maybe it's just a generational thing.
PhilipRoman··on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
Slightly off topic but we need to normalize the ability to patch external dependencies (especially transitive ones). Coming from systems like Yocto, it was mind boggling to see a company bugging the author of an open source library to release a new version to the package manager with a fix that they desperately needed.

In binary package managers this kind of workflow seems like an afterthought.

PhilipRoman··on A deep dive into Rust and C memory interoperability
There are embedded Linux systems with a total image size of ~10MB (not image as in docker "image" but an actual disk image). It would be quite hard to justify the additional dependency.
PhilipRoman··on Replacing tmux in my dev workflow
They do, if you type something like `stop`, it's equivalent to typing `/stop` in the in-game chat. In my scripts I set stdin to a named pipe, to be able to send commands later.
PhilipRoman··on Linux 6.16: faster file systems, improved confidential memory, more Rust support
"Pull requests" can also be done via a mailing list (it's literally a request to pull from some URL, see git-request-pull). It is not common on LKML, but I've seen it used that way. I think it's mostly maintainers that use it among themselves, everyone else just mails patches.
PhilipRoman··on UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act
They could probably manage to deal with the big players (who have enough advertising reach to be used by "ordinary" people). I doubt they could ever block the long tail of non-standard VPNs, especially those that share infrastructure used for legitimate purposes (are they going to ban SSH connections to AWS?).
PhilipRoman··on The POSIX specification of vi
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/xrat/V4_xcu...

> The community of emacs editing enthusiasts was adamant that the full emacs editor not be included in IEEE Std 1003.2-1992 because they were concerned that an attempt to standardize this very powerful environment would encourage vendors to ship versions conforming strictly to the standard, but lacking the extensibility required by the community. The author of the original emacs program also expressed his desire to omit the program. Furthermore, there were a number of historical UNIX systems that did not include emacs, or included it without supporting it, but there were very few that did not include and support vi.

PhilipRoman··on Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
I agree that it's a much bigger problem for LLMs, but to be fair it's also not how humans work. A long lasting, high volume stream of propaganda will have considerable effect on a human even if he is aware that it is false.
PhilipRoman··on XAI data center gets air permit to run 15 turbines, but imaging shows 24 on site
I just realized I don't even know what "disproportionately impacts" actually means. Disproportionate to what? Does it simply mean bigger impact or bigger-than-predicted-by-an-oracle impact? Because I'm quite sure that every bad thing on this planet impacts poor people more.
PhilipRoman··on Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?
No, it's a mini PC.
PhilipRoman··on Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads
Could be. Usually it means the subject is too advanced for the average HN user yet something that they are interested in.
PhilipRoman··on Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?
It's a Lenovo 310B motherboard.
PhilipRoman··on Larry (cat)
Interesting, must be a regional thing since my grandparents had several cats eaten/chased by foxes over the years.
PhilipRoman··on Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip
It especially sucks when even low end mini PCs have at least multiple 5Gbps USB ports, yet we are stuck with 1Gbps (or 2.5, if manufacturer is feeling generous) ethernet. Maybe IP over Thunderbolt will finally save us.
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