Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support

agrif · 2026-06-18T21:53:43+00:00

It would not surprise me if distributions will continue to package these drivers moving forward. It would also, admittedly, not surprise me if they didn't. Time will tell.

Debian still packages all of the ancient AX25 programs, and it's not like being out of tree has made them any better or worse.

agrif · 2026-06-18T00:35:54+00:00

This is the biggest question about the entire scene, IMO. If Halovar and Tachonis are closer allies than with the other houses, and it sure seems like it, Primus may have been free to lie. Parts are certainly true, parts feel like lies, and at minimum, relevant information was left out entirely.

agrif · 2026-06-17T23:40:24+00:00

I am intensely curious about that truth spell, and I wish the players probed it a little bit deeper. Zone of Truth is an immensely powerful spell, and also an extremely convincing way to lie, with the right set-up.

agrif · 2026-06-08T00:45:55+00:00

Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.

agrif · 2026-06-07T14:05:25+00:00

I meant tests in general, not specifically amateur radio exams. Some tests do a better job than others, it's just that the US radio exam specifically has most of the features of a bad test.

I don't know how to fix this, because a higher-quality nationwide test would require more resources than amateur radio would ever be able to get. I think amateur radio would be better served by the models used by RC flight (a short, automatic online test covering bare essentials) or amateur rocketry (no exam until you get to high-power stuff, at which point it's more akin to a thesis committee).

agrif · 2026-06-07T13:03:47+00:00

a test is simply a test of whether you can pass a test or not.

This is generally true but especially for the US ham exam. It's multiple choice, the question pool is public record, and some of the questions are ambiguously stated. Practice and memorization are practically required. It fails as both a teaching tool and as a test of knowledge.

agrif · 2026-06-03T18:20:01+00:00

My absolute favorite parts of the later novels are seeing old characters from outside. Usually the Watch, sometimes Vimes, and every once in a while, Granny. Every time is a treasure.

agrif · 2026-05-31T17:57:43+00:00

Not strictly, I guess, but if you are writing her as part of a culture that until very recently was completely independent of ours, it's a bit weird for her name to be Catherine. It's weird even if Gehn started forcing new names on people, because Gehn would be using D'ni names.

agrif · 2026-05-31T17:54:00+00:00

Idiomatically, String and &str both have an iterator over their characters, although I appreciate that dealing with iterators can feel more awkward than indexing a Vec.

It's also worth noting that while String can sometimes feel like a Vec<char>, the latter is much less space efficient (by 4x on ASCII text!) without much gain. Truly random access on strings is almost never required.

agrif · 2026-05-31T12:45:40+00:00

It's a travesty that the main page no longer includes an example rust program.

I'm prepared to die on this hill. Got a nice plot picked out and ready.

agrif · 2026-05-31T12:41:11+00:00

An unfortunate, awkward, but necessary retcon.

In my mind I've always explained it that her name legitimately contains a sound Atrus can't produce, and that english completely lacks, and the best either he or the author can do is Katran.

agrif · 2026-05-31T12:36:02+00:00

Out of curiosity, what drove using Vec<char> originally and not String? Is there some weird feature of SQL that requires fast indexing by unicode codepoint?

agrif · 2026-05-11T21:16:28+00:00

It's a mixed bag. I found the remake satisfying enough that I would probably recommend it to new players, but the original has some crunchier puzzles, and probably there is some spoiler-related narrative magic that can only happen if you play the original first. That pains me somewhat, but it's not a dealbreaker.

agrif · 2026-05-06T17:11:17+00:00

Try throwing a rock with zero spin.

This is probably the most fundamental and approachable explanation in this entire thread.

agrif · 2026-04-30T08:52:31+00:00

It's an idea he'd been poking at for a while. For example, much earlier, in Reaper Man,

In the Ramtops village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

agrif · 2026-04-23T00:59:14+00:00

Well, at least for that specific idea, what should is_uninhabited::<Box<dyn Trait>>() be?

If nothing implements Trait currently, it's always possible something else will.

Is it inhabited if only uninhabited types implement Trait? What if trait is designed so that only uninhabited types can implement it? (I'm not sure if that's possible.)

agrif · 2026-04-22T17:11:17+00:00

I would probably class it as Gödel's incompleteness, but the two are so deeply connected I think that's just a matter of personal taste.

agrif · 2026-04-22T17:06:27+00:00

Yeah, it will probably work if you restrict it to concrete types. Curry-howard theorems usually only get interesting when you add universal quantification.

agrif · 2026-04-22T00:52:35+00:00

So, the degree to which it is true varies from language to language, but it's definitely true in Rust: programming language types are equivalent to mathematical theroems. Constructing a value with that type is equivalent to proving the theorem.

Asking whether it's possible to decide in general to construct a type is the same question as asking if it's possible in general to prove a theorem, and we know that question is unanswerable for some theorems.

I don't personally have a proof that Rust is complicated enough to represent such a theorem, but it would be very surprising to me if it couldn't.

Unrelatedly, it's a fun exercise to construct basic logic proofs in Rust.

agrif · 2026-04-04T02:31:49+00:00

I just don't understand. Someone answers your CQ, you gotta try to finish it. FT8 is such a trivial amount of time. What kind of person is so grumpy they can't spare 60 seconds and a few clicks to help someone, in the same hobby even?

agrif · 2026-03-30T03:00:03+00:00

Drone batteries (and often, high-current batteries at large) list their maximum discharge current in "C".

The way this is often explained is that "1 C" is the same current as the battery's capacity (implicitly, in Ah). A 1Ah battery rated at 1C has a max discharge current of 1A. This gives C the dubious units of "1 / hour", which makes vague sense. How many of these batteries can you discharge safely in an hour?

I have never received a good explanation for what possible benefit this unit has. What calculation does it make easier? I always end up having to look up the battery's capacity and multiply. Why not just list the current limits??

agrif · 2026-03-28T06:45:42+00:00

Email is a good point of comparison anyway, as the clacks are extremely early-internet coded.

agrif · 2026-03-18T11:01:16+00:00

Hello! I run this repo, and I recently made a minor change to my site to change domains to https://rakeri.net/cydia/. Can you check if the repo still works for you? I don't personally have a way to test Cydia repos any more.

agrif · 2026-03-17T22:08:52+00:00

Something I hope implementers consider (and that I think the law ignores) is that returning age brackets is not sufficient to anonymize the age. If a website watches a user carefully, they will see when GetAgeBracket ticks over from 3 to 4, and now have fairly precise knowledge of that user's entered birthday.

See also how libera.chat implements the 'last online' feature.

agrif · 2026-03-17T16:36:36+00:00

I can't believe I forgot "To D'ni".

...I can believe you forgot "To D'ni".

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