antisol

I expect there's an audience selection bias at work: Fewer greybeards and more spiky haired teens reading HN.

I think it's an awful idea. Apart from making things less secure it also makes sudo's UX inconsistent with most of the other coreutils. Luckily, I don't plan on doing any more ubuntu installs.

Pulseaudio was, is, and always will be trash.

The ALSA drivers for all the creative labs cards worked perfectly well. I never had any issues at all under ALSA, or under OSS before that.

I've had tons of issues with audio bugs once pulseaudio was introduced. To this day the most common solution to any audio issue I see is `pkill -9 pulseaudio`. And it solves the problem about 99% of the time.

It also introduced fun new audio bugs and indeterminate latency. Which still haven't gone away entirely in 2026. To such an extent that any time I have an audio issue, I reflexively `pkill -9 pulseaudio` and about 99% of the time the problem just vanishes.

On the first machine where I had pulseaudio foisted on me - an 800mhz single core Duron - pulseaudio used literally 20% of my CPU time...

...At idle. When no audio was playing...

...To do software audio mixing which my creative labs audio hardware was capable of doing better and for free.

When I filed an issue with the pulseaudio people, saying "hey, you're wasting 20% of my CPU time at idle when no audio is playing because you're ignoring the fact that I have superior hardware that can do audio mixing for free", they closed the issue saying that pulseaudio wasn't meant to be used in situations where you have dedicated hardware for audio mixing.

  > "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"

Exactly. And it's standard rhetoric for the wayland fanboys. "The fix for this was committed 15 minutes ago! You just need to check out the unstable branch and recompile!"

  > what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

Yeah, the security theatre thing is also part of their standard rhetoric. It's a good bit of rhetoric because it scares people who don't know better. They all love to talk about how it's just so insecure to allow us to do things that every desktop environment has been able to do for 30+ years.

But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.

  > Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities

Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!

Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:

"I want to make some incompatible changes in my thing that is being widely used by (say) thousands or millions of people. I could spend a bunch of time ensuring I'm backwards compatible as much as possible, or doing a compatibility layer which would make the transition seamless for most, but that's not sexy work, and it would be something I would have to maintain (also not sexy), and it would take me (let's say) 1000 hours to do. Instead, I'll just insist that each and every one of those thousands/millions of people put (say) 100 hours each into adapting to what I want to do"

It's disrespectful of your users. It devalues their time. It says that your (say) 1000 hours is more valuable than (say) a million people putting in (say) 100 hours each. And it's inefficient - wasting the time of many to save the time of a few.

It also undermines their trust in you: if you're willing to force them to spend a bunch of time re-writing something that already works just to suit your whims, what's to say you won't do it again next year when you have a newer and even shinier whim?

Now someone will jump in to argue about how "FOSS developers are volunteers, they do it for free, you can't expect them to do the boring stuff". Which is false, false, and false: You'll find that for a large number of these projects (like say gnome and wayland) the core developers are indeed professionals who are paid (by e.g redhat) to work on it, even if they started off as volunteers. And the boring stuff is part of the job, too, otherwise don't call yourself a software engineer.

If you're working on a widely-used piece of software, then the users should be your god.

  > They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11

See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.

Davinci resolve has had native Linux support for like a decade now.

Isn't it interesting how perspectives differ?

See, I'd argue that the "nobody is forcing you" rhetoric, spoken out loud and with a straight face while vendors drop support for decades-old, stable, and well-established standards in favour of immature, incompatible, broken new shininess, is an extremely dated argument strategy.

Aah, this old thing. Pops up every decade or so.

Reminds me of the good old "Falsehoods programmers believe about time": https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

Not on the same IP at the same time, but you could always add a second IP for ssh. Just configure sshd to only listen on one IP and <webserver> to listen on the other.

When your firewall guys "block" ssh (or anything else), all you need to do is run your ssh server on port 443 and then `ssh -p 443 user@host`.

Running on 443 means it will blend in with https traffic, making it much more difficult for them to detect and block (I've never actually seen anywhere that can detect/block it - you'd need to be doing deep packet inspection on encrypted traffic) :)

Yeah I discovered ~? a while back and had similar concerns, so I added:

  alias ssh="echo 'dont forget: ~? for SSH escapes!'; /usr/bin/ssh "

into my .bashrc

yeah it sounds like your environment is doing some weird mangling of the encoding. Maybe consider adding an 'alias man="man -E ascii"' into your .bashrc

You might also consider seeing if it's any different in WSL. Or you could, you know, just use Linux ;P

Why are you calling it "AI" if it can't even parse a goddamn man page?

The first one which immediately springs to mind: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-08/optus-sued-by-privacy...

I'm sure a search engine could help you find other examples.

  > But then again people today will also pipe curl to bash

OMG! I'm not alone! Thank you!

  > Security doesn't matter if the competitors' technology is so much better that nobody is buying yours.

This is true right up until the moment their entire database is available as a torrent.

    Listen carefully: OpenClaw is basically a real person you have hired, whose capabilities are vast and fast — in ways both good and potentially bad. But you’ve hired it in the absence of a resume or behavioral background check results. 

...Except that a human is culpable and subject to consequences when they directly disobey instructions in a way that causes damage, particularly if you give them repeated direct instructions to "stop what you are doing".

And also, when it says "You're absolutely right! I disobeyed your direct instructions causing irreparable damage, so sorry, that totes won't happen again, pinky promise!", those are just some words, not actually a meaningful apology or promise to not disobey future instructions.

Personally, I question the usefulness of an AI assistant that can't even be trusted to add an entry to my calendar.

    you withhold and limit access to your devices, your account credentials, and even its own full account permissions, from the start, to the same extent that you would withhold such access from a new hire.

No, like I pointed out, a new hire has signed an employment agreement filled with legalese and is subject to legal ramifications if they delete all my emails while I'm screaming "stop what you are doing!". And if they say "oh, sorry, I totally misunderstood your instructions, that won't happen again" and then do it again, they're committing a crime.

What's the point of hiring a personal assistant who is incapable of sending email? Isn't that precisely what you hire a PA to do?

    Would you let a human being with the aforementioned characteristics — brilliant and capable, but lacking a resume or behavioral background check results — directly use your personal computer or your work computer?

No. And I also wouldn't hire that person as a PA.

This is disingenuous - we were all watching flash video for about a decade before that. And before that we were watching (terrible ~160x120) video in realvideo* or asf format using browser plugins, since maybe 1997-1998, certainly before 2000.

* tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.

it's possible one of those emails might have been from me ;)

Cool site! I especially like the list of RFCs.

Just fyi, towel.blinkenlights.nl:23 still works for me, though I think maybe that's an IPv6 version, there's a note about ipv6 at the start that I was too slow to read. Maybe it should be re-listed? :)

Yeah audacious is where it's at. I've never understood why anybody would want to use an audio player that doesn't look like winamp. I even use (a lightly modified version of) the original winamp 2 skin: https://skins.webamp.org/skin/5e4f10275dcb1fb211d4a8b4f1bda2...

Honorable mention to qmmp, too.

My biggest problem (of many) with client side decorations is that now when your program crashes, you can't just hit the close button to have the window manager kill it, because the process responsible for drawing and responding to the close button has crashed.

The trick is to avoid software using the newer gtk versions.

I'm indifferent to your opinions on justice.

  > I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. 

Well then I guess times haven't changed, because you still haven't written a sorting algorithm. Instead you've - at best - done a code review for one. One that based on my experience is almost certainly a shoddy, substandard implementation with the type of quality I'd be professionally embarrassed to attach my name to in a commit log.

  > I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience.

And you'd have been better off, because now you've got the burden of maintaining a poorly-implemented sorting algorithm that you don't understand that's living in your codebase. What could possibly go wrong?

Further, those abstractions that you just threw away to roll your own encryption were written by actually talented people who actually took the time to think about their implementation before shitting it out into the world. The implementations you'll find in libaries will be superior in every way to the trash your LLM will pump out.

So, TL;DR: congratulations, you've just announced to the world that you're proud that you're a bad coder and that the software you're being paid to produce is getting worse.

Totally unrelated video I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ

(for those with the kind of attention span that causes them to use LLMs, maybe just skip ahead to the "this is what you sound like" section, circa 17 mins)

"sadistic vengeance"? I don't know what you're talking about - you yourself claim that you're merely "indifferent". If you're not being a condescending ass, then how is what I wished for "sadistic"? I think you just your entire premise.

And it's almost impressive, in a sad way, how indifferent you are to everyone else on the planet, and how prima-facie ridiculous your fantasy world assumptions are when given more than two seconds thought. But I'm not here for that sort of "discussion".

Unfortunately however since you have no response to any of the points I actually made, I'll just have to say that I hope you run into someone just as horrible when the corrupt system chews you up and spits you out too.

  > At no point did I say the legal system is always right

First you made the incorrect assumption that we live in a disney-style fantasy world with "If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a 'why'."

Then you made the totally unwarranted assumption that "If the case was truly just I suspect you could find pro bono or contingency legal services to handle your appeal"

  > I suggested that if you are having difficulty finding an attorney willing to take your case on contingency, there might be a reason for that

No, you made an assumption based on zero information and chose to incorrectly insinuate that the case is not just.

  > You are asking a person to take a risk on your behalf who has evaluated the environment and didn’t like the odds.

But "evaluated the environment and didn’t like the odds" doesn't actually have anything to do with the case being just, does it? There's a million possible explanations why someone might choose not to donate their time for free. Like for example "I'm aware of just how corrupt this system is based on my previous experiences and so I choose not to waste my time and energy on this".

Well I mean that's nice for you but I'm not sure how it responds to the question asked - when did I say anything about violence being justified? I merely responded to your ignorant and empirically incorrect fantasy-world assumption that the legal system is always right.

When exactly did I say that I would resort to violence, or considered violence, or advocate for it, or suggest it?

You know, I look forward to the day this unjust system that you blindly and stupidly trust bites you, too.