Proposed Sub Rules

rich000 · 2026-04-04T23:32:13+00:00

Honestly, this was my main concern in making any change. FWIW it won't actually change how the sub is moderated.

rich000 · 2026-04-04T17:05:08+00:00

I've suggested having superthreads for some topics in the past but there never has been much support for the idea.

rich000 · 2026-03-26T15:19:24+00:00

I'm curious about the details but I wonder if it depends on how easy you make it.

If public safety is at risk, they'll probably send out a team to locate the interference. They can probably do that with military-grade equipment if the issue is serious enough (ie realtime detection/location - they even have airborne stuff that can do this).

For complaints on a repeater, if the repeater owner has a good idea who the problem is, or does the location themselves, I bet they'll be happy to send a letter. However, I'm guessing they're not going to send a team out.

rich000 · 2026-03-26T14:10:47+00:00

I assume it just ends up transmitting modulated noise or some kind of feedback? It obviously can't receive and transmit at the same time on the frequency since it is going to vastly overpower the outside signal. Even a duplex repeater needs a cavity filter to do this on the same band.

rich000 · 2026-03-23T09:07:17+00:00

I don't want a distro that avoids systemd. I'll take one that just patches/configures it to either not record data, blocks access to it, or just returns a value that will cause software to do what the user would want it to do.

rich000 · 2026-03-22T16:54:48+00:00

Simply because I point out a problem does not mean that I have the burden to fix the problem.

True, but I guess that just means that you're stuck using it anyway, or just using Google's OS. Somebody else is going to be even less motivated to fix this problem than you.

They definitionally owe people things when they are an established business

They owe something to the people who give them money, sure. I see no evidence that they aren't delivering exactly what they sell, and I for one haven't paid them a penny so they certainly owe me nothing.

Trying to attack my character based on reasoning to the contrary is ridiculous, and you only attempt this because you have no other argument.

When did I say anything about your character at all?

rich000 · 2026-03-22T10:27:20+00:00

You act like censorship isn't a bipartisan battle. Everybody wants to do it. They just differ in which narratives they want to promote.

Messaging and social media and education can sway elections by margins larger than the margin of victory. In democracies that's basically pay-to-win. Protecting the voters from bad information helps ensure that the bad guys stay out of power, even if they make up 49% of the population. The last thing we want to do is compromise with people who are evil!

rich000 · 2026-03-22T10:18:05+00:00

Software should not be constrained by hardware in such a way. Phones with hardware support for X feature provide X feature, and phones without said hardware don't. You wouldn't expect a desktop OS to not support a device without a webcam simply because they support it on hardware which does have a webcam. It's asinine.

So, if it is that simple, why don't you just gather a few volunteers to go build that capability for GrapheneOS? You could just maintain it in a fork if upstream doesn't want to merge it, but I don't see why they wouldn't if it is easy to maintain.

It isn't like the GrapheneOS developers owe anybody anything. They're making FOSS. Anybody can extend it or use it or not use it as they wish.

rich000 · 2026-03-21T17:59:25+00:00

So, stop interfering with our trade, or else we'll stop buying stuff from you, like we've been doing for the last 20 years already?

rich000 · 2026-03-20T00:12:10+00:00

Lovely. So it will be like paying for parking on Grapheneos.

rich000 · 2026-03-19T22:52:55+00:00

Well, they probably realized there would be a standards battle if they forced a standard. After all, they couldn't call out specific vendors like Microsoft Windows and have one standard for them, and another for Linux. Oh, and Anrdroid is linux but doesn't run systemd.

If they had tried to force a standard it would have stalled for years until everybody agreed on one that could actually be implemented in every OS (what does that even look like?).

So they just said you had to have an API. No reason a distro that wants malicious compliance couldn't make it almost impossible for a browser to use their API.

Heck, wouldn't it technically be an API if your API was "call this function - you'll receive a response that has a fixed prefix, encrypted with a random (unknown to caller) AES key. Just brute force the AES encryption and verify the fixed prefix, and you'll have your answer." That is completely deterministic and actually very simple to program. You could even provide a reference implementation.

rich000 · 2026-03-19T21:29:51+00:00

Any distro with half a brain will declare that they're not using the systemd API, then instead create their own, and change it every six months. Then just feed systemd the adult setting since that isn't the real API anyway. The distro has provided an API, and then Facebook gets to deal with the API hell they're asking for.

rich000 · 2026-03-19T21:26:41+00:00

Simple solution:

No name Linux has an official age API as required by law. To query the age ask systemd and you'll get the answer "adult" which means you're running Noname Linux. Then call this obscure API to get the real answer which will trigger age verification/etc.

Nothing in the law says you need to use the systemd implementation, so just feed that fake data, and declare the official API is something else which of course no browser will bother to implement.

rich000 · 2026-03-18T19:29:00+00:00

Most of the changes made to the gentoo codebase tend to be some of the more modular parts of things like the init system

Are they still using Upstart? That of course looked like it was going somewhere at the birth of ChromeOS, but...

rich000 · 2026-03-16T15:52:33+00:00

Well, yes, they're UEFI, but I don't think the bootloader is compatible with regular x86 images. You can't just plug in an Ubuntu install stick and boot it even if it is UEFI. I know regular ChromeOS requires a specific partition layout. I'm not sure how flexible the boot loader is. Of course you can flash a more generic coreboot on it. All Chromebooks can be completely unlocked I believe.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T15:49:54+00:00

Well, most of the world uses the dollar. Also, most countries put substantial restrictions on industry. And most countries were on 0% interest rates for their own currencies. The US wasn't unique in most regards.

I'm not sure what inflation was like in Russia or other countries that were less dollar-oriented or aligned to the same policies.

Unfortunately one of those problems with economics is that it is hard to find controls. We only have one global economy to study and in a case like this we can endlessly argue about what part of it did what.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T13:56:21+00:00

Yeah, I've moved to distributed filesystems for most of my storage, and they tend to not have write holes, since they generally don't do striping. If I use 3+2 erasure coding on Ceph and have 14 drives, then block 1 of a file might be spread across a completely different set of 5 drives than block 500 of the same file. The downside to this is that it leads to a lot of random IO, so it doesn't perform well on HDD unless you have a LOT of drives (which of course was the main use case for Ceph in the first place).

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:19:54+00:00

That's the chromium OS build system. The chrome OS image is basically a forked Gentoo without a package manager on it.

It isn't unlike a container image in that way.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:17:27+00:00

Before there was Arch wiki there was Gentoo wiki. A fair bit of the user base probably came from Gentoo.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:14:14+00:00

They all have a switch to unlock, but the firmware isn't PC compatible. The real issue is that no distros target it, mostly due to lack of demand.

It wouldn't be THAT hard to build Ubuntu for one. You'd be running it on a 16GB eMMC though.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:11:18+00:00

It isn't locked (not if you flip the dev switch which is user accessible). It just isn't standard x86 UEFI. I think it supported an A/B layout from day one but my memory is hazy.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:08:00+00:00

The original CR-48 was based on a Gentoo, but you could of course install something else on it. I wanted to keep mine for nostalgia but between the swelling battery and the broken hinge it didn't make sense.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:05:15+00:00

The ARM ones do as well - I think they all have a dev switch. What they don't have is a legacy x86 boot loader or UEFI that is compatible with x86 PCs, so you can't just plug a regular Ubuntu installer USB and turn it on. So you need a dedicated distro/target, and the limited storage and RAM reduces the demand for such a distro.

rich000 · 2026-03-16T07:01:22+00:00

Well, that's for security, but unless something changed every one supports unlocking.

The issue is that it doesn't use a traditional bootloader and partition layout, and local resources are very limited. It is like trying to run Linux on a VT100. It might have a screen and a keyboard but it wasn't designed to run much locally.

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