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throw0101a

26,588 karma · joined January 1, 2017

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throw0101a··on I said no and Apple said yes
> It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"

No? When I'm asked about Apple Pay on an iPhone, it says "Maybe later". In the Settings it has reminder, and if I go in and say "No" it never pops up ever again (maybe on a iOS major version upgrade?).

Generally with Apple it's one "Maybe later" with a reminder flag set someplace, and then that's it.

throw0101a··on I said no and Apple said yes
> One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.

macOS has a 'service (priority) order':

* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...

It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):

* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...

And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.

By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.

Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.

throw0101a··on I said no and Apple said yes
> if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software

> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.

At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.

throw0101a··on I said no and Apple said yes
> On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads.

I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).

I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
> You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."

"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.

Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
> Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No.

Yes:

* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr-sbc-gr740

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
> SPARC has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Atmel, Bipolar Integrated Technology, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, Matsushita and Texas Instruments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC

Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.

There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:

* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765

throw0101a··on Probes into Toronto's shooter-for-hire network thwarted by impenetrable phone
> The tradeoff to using this kind of high-security operating system is that it’s less convenient, so few people do it, said David Lie, a professor of computer and electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. But Prof. Lie said there’s no legal prohibition against using a privacy-focused operating system, and in some cases, it may be essential for political dissidents, activists and journalists.

[…]

> Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto called the bill’s data-retention requirements, which would mandate electronic service providers keep detailed data of nearly every Canadian for a year, revealing their movements and who they contacted, “almost certainly unconstitutional.”

> Major tech companies such as Signal, which provides secure messaging, and DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, have said they would withdraw from Canada if they were forced to reveal or retain user data that compromises users’ privacy.

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
> I would wager that almost no Linux installs are done by CD or displaying VGA anymore (maybe 0.01%).

When one of your Proxmox (or XCP-ng, or VMware/Nutanix/OpenStack) servers won't boot and you need go into single-user/rescue mode, then talk to me about the convenience or not of a remote KVM (versus having to drive to the DC and hook up the crash cart).

It's all very well if all you manage is VMs/instances, but some of us deal with the hardware that those VMs run on, and things break.

That 0.01% of servers is probably the layer that the other 99.99% run on (and yes, a lot of that 0.01% can also be automated, but if PXE isn't working (or you're getting strange CPU3VOLT or SLOT17ECC or BUS1RESET errors) then neither is re-imaging).

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
> Dell's iDRAC works quite well.

I currently admin several racks of Dells (and Lenovo, and SuperMicro, and previously HP). Just make sure you buy the license for KVM in case you ever need to go into single-user/rescue mode (otherwise better not mind having to drive to the DC and hooking up a crash cart).

Ask @bcantrill (the author of this article/story) about how well integrators integrate (as a hint to the answer, he co-founded Oxide Computers because he ran a cloud service with Dells/HPs/etc).

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.

SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:

* https://sparc.org

Fujitsu sold their own SPARC servers for many years with their own CPUs, and many third-parties put Fujitsu SPARC CPUs into (e.g.) laptops:

* https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...

Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.

Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.

The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.

throw0101a··on Transformers Explained Visually
As someone with an EE degree (though a sysadmin), this use of the term "transformer" is constantly confusing. :)

(Also "cryto" for cryptocurrency rather than cryptography.)

throw0101a··on Ask HN: Is it impossible to disable Siri on macOS 27?
Maybe "macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage":

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535

throw0101a··on What Sun got wrong
>> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).

> SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.

You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.

throw0101a··on Probes into Toronto's shooter-for-hire network thwarted by impenetrable phone
https://archive.today/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada...

https://archive.is/jcqar

throw0101a··on US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

If China (and India and …) sees the US and other industrialized doing nothing, why should they do anything?

The most straight-forward way of solving is either through cap-and-trade (like acid rain was dealt with) or 'carbon dividend' (which Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Volker, etc endorsed):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...

Then you put a 'carbon tariff' on imports for any country that does not have a similar system (e.g., EU's CBAM).

throw0101a··on US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution
> Because it'll create value.

The New Yorker published Tom Toro's one-panel comic/cartoon in 2012, and here we are in 2026:

* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

throw0101a··on Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip
> Other things: since no companies sponsoring its development had any interest in raid 5/6, which is mostly a home enthusiast thing.

I've used RAID-Z1/2/3 at a couple of jobs: yes IOps is suck-y, but if it's for backups of other systems, or the central logging server, or network monitoring (Suricata, Snort), sometimes your priority is cheap/bulk.

I'm currently in the HPC space, and Lustre is a thing here, and it has tiered storage via policies: you can (e.g.) put your recent/hot data on NVMe, but older/colder bits on spinning rust on ZFS.

throw0101a··on Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip
And Btrfs still does not have a RAID-5/6 that they themselves recommend for usage:

* https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-b...

What have they been doing for the last decade(+)?

throw0101a··on Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip
> drama matters because most users don't want to have their favourite FS randomly removed from the kernel unexpectedly after some OS update :)

Jokes on you then: my favourite FS can't be "randomly removed from the kernel unexpectedly after some OS update" because it never made it in — ZFS. :)

throw0101a··on UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8
> […] why limit yourself to 24-bit numbers?

For compatibility with UTF-16:

    o  Restricted the range of characters to 0000-10FFFF (the UTF-16
       accessible range).
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3629#section-12

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16

The original spec had 31 bits (the UTF-32/UCS-4 range):

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2279

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32

throw0101a··on Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
> That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):

Self-reply: see also Boeing company ethos pre-McD acquisition versus post-McD acquisition ethos:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55994102-flying-blind

throw0101a··on Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
> companies aren't human beings with morals.

Companies are not sentient beings in themselves: they are made up of human beings with wills. If the human being(s) make moral choices the result will be companies that do moral actions.

> companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.

That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

There are others:

* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III

* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics

Or going back a few decades:

> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”

* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...

> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.

* https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/

throw0101a··on Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks
> For one, it avoids telling all processes and their mothers the IP of the DNS resolvers they should query, but hands them 127.53 instead.

What "all process" are you referring to? What kind of software on Unix-y systems is not using gethostbyname(3) (or similiar)?

(And the context of this sub-thread is "server management", which I'm not sure how often has VPN running on it and doing things like split (horizon) DNS.)

throw0101a··on Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion
> It is insane to me that judges consistently rule that the constitution doesn't apply because there's a "border" within 100 miles.

100 miles (160 km) covers about two-thirds (66%) of the US population:

* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

throw0101a··on US troop deaths during Iran war exceed Pentagon count by at least four
> The President has embroiled us in an unpopular war in the Middle East and has lied about it.

The Republican President has embroiled us in an unpopular war in the Middle East and has lied about it.

throw0101a··on US troop deaths during Iran war exceed Pentagon count by at least four
> If someone on a military base with no attacks going on, got a heart attack by watching the news, probably not a war fatality.

Were they at that base as a (say) mechanic servicing aircraft engines for flights over the Persian Gulf? Are the only reasons why the planes (and thus him) are there is because of the hostilities with Iran, as otherwise they would be States-side?

throw0101a··on Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks
> But that’s precisely what it allows you to do

And if I don't want a building block like logind or journald, can I not use them? Can I take those blocks elsewhere, like over to FreeBSD and use them there?

SystemD is not "building blocks" — which implies modularity — it is a monolith: components cannot be added or taken away or replaced. The best you can do is maybe run disable --now. (I'm at least thankful I can usually do an apt purge resolved.)

throw0101a··on Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks
> The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management

What use cases of "proper server management" does fucking with my resolv.conf(5) solve?

If I have a laptop I can perhaps see updating values per DHCP or IPv6 RAs, but once I set up a server up why the hell is it a link to /run? (I once had to use chattr +i because of brain dead "cleverness".)

In over thirty years of running Unix-y systems I never needed my resolv.conf "managed", so I have no idea why Ubuntu (for one) defaults to fiddling with it.

throw0101a··on Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks
> I think we just have different ideas of what the word "reasonable" means.

I think we just have different ideas of what the term "building blocks" means.

You cannot add (or remove) part of systemD as you wish: on a Linux system I cannot replace journald with something, and I cannot bring journald over to FreeBSD. SystemD is tightly-coupled (heck, they even borg'd in udevd, which was an independent project at one point).

Building blocks in my mind are like Legos: you can put together the thing you see on the box, but the individual (literal) blocks can be used however you wish.

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