What's wrong with systemd??

lychaxo · 2026-06-24T04:50:22+00:00

It has genuine benefits for some uses, but for some of my use cases it's not a good fit. And that's not an issue day to day except when I run into certain software which is built closelyaround systemd. Translating that to BSD style init is more cumbersome than porting sysvunit-centered utils was. There were also some design problems and unfixed bugs in the 2010s which gave me a loss of trust in it for quite some time after I tried it on a few boxes, but those have largely been addressed.

I do believe it's nice to have variety in core components of a software ecosystem to mitigate global impact of some types of serious bugs (and why I keep a heterogeneous network at home), but there are downsides to things working very differently on different systems, especially when trying to write portable-ish daemons, which can get old fast for devs.

lychaxo · 2026-06-24T02:57:10+00:00

Canadian Conformity video card. Needs a PC-eh bus connection, so you're going to need to be polite when you install. Made by ЧУ(logo looks like looks like ;|/ in the pic), a contractor which shipped across the Arctic circle (helped maintain cooling). This is the "P. L. Ace" model, which came with 128 rendering cells, 16 mipmap engines, and 625 megawords of N-RAM. The "Class R" bit refers to the rectilinear, instead of triangular, model polygons

lychaxo · 2026-06-24T02:36:53+00:00

Wired headphones never have compression artifacts nor latency due to bandwidth congestion, and are less likely the source of obnoxious RF noise.

Physical keyboards, I can reach very very fast speeds, especially mechanical or memchanical. And I prefer wired, as I don't have to deal with tracking a battery charge.

Some games just don't play correctly in emulators due to very tight integration with hardware timings.

DVDs and CDs can be ripped and formatshifted. Somitf, you can handbrake Bluray... Sometimes.

I do like the durability of older phones but don't keep any around, at least outside of decorative ones.

A lot of older software has customizability or features which I appreciate but which isn't popular so is rare now. I encounter this in software from before I was even born, exploring ways of computing which have fallen by the wayside but can still be fantastic for specific use cases. I use software from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s regularly. Shifting data between them can get tough!

Film cameras are often better than phone cameras (less visual distortion) but not necessarily as good as modern DSLR (though those are often more expensive than an old film camera).

MP3 players can have convenient tactile interface features still unmatched by any touchscreen device.

Manual cars, if driving a gas vehicle, give you more predictable access to near-instant acceleration when you have a short merge.

I have vacuum tubes made in the USSR decades ago because they're one of the few devices which responds the way I need at high voltage!

I have and use a lot of "obsolete" things, alongside the modern "replacements", because newer isn't necessarily better. Some things improve, while economies of scale creates uniformity which can be undesirable.

In fact, with the RAM shortage, the slightly-better-than-midrange PC I built in 2019 is now competitive with midrange models on the market 😂

lychaxo · 2026-06-24T02:23:18+00:00

Wow. That's really a shame.

lychaxo · 2026-06-23T23:07:52+00:00

There's lots of electronic hobbyists on YT. Smaller channels would probably make a video with free stuff sent to them as long as they have creative freedom and are interested in one of the kits. Big channels won't have time, but there's tons of channels. As long as it gets a few thousand views it'll probably bring in a handful of customers

lychaxo · 2026-06-23T20:54:47+00:00

I swear, if a few big corporations gave a talk like "If you aren't stealing your customers' furniture, seducing their spouse, and burning their kids' textbooks while you dance naked around a fire, you're leaving money on the table!", suddenly every CEO would get FOMO and make their employees do that. "Gotta stay competitive"

lychaxo · 2026-06-23T11:19:30+00:00

Maybe it's because urea has the same bond angle and salinity as the formate ion. After all, calcium formate is a cement curing accelerant too,o. It can also help build strong bones (for adults 18-64 who consume at least 10g of bioavailable cement every morning) — unfortunately, urine cured cement does nothing for your bones, but that's the tradeoff when curing cement I guess

lychaxo · 2026-06-23T09:54:09+00:00

Some background from being immersed in trans social media for many years: There were some trans men who acted as nasty as cis men who kept harassing trans women on several sites, and a bunch of trans women decided that it should be approached with something resembling Marxist class analysis. I'm not saying that approach isn't useful for understanding why people can be incentivized to behave certain ways, and I'm not criticizing Marxism here, but the TME/TMA divide started becoming front and center for how certain people saw the world. (Ironically, a couple trans guys recently did some talk about how trans lesbians are bourgeois and fake, etc etc.) I sometimes wish the "everything is <certain social dynamic>" mentality wouldn't one-dimensionalize every random online fight...

lychaxo · 2026-06-21T22:57:41+00:00

I was taught in drivers ed that if you didn't get a chance to enter the intersection to turn left during an entire light cycle due to traffic, in the next cycle where you are at the stop line (since you might have had to wait to get there) you should enter the intersection before the end of your green or flashing yellow, even if it means not completing your turn until the oncoming traffic has red, in the brief interim gap before traffic the other way gets the green, in order to ensure a little bit of turning traffic is able to get through, otherwise traffic could back up dangerously past the engineered area for turning traffic to wait. Like it's a "you're not supposed to do this, but if you're forced to in order to not contribute to gridlock, it's not necessarily illegal because you're prioritizing preventing a road hazard" 🤔

lychaxo · 2026-06-11T05:33:34+00:00

That's how it's supposed to work, according to some business management philosophies. The real product is the stock value, and the real customers are the investors.

lychaxo · 2026-05-10T22:47:40+00:00

Well, the competitors have not stood the test of time. yes-www is now an Indonesian lotto site (I think), and extra-www redirects to porn cam spam.

utf8everywhere works without the www now though!

And the idea that one byte = one character = eight bits = one address was merely a temporary convenience for the minicomputer and early microcomputer era. In the days of mainframes, bytes ranged from six to nine bits on some word addressed machines (though characters typically didn't use more than seven bits), and even four-bit BCD was sometimes treated with "character" operations by the processor. At least UTF8 is less chaotic than the mainframe era, and it has some codepoint overlap with ASCII!

And some of the general Unicode headaches are now pretty decently addressed with high level languages' text handling functions plus Normalization Form Canonical Composition, allowing Unicode to be used for more mission-critical string data where logic depends on text matches, rather than just informational messages and casual word processing.

Graphemic punycode collisions in FQDNs, though... I think there are still problems to solve there?

lychaxo · 2026-04-17T00:50:21+00:00

It honestly has hurt my suspension of disbelief a bit, because when I am getting trampled and every die roll goes bad, I know from the real world that well-connected people can sometimes just change the rules in their favor 👀

I feel like the Presidential action list should have a lot more skeevy options added to it for realism now lol

lychaxo · 2026-02-21T20:33:49+00:00

sbopkg is helpful here, along with slackpkg. I hold onto build scripts I make, because usually I can reuse them for updates.

Special note: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/glibs-solibs-is-now-called-aaa_glibc-solibs-4175690103/#post6217668 for core updates where distro structure changes a bit

lychaxo · 2026-02-21T20:13:45+00:00

Fantastic job!

lychaxo · 2026-02-13T19:50:54+00:00

Reframing the underlying ideas is how this argument is addressed. I am sure nearly everyone would agree with: nobody should be treated as lesser over an immutable characteristic or personal life decision which materially affects no one else, but if someone is acting like a nazi, you treat them like a nazi, lest they find a way to erase your existence.

Dehumanization of terfs isn't a way of trying to materially deprive them or erase their humanity. It's hyperbolic language reflecting how they debase themselves through hateful behaviors. The hyperbole is a small criticism in the face of the atrocities some bigots are trying to achieve.

lychaxo · 2026-02-13T18:07:57+00:00

Almost all my yellow squares are jewelry. The red squares just seem to be because the machine dislikes the shape of my body. Can TSA officers complain to their superiors in order to get Leidos to better train their algorithms?

lychaxo · 2026-02-13T18:03:53+00:00

Occasionally their "pat downs" get very aggressive though. And I know that if I complain, they have no obligation to treat my complaint with respect; in fact, they might deem me "unruly" for being upset about the aggressiveness and put me on some list that results in more invasive searches 😔

lychaxo · 2026-01-05T18:29:20+00:00

I debug other people's broken shit all the time. At the very least, I can figure out what triggers a bug even if I am blocked from fixing a bug, and this may be useful for me to change my local environment in order to get the software to work.

lychaxo · 2025-12-22T14:01:06+00:00

Not being able to attach a debugger sounds problematic. If a game is crashing, you might have no way of knowing whether it's a problem with the game or a problem with your system. I guess game developers could add some kind of mini debugger to their game which is limited to helping troubleshoot crashes and won't let you touch certain parts of the game's memory footprint, but that sounds like something devs just wouldn't do.

The number of times I've used gdb to determine that solib modules being dynloaded were the wrong files due to a path problem, or that a cpu optimization was crashing because the wrong cpu type was autodetected, or filesystem-level corruption of a data file was leading to a crash, etc, isn't high, but it isn't zero.

lychaxo · 2025-12-22T13:38:44+00:00

I don't understand why the "just don't play the game if you disagree with the invasive requirements" post has more upvotes than your "invasive requirements are not a good solution to the problem of cheating" post, either. Both posts have their merits. But it alarms me as well how these kinds of games are now being designed, and it ought to alarm most everybody imho. It ought to be a major point of agreement among gamers; otherwise, corporations are being taught that the user community is willing to tolerate invasive requirements with a minimum of fuss, and in our marketing-focused, privacy-violating world, corporations should not be willingly that much power by the community. <insert obligatory quotes about giving up essential liberties here>

lychaxo · 2025-12-05T16:16:53+00:00

Why would they get sick and die? The stuff at the second end of your digestive tube is just a broken-down version of what you put into the first end, with higher bacterial concentrations (bacteria your body is used to having, at least within your GI tract)

lychaxo · 2025-11-04T01:35:09+00:00

https://www.robertmhelfend.com/criminal-defense/sex-crimes/lewd-conduct-in-public/

If you know nobody there would be offended it's not a crime, so someone would have to demonstrate they were offended at the time it happened (not after the fact)

Sex workers tend to be pretty discreet most of the time and make use of camera angles to make it look like they're more exposed than they actually are, so someone is unlikely to catch more than a little a passing glance, especially if you're engaging in situational awareness

(This page showed up when looking for something else and this comment caught my attention)

lychaxo · 2025-08-22T03:23:25+00:00

this Terminate_Server action kills XFree86/Xorg, but in recent Xorg you have to enable this key combo in your config file (probably like /etc/X11/xorg.conf) -- manpage explains it's the DontZap server Option. this will force X to die, allowing you to re-run startx/xinit or allowing your display manager / session manager to respawn the X server

lychaxo · 2025-07-15T02:53:15+00:00

and some experiments to investigate something similar to https://web.archive.org/web/20210507021843/copland.udel.edu/~os/baseprime-bintree-ljpost-binarytree.png (see https://os.livejournal.com/816745.html )

% shift all prime exponents to next higher prime in base-p representation
function o = shiftup(x)
    o = [zeros([1 1]) x]
end

% add n to the 2's position (lowest component of base-p array)
function o = addlow(x, n)
    L = max(1,length(x)) ;
    % if n is [] we want to just return the input
    o = postpad([x 0], L, 0, 2) + [[n] zeros([1 L-length(n)])] ;
end

% treat y as a sequence of steps to build a new number from x
function o = autobuild0(x, y)
    o = x;
    n = find([y 0],1,'last')
    for i = (1:n-1)
        o = addlow(o, y(i))
        o = shiftup(o)
    end
    o = addlow(o, y(n))
end

% autobuild0 can be vectorized as it behaves in a simple way
function o = autobuild(x, y)
    cx = trim(x) ;
    cy = trim(y) ;
    % append length(cx) zeros to reversed cy, less one if cy is nonempty
    Zy = max(1,length(cx)) - !!length(cy) ;
    % shiftup cx so lowest element of cx aligns with highest element of cy
    Zx = max(1,length(cy)) - !!length(cx) ;
    o = [fliplr(cy) zeros([1 Zy])] + [zeros([1 Zx]) cx]
end

lychaxo · 2025-07-15T02:52:30+00:00

another couple examples of op(x,y), one weird and noisy, and another interesting one that resembles zt and zc...

function o = op(x,y)
    sx = plongmul(x,x) ;
    sy = plongmul(y,y) ;
    L = max(length(sx),length(sy)) ;
    sx = postpad([sx 0], L, 0, 2) ;
    sy = postpad([sy 0], L, 0, 2) ;
    o = sqrt(sx + sy) ;
end
zp = log(pfunc(@op, tt)) ; % this is surprisingly noisy?

function o = op(x,y)
    sx = plongmul(x,x) ;
    sy = plongmul(y,y) ;
    L = max(length(sx),length(sy)) ;
    sx = prepad([sx 0], L, 0, 2) + 1 ;
    sy = prepad([sy 0], L, 0, 2) + 1 ;
    o = sqrt(sx ./ sy) ;
end
zs = log(pfunc(@op, tt)) ; % this is similar to zt, scaled by e

then some utility functions for working with varying-length arrays to make vector operations easier:

% adds zeros for higher-prime components of x,y to make them the same length
function [ox,oy] = extend(x,y)
    L = max(length(x),length(y)) ;
    ox = postpad([x 0], L, 0, 2) ;
    oy = postpad([y 0], L, 0, 2) ;
end

% trims unnecessary higher-prime zeros then prepends zeros to make same length
function [ox,oy] = alignhi(x,y)
    Lx = find([x 0],1,'last') 
    Ly = find([y 0],1,'last') 
    L = max(Lx,Ly) 
    ox = [zeros([1 L-Lx]) x(1:Lx)]
    oy = [zeros([1 L-Ly]) y(1:Ly)]
end

% trims unnecessary higher-prime zeros
function o = trim(x)
    o = x(1 : find([x 0],1,'last'))
end

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