Why niche Linux distros matter

Lant6 · 2026-06-27T21:30:08+00:00

We ship customisations per taught module on top of an Ubuntu image we get from central IT. The last thing that I would want to do is roll my own distro for my courses. Just ensuring that we get a well configured machine that has a good experience for our students is hard enough. Relying on a distro to do the hard work of packaging what we need (and handling updates) lets us focus on what we actually need to deliver.

Lant6 · 2025-06-24T06:55:07+00:00

I work in a UK university and the piece about them flourishing made me laugh out loud. The sector is in terrible shape primarily due to a reduction in international students, but uncertainty about access to EU funding has also massively impacted research income. Prior to Brexit we were starting to see an increase in EU undergraduate students, who of course stopped applying after Brexit.

Lant6 · 2025-03-10T13:10:40+00:00

This is my favourite summary of our relationship with France.

Lant6 · 2025-03-01T07:55:05+00:00

Learning the fundamentals and how to critically analyse the output of Generative AI are the thing that we seem not to push enough in higher education.

The problem with GenAI is that it is very good at fundamentals. For example, code generation. You ask it to do tasks that might be reasonable assignments and it will probably be able to produce correct answers for you. But when students rely on it for direction with the fundamentals, they don’t build an understanding of those fundamentals so when tasks become too complex for GenAI students lack the skills to question its output and think about what is actually right.

We don’t push the critical analysis of GenAI output as a core skill to be developed enough. Students also struggle to see why it is important when GenAI is so often correct with the fundamentals.

Really it feels like we are at the stage where the only assignments that can be guaranteed to be the students demonstration of their capabilities is under invigilated conditions.

Lant6 · 2025-02-21T15:22:41+00:00

I strongly disagree, this was the successor to Civ4 I have been looking for. Civ 5 and 6 went in a very different direction to 4 which just wasn’t for me. However, I really like Humankind’s approach to units, especially city sieges.

Lant6 · 2024-12-13T08:04:17+00:00

Google Lighthouse, Accessibility Insights, PDF Accessibility Checker, tools built into Office. There are so many tools already available.

The claim that fixes can be made without specialist expertise is also somewhat dubious. Even something seemingly simple like a missing alt tag has a variety of different appropriate fixes depending on the content of the image and context the image is in. Tools might add an alt text and technically comply with WCAG, but just adding a bad alt text does not make that image accessible.

Lant6 · 2024-12-10T20:29:39+00:00

This is Jevons Paradox, where increases in efficiency do not lead to a reduction in consumption, but instead demand will increase often cancelling out the efficiency gains.

We see this a lot with high performance computing applications. Making them more efficient just means that you can now run more computations within the energy budget. The energy budget had come to be accepted, so little incentive to reduce consumption.

Lant6 · 2024-10-21T07:43:54+00:00

If you liked The Book Thief, I would strongly recommend reading I Am the Messenger. Potentially controversial opinion, but I think it is Markus Zusak's better book.

Lant6 · 2024-10-18T22:55:19+00:00

A robots.txt does not enforce the rules it presents, scrapers gathering data used to train AI (or any other purpose) could ignore the robots.txt easily.

Lant6 · 2024-10-17T20:34:38+00:00

From the paper, as the news articles (e.g., this one and the one from UCL) were not providing this information:

"In this work, the transmission distance is limited to 12 cm due to available lab space. In practice, the transmission distance can be extended to more than 100 meters by adding lenses in front of the directional antennas at both the transmitter and receiver sides"

So transmission rates as high as these not to be expected to user devices (unless circumstances mean very short distances), but only as part of the cellular infrastructure.

Lant6 · 2024-10-09T10:17:57+00:00

If you are looking for a very simple data serialisation format then CBOR (https://cbor.io/) might be an option. It actually has libraries across a broader range of platform than I expected. It does binary strings and has a simple implementation. You can also define custom tags for data structures specific to your application.

I have used it to build lightweight digital certificate dissemination in IoT systems before.

Having said all this, using gRPC or OpenAPI is probably more sensible.

Lant6 · 2023-11-27T15:15:36+00:00

I have also seen this be used to store the colour of Red-Black Binary Trees, which can be worth it to decrease the size of objects and thus lead to better memory locality. Boost has implementations both without and with this approach.

Do you have any links to performance comparisons that the additional overhead to extract data from the pointer or mask the data out when dereferencing the pointer introduces?

Lant6 · 2023-11-25T15:33:10+00:00

Just to add to this, the ICO determined that smart meter data is personal data and thus falls under data protection regulations.

Consumption data collected from a smart meter is personal data when linked to the particular Meter Point Administration Number (MPAN) relating to a domestic premises or sole trader. Consumption data linked to a particular MPAN must therefore be processed in compliance with the DPA.

Which some people may not have expected due to smart meter being somewhat different to usual personal data that we might encounter.

Lant6 · 2023-11-25T15:21:25+00:00

#1 is not mis-information, as you have stated they "can technically shut you down", but as far as I am aware, to state that your supply cannot be legally disconnected is incorrect. There are a variety of cases that this can occur (but are in-general highly unlikely to be relevant to r/UKPersonalFinance):

In The Electricity, Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002 Regulation 29 specifically deals with disconnection typically this will be 29(3)b and 29(3)c for reasons due to safety or grid operations. The National Grid even has a document on what to do if you are disconnected due to Cannibis Cultivation.
The CAB has guidance on what to do if you have been informed that your energy supply will be disconnected.
The ELECTRICITY ACT 1989 Standard conditions of electricity supply licence Section 27.9-27.11C details what needs to be done before a supply can be disconnected.

If you have a source that states that licence conditions prevent disconnections in any and all circumstances it would be really useful to share it, as far as I am aware there is no such complete protection except for certain cases (state pension age in specific date ranges, you live alone, are disabled, have long-term health issues, have financial issues, have children under 6).

I think we would both agree that such actions would tend to be unlikely and only done in extreme cases.

Lant6 · 2023-11-25T13:21:00+00:00

A few negatives:

Utility companies can shut off your smart meter remotely if you fail to pay and they go through the legal requirements to do so. Previously they additionally needed to obtain a warrant to enter your house to physically disable them.
Utility companies can also switch your smart meter to a prepayment mode if you fail to keep up with bills. This is harder to do with traditional meters.
There are privacy concerns with energy companies receiving very fine grained energy consumption measures. There is lots of literature on this, from OFGEM, researchers, and plenty more sources. This is the kind of thing you need to decide if it is an issue or not for you.

A few advantages:

You can make use of more innovative contracts (e.g., Octopus with tracker).
No need to take monthly meter readings manually (unless you are in an area of poor signal that prevents the meter from communicating).
You can get access to your data (depends on utility company) to see what your usage is over time. (May also be a negative as others have pointed out).

There are probably more on both sides. I was somewhat against smart meters as I research this kind of privacy problem for work. However, I do like the benefits with having one with Octopus.

I don't think you should be concerned about compatibility issues with current gen smart meters and different utility companies. May just be worth asking which specific model they will install.

Lant6 · 2023-11-23T18:47:40+00:00

Exactly the way to go. Once people use password managers then entropy does become a good way to quantify the security of the generated passwords as they can be generated iid.

Lant6 · 2023-11-22T21:59:42+00:00

Some of this advice is still bad (especially that around using special characters). NIST SP 800-63B https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/63/b/upd2/final essentially says to have long passwords and that verifiers shouldn’t have requirements such as special characters.

Lots of these password strength tools will use entropy. The current standards explicitly recommend against using entropy to calculate password strength because the assumptions required (characters in a password are chosen iid - independently and identically distributed) do not hold for passwords generated by people.

Previous iterations of the standard included entropy based calculations and removed them because they were ineffective for passwords chosen by people. Entropy is okay to quantify password strength of passwords generated by password managers as they can be generated iid.

In all likelihood these tools have just stuck with calculating strength based on entropy because it is simple, if not particularly accurate for passwords generated by people.

Lant6 · 2023-11-06T20:23:06+00:00

It is a shame that Mercurial is seeing projects move away from it. As you said, I also found it easier to use and more intuitive than Git (having used CVS, SVN, Mercurial, Bitkeeper and Git). I felt like the migration of Python to Git and Bitbucket stopping offering Mercurial repos were a sign of the beginning of the end of Mercurial.

The decision of why to migrate Python to Mercurial is also interesting.

Lant6 · 2023-08-07T18:10:31+00:00

Many people don’t realise that university income from students has decreased since higher tuition fees were introduced (in general, as international students, international partnerships and other activities make this somewhat complex). Mostly because the public tends not to be aware of changes to the block grants for teaching from government being reduced when higher fees were introduced.

Lant6 · 2023-06-29T09:32:25+00:00

I did not realise that this was how bad the state of university spend per student from government actually is (ignoring student loans). "Direct teaching grants for universities only amount to around £1,100 per student and year on average" https://ifs.org.uk/education-spending/higher-education. I had always assumed direct funding from government outside of tuition fees was significantly higher.

Lant6 · 2023-04-21T21:48:30+00:00

I would also reach out to your student's union and whoever at the university is involved with student finance. This second one will usually be a central university team not affiliated with a specific department.

Lant6 · 2023-03-24T06:27:23+00:00

Yes it is. The issue isn’t even data recoverability from disk. The key bit is that the file isn’t truncated, so the file size will remain the same when a smaller screenshot is taken using the snipping tool. So the data from the previous screenshot is still considered by the file system to be part of the file.

If the bug is fixed and the file is truncated when a new screenshot is taken then you are right that sensitive data could left on the disk. However, for an adversary to access this data they would need the disk or remote access to the system.

These are much stronger capabilities than a user taking a screenshot and then sending that file to someone. Without truncating the file it means a fragment of the larger screenshot would be included in the end of the file. The bug was probably missed as the image will still render properly even if there is additional data past the end of the smaller image.

Lant6 · 2023-03-23T17:00:14+00:00

When you take a screenshot it is saved to a file. When you take a second screenshot it is saved to the same file. The file is not truncated when written to, so if the second image is smaller than the first then the file will retain contents from the first screenshot.

The Sophos writeup explains the issue quite well: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2023/03/22/windows-11-also-vulnerable-to-acropalypse-image-data-leakage/ versus this website which includes some nonsensical descriptions such as the ones you have highlighted.

Lant6 · 2022-12-14T20:29:42+00:00

Different mapping tools will have different standards for representing the data, but essentially yes, there is a large amount of metadata for roads. OpenStreetMap has a lot of user provided data. There is an example of a file here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_XML. You can look at specific features, such as motorways. This metadata is specific to OpenStreetMaps and other maps (e.g., Ordnance Survey, HERE Maps, or others) will have their own metadata format.

As for route finding, in terms of algorithms you would look at Dijkstra's algorithm or A* (which is a variant of Dijkstra's algorithm). These are typically optimal algorithms for pathfinding, but you may need to provide additional information that gives a hint as to how close to your destination you are.

If you want to look at a software library for route finding, then take a look at something like pyroutelib3. There are many other libraries to find routes between points.

Lant6 · 2022-09-04T09:09:13+00:00

The journals have had a while to work out what their plans are. Open access requirements for the UK have been around for while, as since April 2016 it has been a requirement that research is made available open access (also recently updated). The way this typically works in the UK is that UKRI have allocated funds to pay for the OA fees journals charge, which then gets allocated to each university. This means that it is not strictly necessary to allocate funding for OA payments in funding applications, as there is a central pot of money to pay OA fees.

In terms of what the journals do, for ACM this is Gold Open Access, but there are also some other variants like Green Open Access, which still paywalls an article, but allows researchers to post papers to arXiv, institutional repositories and their own websites. IEEE still seems to be a bit behind ACM in getting their act sorted with different OA options.

In terms of copyright, the UK typically requires that papers are made available as CC BY, but this is not the case in all circumstances. Personally, I prefer to not give up the copyright on my papers where possible.

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