lotharcable

Emacs is unique because it is self-editable. That is you can edit and modify the program on the program realtime. There is a C-based core that can't be updated on the fly, but by and large Emacs a self-mutable Lisp virtual machine that comes with a built-in editor and repl.

Depending on how you want to look at it it is possible to say that Emacs editor you use when you first install it is just the default application for the ELisp machine. This is why people talk about things like Org-Mode as if it is this separate thing. It kinda really is. Sure it is included with Emacs nowadays, but it really is just another Elisp application. And, yes, it is a editor first and the machine is based around concepts like buffers, but it is still a full fledged programming environment.

Which also means that if you don't like Emacs as a editor you can write your own. Which people have done. It makes a great Vi/Vim editor with Evil that is far more compatible with Vim then most people imagine. I use "Meow-mode" which is another model editor that adopts some more modern approaches from things like Helix and puts a lot of focus on improving the efficiency of Emacs keyboard macros.

So saying that Emacs users just have a "Emacs-shaped hammer" makes as much sense as saying that all Java authors have is a big Java hammer or that Linux users can only see problems as Linux nails, or whatever.

There is a downside to all of this, of course.

Emacs where-everything-is-changeable-and-accessible-all-the-time doesn't lend itself to multi-threading, so if you have a lot of stuff going on in the "background" it can cause performance problems. The newer "native compilation" that became standard in the past few years does helps a lot, but there is a still a single thread deep down.

Also if you want to get very productive in Emacs there is a learning curve. If you are a sysadmin type that has been using Vi for decades then going to Emacs is going to be very painful. The best bet for becoming a advanced user very quickly is to learn just enough Emacs to do basic editing and navigating info files... and then just put the effort into learning Elisp. You don't have to do this, lots of people use it for years without learning any real elisp, but it does limit you. Of course thanks to things like Doom Emacs you don't lose much compared to other editors/IDEs.

Also things like Eshell and GNU Calc are criminally underrated and misunderstood. (hint: Eshell is not a terminal emulator and doesn't use a external shell program, so don't confuse it with things like ETerm)

And, hey, I can now have conversations with my editor with the help of ollama. So there is that.

It hard to know the timeline with his data loss, but I am assuming it was a long time ago.

XFS is originally from SGI Irix and was designed to run on higher end hardware. SGI donated it to Linux in 1999 and it carried a lot of its assumptions over.

For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that if the machine had a crash or sudden power loss the hardware raid would live on long enough to finish its writes. SGI had tight control over the type of hardware you could use and it was usually good quality stuff.

In the land of commodity PC-based servers this isn't often how it worked. Instead you just had regular IDE or SATA hard drives. And those drives lied.

On cheap hardware the firmware would report back it had finished writes when in fact it didn't because it made it seem faster in benchmarks. And consumers/enterprise types looking to save money with Linux mostly bought whatever is the cheapest and fastest looking on benchmarks.

So that if there was a hardware failure or sudden power loss there would could be several megs of writes that were still in flight when the file system thought they were safely written to disk.

That meant there was a distinct chance of dataloss when it came to using Linux and XFS early on.

I experienced problems like that in early 2000s era Linux XFS.

This was always a big benefit to sticking with Ext4. It is kinda dumb luck that Ext4 is as fast as it is when it came to hosting databases, but the real reason to use it is because it had a lot of robust recovery tools. It was designed from the ground up with the assumption that you were using the cheapest crappiest hardware you can buy (Personal PCs).

However modern XFS is a completely different beast. It has been rewritten extensively and improved massively over what was originally ported over from SGI.

It is different enough that a guy's experience with it from 2005 or 2010 isn't really meaningful.

I have zero real technical knowledge on file systems except as a end-user, but from what I understand FreeBSD uses UFS that uses a "WAL" or "write ahead log".. where it records writes it is going to do before it does it. I think this is a simpler but more robust solution then the sort of journalling that XFS or Ext4 uses. The trade off is lower performance.

As far as ZFS vs Btrfs... I really like to avoid Btrfs as much as possible. A number of distros use it by default (OpenSUSE, Fedora, etc), but I just format everything as a single partition as Ext4 or XFS on personal stuff. I use it on my personal file server, but it really simple setup with UPS. I don't use ZFS, but I strongly suspect that btrfs simply failed to rise to its level.

One of the reasons Linux persists despite not having something up to the level of ZFS is that most of ZFS features are redundant to larger enterprise customers.

They typically use expensive SAN or more advanced NAS that has proprietary storage solutions that provide ZFS-like features long before ZFS was a thing. So throwing something as complicated as ZFS on top of that really provides no benefit.

Or they use one of Linux clustered file system solutions, of which there is a wide selection.

There are liability issues for any sort of "money" or finance paper that don't exist for regular news reporting.

Under regular news reporting journalists have no legal obligation to their readers or the truth. They can say anything they want, essentially. It can be accurate, or not. It can be the truth, or not. It really doesn't matter. You can be lying for personal profit or political effect or any reason you want and it really isn't something you can get sued over. Just have to avoid tripping over defamation laws.

Where as if you are dealing with financial reporting there is legal liability. It is possible to get busted for committing fraud, it is possible to get sued for misleading information.

So keeping these sides of the business completely separated is probably a good way to limit liability.

There is systemd the init and there is systemd the project.

I counted no less then 64 related executables related to systemd on my system.

Accusing systemd of "not doing one thing and doing it well" is like accusing the GNU project of not following the Unix philosophy.

Ubuntu desktop is Ubuntu desktop, not Gnome desktop.

It uses Gnome but it isn't Gnome.

The way you deal with this is tort law.

It is already criminal for people to hijack websites like this. It is also criminal to defraud people.

If you are damaged by a company's negligence in this way you just sue them.

This isn't as hard as seems. I've known people that make it a practice to take corporations to small claims court every time there is a data breach or some other problem with a company that has a account with them. It is usually pretty easy to win those sorts of cases as Judges have little sympathy for these mega corporations.

If you are lucky and the company involved is actually incompetent then chances are they won't respond to the small claims lawsuit and you win by default. Get whatever you asked for.

What they actually did was to implement kernel-level rootkits.

This is why things 'secure boot' and requirement for signed drivers are a thing.

Ideally you'd have a programmable keyboard. That way it keeps the OS configuration down to a absolute minimum. It is just easier that way. Especially if you want to use multiple OSes and such things.

"Consumers".

This is the difference between "consumer" and "customer".

A customer has control over their money. They make choices that benefit themselves and producers must compete with one another for their money.

A consumer is just somebody whose job is to not only eat the shit shoveled at them, but work their ass off and live in debt for the joy of eating it.

But, don't worry, the government will step in and give you "consumer rights" and protect you. Lol.

> There are many reasons to not like systemd and the creator, who incidently after leaving the GNU/Linux is now working for the same company that sought to destroy it, Microsoft.

Yeah, well... Microsoft is probably soon to be one of the bigger Linux developers out there. As the profit slowly drains out of the desktop their core business model is going to be increasingly dependent on open source and Linux.

Just in case anybody reading this is a big fanboy of Linux... This is what winning feels like.

> It feels like the time is ripe for something simpler and more modern to replace* systemd.

Well then do what Poettering did and write it.

It's threads like this why I am eternally grateful that Linux kernel uses a merit driven approach and not concessus driven one.

That is kinda insane thing to say. That is like trying to claim that you can't do threads in C++ because you can fork.

Of course Go can fork processes.

X11's model for 'cut buffers', 'primary', and 'clipboard' is a historically bad design.

Like very easily in the top 10 worst designs in computer science history.

The fact that it managed to work at all is a testament to the millions of man-hours people were willing to pour into polishing a turd to make Linux Desktop a reality.

If we had the ability to go back in a time machine and do it again it is now painfully obvious that X11 should of been completely abandoned by the mid-1980s. This would of saved a huge amount of heartache.

What "hollowed out middle class" in America are things like "The Jones Act".

The major problem in America is not foreign competition. The barrier to industry is not opening up relations with China.

The major problem in America, and has been since at least the 1970s is a managerial crisis. It is a crisis imposed on the working class by incompetent monolithic bureaucracies in government and in corporate culture.

The problem is exactly the sort of problems imposed on the public by things like the "Jones Act". It is that incompetent buffoons attempt to impose rules on the country to accomplish one thing, which fails utterly, and then has a whole host of undesirable side effects that are aggressively ignored and/or downplayed by apologists like yourself.

It is this managerial crisis that saw the rise of massive conglomerates in the 60s and 70s that ate up industry all over the midwest, liquidated them, and leveraged the assets to purchase more small and medium business. This was considered marvels of efficiency then... which in actually has turned out to be a series of accountancy scams and pyramid schemes that all hinged on exploiting incompentely design regulation.

It is the protectionism and subsidies and cronyism in this country that has destroyed it's competitiveness.

It has never been, and probably never will be, the willingness of the American worker to compete with foreign labor.

Advocating for more protectionism and cronyism and regulatory capture is going to make the problem worse, not better.

IF you need proof of this look no further to what the Federal government has done to the semiconductor industry in the past year.

It is 100% possible.

The problem is that it's monumentally expensive. You will need to have a pretty big water tower to handle enough energy to run a microwave for a hour.

P.E. = mg(h)

So say we have 2,000 liters of water that is 50 meters high.

2000kg * 9.81m/s^2 * 50 * 80% efficiency = 784,800.0 joules.

Say you have a 1100 watt microwave. A watt is 1 joule per second. That gives you enough energy to run that microwave for about 11 minutes.

A better example would be existing municipal water towers. A 500,000 gallon water tower that is 129 feet tall costs about 2 million dollars. This is based on a public notice I found for a city in the USA.

That is 1892700 liters and 39 meters. I am guessing that the average height the water actually falls is 25 meters.

The average American household uses about 30Kwh per day. Which is 108,000,000 joules.

1892700 * 9.81 * 25 * .80 / 108,000,000 = 3.4

So 2 million dollars for 3.5 households-days worth of energy.

I don't know if having 1 days worth of energy is too much or too little per household.

And beyond the cost of the tower itself you need the generators and lines and holding pond for the water. Or underground tank or whatever you want to use.

It's very expensive.

However it is probably the cheapest option right now as far as current technology goes.

It would probably be cost effective for a off-grid shack in the woods, though.

They don't go bankrupt in the conventional sense.

When they go bankrupt economists like to use the term "Hyper Inflation".

This means that the currency they produce becomes worthless.

Nonsense article.

The point of Stoicism isn't to avoid feeling bad about living in a failing Empire.

It's acknowledging that you can't control the world. You can only control your reaction to it and your own actions.

And putting your faith in large institutions doesn't give you that control. It just creates a illusion of control. Large institutions can embody knowledge and procedures to reduce the incidents of failures to a significant degree, but whem they do fail they amplify the effect of that failure.

For example if two people get into a dispute over land there is the potential it could devolve into violence. Most of the time this doesn't happen, but the potential is there. One or both of those people may end up being killed. They may accidentally hurt or even kill people by unhappy accident as part of their conflict.

But by and large the violence and damage is limited to the people that made the decisions.

However when large governments get into conflicts over land and become unreasonable then the potential damage is massive. Millions of people can die. Mostly innocent people who have no stake or choice in conflict and will not benefit from any outcome can be slaughtered in mass mumbers.

And what is worse is the people that make those decisions are not personally affected by it.

In the last century hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of their own governments. Far exceeding the number of victims of individual violence and criminality. And almost none of the "leaders" that made those decisions ever faced punishment or even significant personal consequences.

Most died while still in power living in relative luxury of old ages or natural diseases.

Making large institutions to try to control the world does not result in control over the world. It creates a illusion of control coupled with a potential for extreme levels of destruction.

You only want as big of a institution that is absolutely required. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't know about the article.. but generally speaking

You can't "count" protein in the same way that you can count carbohydrates or sugar or calories. This is because protein is much more complex and different types of protein vary in type of amino acids and your ability to digest it.

Thus quality of the protein varies significantly by it's source.

So 50 grams of protein from a hamburger is not equivalent to 50 grams of protein from a bean-based burger. Depending on the exact mixture of components and how it's prepared you might need to eat 250 grams of "fake meat" to match the 50 grams of beef protein.

Even in the USA most people don't meet minimum intake requirements for proteins. And it's very difficult for vegans to meet the minimal requirements.

It is possible, but it requires a mixture of different types of plant proteins to supplement each other and improve digestibility. But it's not a simple thing you can do by accident and very few people are aware of the disparities. You can even make things worse by mixing things badly.

I don't know all the details as I've only become recently aware of this stuff...

For gauging the quality of protein they have developed the DIAAS method to indicate protein quality. The old scale was PDCAAS, which some older dietary guidelines are based off of. However PDCAAS didn't take into account the digestibility of the protein, which lead to misleading suggestions.

Governments killing people without due process in this manner is criminal homicide.

Each person needs to held individually accountable for their crimes. State secrets should be declassified and released. Each person's individual actions should be documented. And they should be tried in court and serve sentences commensurate with their level of participation.

This does not secure the country. This creates enemies and makes the situation worse.

If we lived in a just world ever single one of these people would be serving a lifetime in jail. This includes the politicians that approved funding for it as well as any lawyers and judges that rubber stamped it.

There is war and then there is what the Federal government is doing. They are not the same thing.

It is unacceptable. It is global tyranny.

X11 is hopeless. It was a turd 30 years ago. It still is a turd. If it was a simple as "make your toolkit asynchronous" then it would of been done a long time ago.

Take Xterm, for example. I did benchmarks over remote systems long ago. When it came to performance over the network it was absolutely trounced by Gnome-Terminal. And Gnome-terminal was a lot slower then then it is now. The reason was because Gnome optimized text output on scrolling text that minimized the latency impact. And it still sucked.

There was a reason that it never saw widespread use in the enterprise outside of very nitch sysadmin users on pretty much local area networks.

Were as Windows has been used to support thousands of users in a single environment with almost entirely remote applications for a very very long time now. For most users and most applications there is no difference in functionality between remote and local applications.

Were as X11 will never be able to accomplish that unless the computer is sitting in the room next to you. Nomachine and similar tech can speed it up, but that isn't really X11 is it?

There isn't many people in the USA that love the idea of driving their car to ride a train so that they can then rent a car to get where they are going.

Rails work very well in situations were you have high density living areas connected to high density working areas and everybody needs to get from the same point A to the same point B very often.

There is only a few places in the USA were such situations exist and they generally already have railways for people to use.

There was once a time were the USA had useful network of trains that people could actually use to get where they wanted to go, but the Federal government flushed that down the toilet in the first half of the 20th century in the name of "improving efficiency".

Pretty much every town, big or small, in the USA that was started before train going through the heart of it. If it didn't have a way to get there by rail there was no real point in building it.

But that hasn't been true for a long long time.

The idea being that large numbers of privately owned railways with small depots all over the place wasteful use of resources. It was much better to regulate and consolidate to remove the redundancies. They used to be proud about all the different depots and stops that were being destroyed and railway spurs that were being shutdown because they thought that it would reduce costs and economize the railway network.

The end result of all of this was the Interstate highway system.

Rail isn't going to come back.

> You are misrepresenting the definition of hate speech in order to create a strawman. Here is the definition from Google search card:

I don't give a shit what Google has to say about it.

What I do care is what the laws actually are. We are talking about Hate Speech Laws. The law is what matters. Not your cherry picked definitions that help prop up your misrepresentation/misunderstanding of what is going on.

> So it's not just "offend or mock or belittle", but rather "abusive or threatening".

The issue is that 'abusive' is nonsense.

If it's a legitimate threat then it's illegal no matter what person or group it is targeted at.

When it's legal to do it against one political classification of persons, but it's illegal to do it against another one... That is a big freaking problem.

For justice under the law it needs to be universal in application. If you can be "abusive" against one person, but not another because of politically defined group classifications or you are not allowed to talk about or discuss or bring up certain projects because protected classes of people might find it "threatening", then that is objectively immoral.

> And if you think "offend or mock or belittle" are the same as "abusive", then you just don't get it yet.

Well there isn't much to get here. So I get it. Do you?

Euphemistic usage and strange definitions of "abusive" and "threatening" doesn't change anything. It's just abusing the language to obscure a position.

If it's real abuse, if it's real threats... then it's illegal universally. Nobody is arguing against that.

> I am skeptical of giving the government the power to censor speech and to determine what is hate speech, because this power can be abused. But at the same time, hate speech is a real thing and allowing it does not promote freedom of speech.

No.

> For example, suppose someone says "I think that everyone who does not believe in my religion should be killed." That type of speech is intimidating and comes with the threat of violence. Therefore any non-believer might pretend to believe and censor themselves out of fear for their lives. In this way, the speech itself acts as a form of censorship, and allowing it to occur silences more people than banning it.

You are conflating things. Hate speech isn't about threats of violence.

Hate speech is when you have specially classified groups of protected people that you are not allowed to offend or mock or belittle. It is also about making it illegal to talk about subjects that are not approved by the government. Like how you are not allowed to show nazi flags in video games.

You can go ahead and offend, mock, or belittle people that are not part of a protected class. That isn't illegal under "hate speech laws".

Nobody is defending or claiming that threatening people with violence is "free speech". Trying to claim this is grossly misrepresenting the entire argument. Either for, or against, hate speech.

Money != Wealth

You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.

That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.

And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.

Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?