I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I started playing with rust last week (just converting a couple of C# projects so far), and I’m going to say that once you understand that mutexes/rwlocks are wrappers around the actual data, it (to me at least) feels better.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s an absolute headache for anyone that’s acquired intermediate or better skill in one of the Cx languages. The paradigm shift is still hitting me hard. But this was one of the differences I actually think is an improvement in probably most use cases.



  • I think this overall is a better idea. I’m going to say this because, I thought I’d look into rust today. So I installed it, setup vscode to work with it etc. And it’s all up and running. I thought I would port over a “fairly simple” C# project I wrote recently as a bit of a test.

    While I’ve generally had success (albeit with 30+ tabs open to solve questions I had about how to do certain things, and only making it about 20% into the task) I’m going to say that it’s different enough from C, C++ and C# (all of which I can work with) that I really don’t think it is fair to expect C developers that have day jobs and work on the kernel in their spare time to learn this. It’s fundamentally different in my opinion.

    Now, I don’t condone any bad attitude and pushing away of rust developers from the project. But there’s no way they’re going to want to do anything to help which involves learning a new language. It’s just not going to happen.

    Likewise, C is not a language most new developers are learning. So, I feel like over time there won’t be so much of an influx of new kernel developers and any Rust based kernel could find itself with more contributors over time and taking over as the de-facto kernel.

    In terms of Redox (not looked into it yet). So long as there’s a different team working on the userspace tools. I would say the main task should be getting a solid kernel with drivers for most popular hardware etc in place. The existing GNU tools will do until there’s a kernel that is able to compete with the C one. But that’s just my opinion.


  • Here’s what I think. Both opinions are correct.

    Rust is sufficiently different that you cannot expect C developers to learn rust to the level they have mastered C in order to be working at the kernel level. It’s not going to happen.

    I don’t really know too much about rust. Maybe one day I’ll actually mess around with it. But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn’t even find where the code to do a thing was. It’s just different enough to be problematic that way.

    So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

    Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don’t want to learn a new language in order to help isn’t going to make many friends on that team.


  • When you post in a thread you get an ID for that thread. When you post in a different thread you get a different id.

    That’s what I said. You don’t need any ID to federate the messages. If you reply to a comment the nesting is based on the comment/post ID and not the usernames.

    You couldn’t track a users posts after the fact, and I think that’s kinda the point.


  • Not so sure that’s true though. If you look at a 4chan threads in some boards, you can recognize the individual anonymous’ from the ID next to them.

    I suspect it’s using either a cookie, or the IP address to track a user and while not storing that info, generating an ID hash from perhaps a unique ID for the thread + their details.

    No reason you couldn’t federate using the same. But, even without that, each post and comment has a post ID and replies would be tracked that way. Just, you’d need to remember which replies were your own.

    The home instance could store for a thread some info about posts/comments from an IP or cookie too and highlight them. But that info wouldn’t be federated.

    I actually don’t think it’d be a problem, really. But, is this something missing from our lives? I’m not so sure.


  • I find anything with that coated plastic over time gets crappy. I still have an old X52 pro I’ve had for probably around 15 years now. In the end I just completely took off the flaking rubber style coating they put over it and it’s now shiny plastic and still going strong.

    I also have a G502 that’s 6 years old. It has some worn areas where it’s actively held and on the buttons. I replaced the skates last year and have a spare set. Otherwise, still going strong.

    Really not sure why I’d subscribe for something that lasts so long and isn’t THAT expensive to replace.




  • OK, one possibility I can think of. At some point, files may have been created where there is currently a mount point which is hiding folders that are still there, on the root partition.

    You can remount just the root partition elsewhere by doing something like

    mkdir /mnt/rootonly
    mount -o bind / /mnt/rootonly
    
    

    Then use du or similar to see if the numbers more closely resemble the values seen in df. I’m not sure if that graphical tool you used that views the filesystem can see those files hidden this way. So, it’s probably worth checking just to rule it out.

    Anyway, if you see bigger numbers in /mnt/rootonly, then check the mount points (like /mnt/rootonly/home and /mnt/rootonly/boot/efi). They should be empty, if not those are likely files/folders that are being hidden by the mounts.

    When finished you can unmount the bound folder with

    umount /mnt/rootonly

    Just an idea that might be worth checking.



  • I think we should qualify the question. I think I’d like to hear a reason for society as a whole to exist that is reasoned and has a firm basis in logic and has no emotive or circular reference.

    Because I cannot see the point of it (and I’ve been accused of being a pessimist, depressed and worse for expressing this opinion). So, I would really like to hear an actual reason for us all to be here.



  • Both, each have their place. I have a desktop in my office. Decent recent spec and kept fairly up to date.

    Laptop I have a reasonable “gaming” spec in the lounge we both use it.

    The laptop will always be a compromise. You cannot shift the dissipated heat from a full power gpu at all in that form factor, and most cpus are going to also be lower power editions because they need to work on batteries as well as connected to power. But they’re still for sure usable.

    Desktop will always outperform. Even the stock cpu and gpu options will perform at a higher tdp, and you can usually improve cooling in a big case to either improve stock boost frequencies, or over clock.

    Physics is the limiting factor for laptops, both in terms of power delivery, and heat dissipation.




  • GPS Navigation didn’t become widely available at a decent size until the mid 2000s I would say. I remember for sure I had GPS navigation on a laptop which was just as ridiculous as it sounds in around 2002-2003.

    The GPS was a PCMCIA card with an aerial you put near the windscreen. The software would just stop showing a map when you went faster than 50mph or so, and only provide basic instructions and your speed. Buying a laptop charger that plugged into the cigarette lighter socket wasn’t as cheap as it is now either.

    Needless to say, it was a novelty thing. The main problem with paper map navigation when driving is, you really need to compress the instructions down to something you can remember if driving on your own. Since you need to stop if you lose track of your route. I don’t miss that to be honest.