You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.

Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.

Watch the video. Wedson is being yelled at by Ted Ts’o. If the general doesn’t yell, but his lieutenants yell, is that really progress? I will say that last time I saw Linus, he was very quiet and courteous, but that likely was because it was early morning and the summit-goers were starting to eat breakfast and drink their coffee.

I want to run PipeWire as a system user and have multiple login users access it. My current hack is to run it as one login user and then do something like:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1001

Where 1001 is the user ID. Is there a cleaner approach?

Well, I don’t want to pull the kernel-hacker card, but it sounds like you might not have experienced being yelled at by Linus during a kernel summit. It’s not fun and not worth the money. Also it’s well-known that LF can’t compete with e.g. Collabora or Red Hat on salary, so the only folks who stick around and focus on Linux infrastructure for the sake of Linux are bureaucrats, in the sense of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

Sounds like it’s time to start training code-writing models on leaked Microsoft source code. Don’t worry, it’s not like it’ll “emit memorized code”.

I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.

Maybe you should actually try one before sharing your thoughts.

I’d love to link you to their Wikipedia pages, but both of them are redlinked. As far as I can tell, Dr. V. Ronald was an educator who moved from Canada to the USA as part of the whole Xerox PARC thing and probably was valued for mainframe experience; does anybody have a full bio? The current maintainer is Ron Sunk, who did a full run at MIT up through postdoc before going to Red Hat. The names are a coincidence; runk implements what we now call Sunk summation, after Sunk’s thesis. (As you might guess, that’s an instance of Stigler’s law, since clearly Dr. Ronald discovered Sunk summation first!)

Also, as long as we’re here, I want to empathize a little with Sunk. The GUIs that folks have placed on runk, like GNOME’s Gunk or Enlightenment’s enk, look very cool, and there’s rumors of an upcoming unified number-counting protocol that will put them all on equal ground. But @MossyFeathers@pawb.social wasn’t joking; Dr. Arnold’s code literally only reads punch cards, and there’s a façade to make it work on modern Linux and BSD transparently. It predates X11, if that’s any help. The tech debt is real.

Because frankly, Ronald (the current maintainer, not the original author) is very competent. I say this as somebody who has personally been yelled at by Ronald at a kernel summit; I didn’t deserve it, but none of his technical points were wrong. I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?) Not to excuse his conduct, just to explain why he’s not been replaced yet.

You’re not crazy or harsh. This is a very real problem. I have been stuck doing business development at every company I’ve worked for. There’s always some shitty load-bearing Django app whose schema determines what the business is capable of doing, and somebody’s gotta maintain it. It’s gotten to the point where I assume that any interesting things I do will be outside of work and not for pay.

Yes. The meme is the belief that societies divide neatly into "political’ and “non-political” systems. Those carrying the meme often find themselves confused as to why there are “political” aspects to the “non-political” systems that they interact with and rely upon. An easy temporary antidote to disrupt this meme: Politics is merely the discussion required to establish or change policies; the non-political systems are those which have no policies whatsoever, which are the systems that aren’t managed by humans. All human systems are political.

You’re thinking of CPython. PyPy can routinely compete with C and C++, particularly in allocation-heavy or pointer-heavy scenarios.

You may be pleased to know that PyPy’s Python 2.7 branch will be maintained indefinitely, since PyPy is also written in Python 2.7. Also, if you can’t leave CPython yet, ActivePython’s team is publishing CPython 2.7 security patches.

I think they’re saying that e.g. you shouldn’t index a natural key unless you know that you’re going to search/collate by that key as a column. Telling the database that a certain column contains (a component of) the primary key is adding a restriction to that column.

This shit is why I cannot recommend Truffle/Graal. Yes, it’s cool technology. Yes, it works well. Yes, I remember Chris Seaton. Yes, most of it is Free Software. However, Oracle is still the fucking lawnmower, and it’s not safe to build upon anything they can convince a judge they might own.

Alternatives include RPython (my preference) and also GNU Lightning.

Direct rendering infrastructure in Linux predates widespread use of “digital rights management” as a term of art by about two or three years. “We were here first,” as the saying goes. That said, the specific concept of direct rendering managers is a little newer, and probably was a mistake on its own merits, regardless of the name.

Oracle Ruined America’s Cup (Larry Ellison)

Yes, if that’s the only reason one is using fail2ban. Honestly, I won’t miss it.

PyPy exists. (This is news to around 95% of the community.)

At their most general, they are “data processors.” In common parlance, they’re often called “algorithms,” although some folks insist that that is reserved for programs with trivial control flow. For disambiguation and comparison:

• A service is an API surface and a contract promising that the surface has certain behaviors; data processing may be part of how the API is implemented. In practice, a service is e.g. an HTTPS endpoint and an OpenAPI specification.
• A capability is a copyable token which simultaneously authorizes its holder to perform an action and designates the holder as having the authority to perform that action. This won’t be part of your normal curriculum and training; see this post for an introduction, or this story for motivation.
• A controller is a modulator for a (distributed) system. Typically a controller is anything which is actuated by a control loop, although sometimes a controller can sit outside of the system. Common examples include MVC patterns, k8s components, and video-game controllers.