algernon

Meson and CMake are the two major players I've seen along autotools. Are they better? In some respects, yes (especially Meson, imo), in others... not really. For a pet project that only targets two platforms, I'd just stick to handwritten worst-practices Makefile. You will likely have less trouble with that than any of the others, simply because you know it already.

...and here I am, running a blog that if it gets 15k hits a second, it won't even bat an eye, and I could run it on a potato. Probably because I don't serve hundreds of megabytes of garbage to visitors. (The preview image is also controllable iirc, so just, like, set it to something reasonably sized.)

Steam Deck, because it is handheld, and can run a lot of my Steam games. I can also dock it to a big screen and attach a controller.

Aren't all consoles like that, though? They all run mainstream operating systems, and are basically locked down PCs in a fancy box. If anything, the Steam Deck is further from a PC than an XBox/PS, due to being handheld, with an embedded screen and controller, while XBox and its friends require a display and an external controller (like a PC).

I only serve bloat to AI crawlers.

map $http_user_agent $badagent {
  default     0;
  # list of AI crawler user agents in "~crawler 1" format
}

if ($badagent) {
   rewrite ^ /gpt;
}

location /gpt {
  proxy_pass https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse163/20wi/files/lectures/L04/bee-movie.txt;
}

...is a wonderful thing to put in my nginx config. (you can try curl -Is -H "User-Agent: GPTBot" https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/robots.txt | grep content-length: to see it in action ;))

I think the first thing to figure out would be why udev is getting shut down. Perhaps you could extract its logs? journalctl -b -u systemd-udevd.service should do the trick. This gets you the logs of the current boot's udevd service.

Once you know why it is shutting down, it will be time to figure out how to stop it from shutting down. That should, hopefully, fix the problem you're having.

Nevertheless, as Bluesky grows, there are likely to be multiple professionally-run indexers for various purposes. For example, a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network index that provides insights to their clients.

(source)

Is that supposed to be a selling point? Because I'd like to stay far, far away from that, thank you very much.

My parents moved to Linux on their own accord: Dad just wanted something that stays the same, and doesn't try to exploit him, so he's been a happy Debian & XFCE user for about a decade now; Mom never used Windows, so she's happy with Debian & GNOME I was a Debian user (and developer) back when they switched to Linux, and Debian is where they stayed. Dad's in IT, so he can manage both systems fine, most of the time. I need to unfuck it from time to time, when Dad decides it is a good idea to try and install the latest LibreOffice Ubuntu arm64 .deb package on his x86_64 Debian oldstable, throwing whatever --force flags at dpkg he can find, but other than that, they have everything they need, are happy with their choices, and need very little support from me.

In my own household, Linux is the only system to begin with (apart from a handful of Android phones we all hate, and an XBox, which is slowly getting replaced by a Linux mini PC). I've been a Linux user since late 1996, and I purposefully only bought hardware that works decently with Linux, so setting up scanners, printers and the like are a breeze.

Wife saw my setup, how I operate it mostly with the keyboard (she hates the mouse more than I do!), wanted the same, so I built her something similar (NixOS + Wayland + niri + firefox + geary). She never had her own computer before, but did use Windows at work from time to time. She didn't want to use it on her laptop, though. She wanted something tailor built for her, for her very reluctant computer-usage. So Linux it is! She doesn't hate it, which is the best I can accomplish with anything computer-related when it comes to her. I'm maintaining her laptop, but that too, requires little work. I just update it from time to time. She's loving that she can send a print job from her laptop, from the living room, to the printer in my work room.

Kids played with both the xbox, and the gaming mini pc I built, and much prefer the latter, because it is easier to navigate, it is faster (using cheaper hardware), it is more stable, so when they're old enough to get their own computers, they want Linux too, and I shall abide. Luckily, while schools around here are rather windows-oriented, they have to accommodate Linux users too, so the kids will be more than fine with their Linux computers, even for school tasks. Whether they'll end up maintaining their computers or not remains to be seen. If they want to, I'll teach them how to.

That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s.

On the other hand, if the site linked would not serve garbage, and would fit like 1Mb like a normal site, then this would be only ~325mb/s, and while that's still high, it's not the end of the world. If it's a site that actually puts effort into being optimized, and a request fits in ~300kb (still a lot, in my book, for what is essentially a preview, with only tiny parts of the actual content loaded), then we're looking at 95mb/s.

If said site puts effort into making their previews reasonable, and serve ~30kb, then that's 9mb/s. It's 3190 in the Year of Our Lady Discord. A potato can serve that.

I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.

Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There's no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there's a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.

I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn't need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.

It's about 5 times longer than previous releases were maintained for, and is an experiment. If there's a need for a longer term support branch, there will be one. It's pointless to start maintaining an 5+ year branch with 0 users and a handful of volunteers, none of whom are paid for doing the maintenance.

So yes, in that context, 15 months is long.

A story like that, eh? Well, as it turns out, the entire configuration of my operating system is a story. Or rather, many stories.

...and you think 14-17 year olds won't circumvent this in mere seconds? Like, they'd just sign up at an instance that doesn't implement these labels, or doesn't care about them, or use their parents accounts, or ask them, or an older friend to sign them up, and so on. Even if age verification would be widespread and legally mandated, I highly doubt any sufficiently determined 14-17 year old would have any trouble getting past it.

If I'm working for someone else (company or otherwise), I'll write comments and docs in whatever language I can speak that they want me to (which pretty much means I write comments in English, because I rarely work for Hungarian companies nowadays, and even the ones I did work for preferred English, and these are the only two human languages I can write :().

When working on my own projects, it is always English, because Hungarian doesn't have good translations for many of the technical terms, so half my comments would be English borrowed words anyway. Might aswell write the rest in English too. Also makes it easier for others to chime in, because there are a whole lot more people speaking English than Hungarian.

It was harder in the beginning, when my command of the English language was far worse, but even then, half-Hungarian/Half-English comments just looked weird, and more jarring than full English, even if that English was kinda bad.

I was in similar shoes (my server is running Debian, as it has been for the past two decades), and am going to rebuild it on something else. I chose NixOS, which I recently switched to on my desktop, because it lets me configure the entire system declaratively, even the containers. The major advantage of a declarative configuration is that it will never be out of date.

My main reason for switching is that I've been running the server for a good few years, initially maintained via ansible, but that quickly turned into a hellish bash-in-yaml soup that never quite worked right. So I just made changes directly. And then I forgot why I made a change, or had the same thing copy & pasted all over the place. Today, it's a colossal mess. With NixOS, I can't make such a mess, because the entire system is declared in one single place, my configuration.

Like you, I also planned to use containers for most everything, but... I eventually decided not to. There's basically two things that I will run in a container: Wallabag (because it's not so well integrated into NixOS at the moment), and my Mastodon instance (which runs glitch-soc, which is considerably easier to deploy via the official containers). The rest will run natively. I'll be hardening them via systemd's built-in stuff, which will give me comparable isolation without the overhead of containers. Running things natively helps a lot with declarative configuration too, a nice bonus.

For reference, you can find my (work in progress) server configuration here. It might feel a bit overwhelming at first, because it's written in a literate programming style using org mode & org roam. I found this structure to work great for me, because my configuration is thoroughly documented, both the whys and hows and whats.

( ͜ₒ ㅅ ͜ ₒ)ლ(´ڡ`ლ)

I think that comes pretty close. Seeing as LLMs seem to avoid the topic of sex and female presenting nipples, I doubt they'd be able to recognise this picture, and thus, it might be a decent way to poison their training set. Sex talk and cursing should also drive a scraper away quickly, but... horny emoji art? That might just get through and poison the training set.

At least if I understood the question correctly, and the goal is to scew with an ML trying to scrape and learn.

There's a very easy solution that lets you rest easy that your instance is how you want it to be: don't do open registration. Vet the people you invite, and job done. If you want to be even safer, don't post publicly - followers only. If you require follower approval, you can do some basic checks to see that whoever sends a follow request is someone you're okay interacting with. This works on the microblogging side of the Fediverse quite well, today.

What I'm trying to say is that with registrations requiring admin approval gets you 99% of the way there, without needing anything more complex than that.

It's not. It just doesn't get enough hits for that 86k to matter. Fun fact: most AI crawlers hit /robots.txt first, they get served a bee movie script, fail to interpret it, and leave, without crawling further. If I'd let them crawl the entire site, that'd result in about two megabytes of traffic. By serving a 86kb file that doesn't pass as robots.txt and has no links, I actually save bandwidth. Not on a single request, but by preventing a hundred others.

I don't use social media to stay connected with family. I lift up the phone, go visit, or if we need to communicate online, I have an XMPP server for the family with end to end encryption. Can share pictures, text, and can even do video calls if need be, send files, and so on.

Don't see the need to involve any kind of social media.

I don't think serving 86 kilobytes to AI crawlers will make any difference in my bandwidth use :)

Better NixOS integration, less resources used, similar levels of containment. The containers I planned to use don't provide any additional safety than the system services. In many cases, I could harden the system services more. Like, if a container has a /bin/bash in it, it's hard to remove that, while I can pretty easily prevent my systemd service from accessing it.

Like, systemd.services..confinement is pretty darn strong. If enabled, NixOS will set up a tmpfs-based chroot with just the required runtime store paths for the service. Good luck doing something similar in a container!

It is pretty darn trivial to turn those env vars into a config.ini. But if you don't want to, my writefreely-docker has you covered. It has been used in production for a couple of hundred writefreely blogs over the past few years.

There's plenty, but I do not wish to hijack this thread, so... have a look at the Forgejo 7.0 release notes, the PRs it links to along notable features (and a boatload of bugfixes, many of which aren't in Gitea). Then compare when (and if) similar features or fixes were implemented in Gitea.

The major difference (apart from governance, and on a technical level) between Gitea and Forgejo is that Forgejo cherry picks from Gitea weekly (being a hard fork doesn't mean all ties are severed, it means that development happens independently). Gitea does not cherry pick from Forgejo. They could, the license permits it, and it even permits sublicensing, so it's not an obstacle for Gitea Cloud or Gitea EE, either. They just don't.

Works out of the box here, NixOS 23.11 / GNOME 45 / X11, so I suspect this might be either a Wayland or Sway problem.

When I switch to dark mode in GNOME, both Firefox's UI, and the sites that support dark mode, switch.

A free account is an easy way to test out the platform, give it a test ride, see if it works for you. If it does, you can pay for a Pro (or Team) subscription, and you get to use your own domain, and keep all the posts you already made on the free account, with all their comments and replies and whatnots.

Or, if it works out, and you want to self host, you can do that, too!

The difference between write.as and medium and other enshittified things, though, is that write.as is not VC funded, and Matt has no interest in making an "exit". Even if there are things I disagree on with him (eg, CLAs), I trust Matt to not enshittify write.as anytime soon. He's been running things for almost a decade now, remarkably well.

Yeah. But I'm also using a keyboard layout where frequently used keys aren't on my pinky, and a keyboard where modifiers are on my thumb cluster, rather than on my pinky.

Ah! My bad.

mumbles something about big corps choosing way too generic names for their stuff

Possibly. But if you - say - use a programming language that allows unicode identifiers, you can encode such emojis into the code, and if the model strips them out, they'll get absolute garbage to train on.

I disagree. It's a gaming console. It is marketed as such. It's primary purpose is to run games. By the way, you can browse on the Xbox. And because it has a full-blown browser, you can even use Office365 if you attach a keyboard and a mouse. So lets disqualify that too? :)

A lot of people do. Especially on GitHub, where you can just browse a random repository, find a file you want to change, hit the edit button, and edit it right there in the browser (it does the forking for you behind the scenes). For people unfamiliar with git, that's huge.

It's also a great boon when you don't want to clone the repo locally! For example, when I'm on a slow, metered connection, I have no desire to spend 10+ minutes (and half of my data cap) for a repo to clone, just so I can fix a typo. With the web editor, I can accomplish the same thing with very little network traffic, in about 1 minute.

While normally I prefer the comfort of my Emacs, there are situations where a workflow that happens entirely in the browser is simply more practical.

Yes, it can run all that. You may have to jump through a few hoops (just like in the case of the Steam Deck, just different hoops), but it can run all that.

I'll also turn your question back to you: how many people use the Steam Deck for productivity, rather than for gaming, which is its intended purpose? And does it matter?

Like it or not, the steam deck is a gaming console, even if you can run non-game stuff on it too. Heck, even stuff like the Game Boy had (official!) accessories like the Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer, which were both useful outside of gaming. Does that stop the Game Boy from being a (retro) gaming console? There's an ongoing project to provide productivity apps for the Game Boy (though, arguably, it did not ship yet, but you can extend the game boy with a cartridge in whatever way you can imagine).

Or, you can use your SNES as a MIDI Synthesizer (https://www.supermidipak.com/)! No modding or anything necessary, it's just a regular cartridge. Can it be used for fun? Yes. Is it a game? No. You can do a lot of stuff with an SNES cartridge that has nothing to do with gaming. There was even a cartridge that let you play online games on the SNES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND) - but not only games, it also let you read and write messages to other people. You didn't need to go into "desktop mode", nor install a browser, nor do anything special. You plugged in the cartridge, and it worked. It was far less locked down than the XBox or even the Steam Deck! Does that disqualify the SNES (or the game boy) from being a gaming console?

Threads does not interact with the Fediverse in its current form. It's a horn blasting into the fediverse at best. It's not participating in the fediverse, it's shouting into it. As such, it's correct to not report on how thredsizens participate in the fediverse - they do not, not at this time.

I would suggest trying with Wayland + GNOME, using GNOME's default WM, rather than sway. If that works, and sway doesn't, then the issue is somewhere between GNOME and Sway. That should help narrow things down.

So then a Game Boy is a PC, and so is the SNES, and the SEGA Genesis. Cool, cool, makes perfect sense.

Myself, I think the wikipedia definition is far better than yours.

There's a very important difference between what you can do with a thing, and what the thing was intended for, and what it is best at doing.

And how would that improve anything? Like I said, any general purpose engine is a no-go for me, because they index things I have no desire to ever see in my search results. Kagi is no exception.

Been there, tried it, didn't find it noticably better than the other general purpose search engines.