• 25 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • You’ve got to do some manual config. I know about it but don’t use it. You can redirect home folders with the container in the distrobox create flags. I think the better option is to use the user/groups/SELinux context in addition to the container as this will show up in ownership and is more easy to trace. One of my main problems is how packages have Python installation requirements that by default try to break pip out of any containerized context and create their own venv setup. It totally screws up the whole distrobox container setup and separation from the base system.


  • With Linux over the years, I have learned to ignore all hardware marketing as (basically) scammers. The supporting software is the important part. If the software is not open source, the product is only available to rent and likely includes or has the potential to become an extortion scam of subscription parasites. When I shop for products now, I do so by searching for the open source software first. Once I find a large project with several contributors, I git clone the repo and then I run an app called gource on the command line. Gource creates a 3d visualization of the project over time and its commit history. Have a look at the Linux kernel some time or just watch a video of someone that has uploaded the visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iFnzr73XXk

    With the actual visualization, you can zoom in and select the individuals or watch branches specifically. The trick is to get an idea of who the main contributors are in the various spaces and how consistent they are. Find who is working on what hardware and how they are working on it. Some times you’ll see a person comes in and only makes a single commit or a few that contain everything for a device and then they disappear. These are often subcontracted devs that a company hires and gives a checklist. Issues, bugs, and unsupported features are unlikely to get fixed unless you see someone else that is making commits in this space. What you’re really looking for is one of the main project devs that makes ongoing commits to some specific hardware over longer amounts of time and fairly recently. It means they have the device in question. That generally means the device has or will have excellent support in the long term. It also generally means the person either really liked the product or the company is smart enough to supply the dev with the device or supporting documentation.

    Sorry if this seems unsolicited. It took me a long time to break out of the hardware spec shopping fallacy and all of the troubles it can cause. Prioritizing true ownership and shopping for the software first is a far more enjoyable life experience. It likely won’t help in this niche, but for computers in general use: https://linux-hardware.org/

    You will likely find that search engines attempt to obfuscate this information. Expect that. Use offline open source LLM’s, ask the community, or more advance searching methods to find relevant info. Both m$ and the goo are the two biggest beneficiaries of the proprietary software ecosystem and they are the only two web crawlers that exist at relevant scale. All search engines use one or both of these sources either directly or by proxy.


  • I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.


  • TBH: tl;dr (…but read ~1/4 and skimmed the rest.)

    Emacs can likely do most, if not all, of what you’re looking for.

    As far as distros, go with either Fedora Workstation or Silverblue. If you can run SB, try to avoid messing with the base system as much as possible, skip using the toolbox containers system and just use distrobox. With distrobox, you have almost all Linux distros available as containers, so you build on them. The only exception I know of is NIX. You can’t run NIX in distrobox. You probably could run the NIX package manager, but that involves this weird setup where a user owned directory exists in / root. Personally, this is just too weird for me to use it. I expect all user activity and configuration files to be confined to /home/$USER/

    Fedora just works, but try and lag behind the release cycle a little bit. Like right now F40 is pretty solid, but there were some issues in the first month or so after F40 first came out. I have lagged in every release since ~F28 and never had issues. I switched to F40 within the first week or so and a few packages were wonky. Basically Python was super fresh and did some odd stuff with containers where it did not work without manually removing and replacing Python in each container. I think that was the only manual intervention issue I’ve had with Fedora. I have a 3080Ti laptop with the 16 GB GPU. The Anaconda system in Fedora builds the Nvidia kernel module automatically in the background each time the kernel is updated. It works flawlessly, even with secure boot enabled.




  • Amazon’s pricing I not deterministic. You were likely tracked and information collected to know this was a key item for you. Amazon will market loss leaders to you in an attempt to get you to default to buying on Amazon.

    As a former Buyer for a chain of retail stores, the loss leader is effective marketing. I sell you a popular item at or below my typical cost because statistically, a large percentage of customers are making a special trip to my store to buy that product and will make additional purchases at margin. On the wholesale Buying side, these are tools to get past bulk buying tier discounts for seasonal ordering with smaller scale retail.

    Amazon is using a convoluted front end system of overlapping product categories and a supposed multi seller listings (despite collectivized logistics and warehousing) on the website you see. This is how they perform price fixing where you do not see honest or straight forward determinism. When you repurchase that same item later without making comparisons, the seller will shuffle so that a higher price is presented.

    If you have a well isolated network where device history for social media and internet browsing is totally partitioned from e-commerce you’ll likely see even more of the scam. If you see anyone online show the search results and pricing on Amazon, then try to replicate those search results and product price on a device that is totally partitioned from your viewing of the item/price elsewhere, you’re likely to find it is not possible. If you then go back to the original device and do the same, you’ll magically find the same product and lower price. It is a scam market. This is why they are collecting and paying for all that data about you. We are in an age when automated individual targeting and manipulation is possible and happening. This is why data mining stalkerware is insidious. Scam markets are only the tip of the iceberg and what can be uncovered if you go looking for it. Anyone that has done database or logistics management should have major red flags flying when looking at how Amazon’s website is setup. The front end is absolutely untenable garbage for effective logistics. The only reason it is convoluted and search results are terrible is because it is a price fixing scam. The logistical efficiency proves that there is no connection between the front and back end of the site.



  • Multi threading is parallelism and is poised to scale to a similar factor, the primary issue is simply getting tensors in and out of the ALU. Good enough is the engineering game. Having massive chunks of silicon laying around without use are a mach more serious problem. At the present, the choke point is not the parallelism of the math but actually the L2 to L1 bus width and cycle timing. The ALU can handle the issue. The AVX instruction set is capable of loading 512 bit wide words in a single instruction, the problem is just getting these in and out in larger volume.

    I speculate that the only reason this has not been done already is because pretty much because of the marketability of single thread speeds. Present thread speeds are insane and well into the radio realm of black magic bearded nude virgins wizardry. I don’t think it is possible to make these bus widths wider and maintain the thread speeds because it has too many LCR consequences. I mean, at around 5 GHz the concept of wire connections and gaps as insulators is a fallacy when capacitive coupling can make connections across all small gaps.

    Personally, I think this is a problem that will take on a whole new architectural solution. It is anyone’s game unlike any other time since the late 1970’s. It will likely be the beginning of the real RISC-V age and the death of x86. We are presently at the age of the 20+ thread CPU. If a redesign can make a 50-500 logical core CPU slower for single thread speeds but capable of all workloads, I think it will dominate easily. Choosing the appropriate CPU model will become much more relevant.


  • Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

    Nvidia is just playing conservative because it was massively overvalued by the market. The GPU use for AI is a stopover hack until hardware can be developed from scratch. The real life cycle of hardware is 10 years from initial idea to first consumer availability. The issue with the CPU in AI is quite simple. It will be solved in a future iteration, and this means the GPU will get relegated back to graphics or it might even become redundant entirely. Once upon a time the CPU needed a math coprocessor to handle floating point precision. That experiment failed. It proved that a general monolithic solution is far more successful. No data center operator wants two types of processors for dedicated workloads when one type can accomplish nearly the same task. The CPU must be restructured for a wider bandwidth memory cache. This will likely require slower thread speeds overall, but it is the most likely solution in the long term. Solving this issue is likely to accompany more threading parallelism and therefore has the potential to render the GPU redundant in favor of a broader range of CPU scaling.

    Human persistence of vision is not capable of matching higher speeds that are ultimately only marketing. The hardware will likely never support this stuff because no billionaire is putting up the funding to back up the marketing with tangible hardware investments. … IMO.

    Neo Feudalism is well worth abandoning. Most of us are entirely uninterested in this business model. I have zero faith in the present market. I have AAA capable hardware for AI. I play and mod open source games. I could easily be a customer in this space, but there are no game manufacturers. I do not make compromises in ownership. If I buy a product, my terms of purchase are full ownership with no strings attached whatsoever. I don’t care about what everyone else does. I am not for sale and I will not sell myself for anyone’s legalise nonsense or pay ownership costs to rent from some neo feudal overlord.








  • Yes .docx.

    It appears as though the encoding is missing in such a way that nothing in Linux recognizes the file. The underlying CLI tools don’t have a way of converting the file. I tried with Python’s docx tool and with iconv. It has to be encoding related because some tools initially load the file with several sets of Asian characters instead of English. However, there is no hexadecimal or sections of entirely binary looking data. Archiving tools do not open up the the file to reveal anything else like a metafile or header. Neo vim shows garbled nonsense throughout. Bat warns of binary. Python won’t load the file, nor will Only Office. Libre Office and Abi Word load initially with Asian characters before crashing.

    The only option is likely gong to be setting up the W10 machine and converting a bunch of files within it.

    Ultimately, my old man thinks he can be an author all of the sudden and is trying to write. He’s not very capable of learning. I’m not confident that he can learn to use FOSS to do the same thing he has been doing. This post was just to see if there are options I am not already aware of that might actually work in practice. I can easily do everything I need in FOSS. I can do everything he needs to do. I’m more concerned about becoming his tech support when he forgets how to copy pasta. He already fails to separate the internet hardware connectivity from the web browser and operating system within his mental model of technology.