cturner

After reading the web page, I am left with some questions unanswered,

* Is it a goal for AlpineBSD to run on native hardware, or is it intended for containers (a major use-case for Alpine itself)?

* For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

If the team want to attract interest, they should give more context.

The mission is unclear. The team could address this by stating goals and milestones on the front page.

There is a link to a tool s6 on the page. The description of that tool opens with a circular definition. It would be clearer if it stated why it exists in the opening paragraph. Near the bottom it talks about "One of the design goals of s6-frontend". It would be better to state all of the design goals.

I am coordinating a 504 restoration and realised yesterday that the new Morgan is almost as heavy as the 504. It would weigh more that a 405. A Morgan!

OT - if the Iran regime collapses, it will be an amazing time for 405 restoration in the west. They can still make so many new parts.

To be clear - I agree with your statement that Linux is full of sharp edges that won't get fixed. I got abandoned by a series of desktop systems. Like you I had gone to and from the linux desktop but had found it unpolished. I was with Mac OS X for a while, and then a major upgrade broke my workflows. Finally I gave up on having a nice desktop. Once I had accepted that, I found a kind of contentment. It has been 15 years, I wouldn't go back now.

No, I replied because I think cosmic_cheese should be more cynical. Linux is hard, and won't get better. The X-Windows clipboard design is awful, the wayland team made a decision not to improve on it. I replied to the frustrations of trying to create a daily driver.

If you try again, be less ambitious. Don't try to get KDE or Gnome going.

Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.

Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.

I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.

When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.

It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.

The fact that people care a lot about Unix clones is significant, though. nine_k could have been more effective in arguing the point, but it seems like a strong point to argue. Do you think you Go is flexible enough to write a Unix clone with performance equivalent to a C-unix? If so, why has it not been done?

It would passable for a totalitarian state, but is not for a developed economy. Identify the actors - the lab or company. For contrast, "South Carolina develops a method.." or "Cupertino develops a method..".

Use of "Scientists" is sloppy, also. It manufactures authority. Present the facts and let the reader judge whether they are scientists or not.

On a system of that era, some scenes look far smoother with the GUS than SB16. With the GUS running, the CPU could focus on graphics because the audio was offloaded to the GUS. This was particularly true of the 3d flight scene.

Something that undermines the operating system angle is that emacs does not implement hardware drivers. All interaction with the computer go via system calls.

Norton Commander contains a text editor. Emacs operates at that level, whilst being reprogrammable.

What you say seems true. But a comment - there are more effective ways to achieve it than a bill of rights. Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights but does have decent due process, as a result of deliberate legislation. The bill of rights leads to the US Supreme Court being highly politicised because it is a nasty undemocratic backdoor to synthetic legislation. Australia does not have a politicised high court.

I have built large systems on python that use classes, for more than ten years. I came to it from Java, ten years.

As a rule, I avoid implementation inheritance. Occasionally I need to facade a library that assumes implementation inheritance to avoid it spreading into my codebase.

When the codebase hits a certain size, I hand-roll some decorators to create functionality like java interfaces. With that done, and a suite of acceptance tests, I find it scales up well.

This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release 5 is a DevTeam release with input from what was new blood fifteen years ago.

For all your words, you have dodged the only question of my last post.

By the late 80s, the wholesale sales tax was creaking at the seams. Toys were taxed at 24% but luxury goods at 0%. Also it was complex and expensive to administer. The wholesales sales tax was awful public policy.

Keating knew the GST was good policy, but lacked the conviction to stand up to “jellyback” Hawke (Walsh’s characterisation) and his caucus for it. Keating had taken it to the Tax Summit as his preferred policy “Option C”. Lacking meaningful policies of his own, Keating won the 93 election on a platform of opposing the GST and could not engage in reform as a result.

In the aftermath of the 93 election, Howard said never ever to a GST. Then, during government, cabinet and treasury looked at the indirect taxation mess and concluded that the GST was the optimal policy.

They could have done several things at this point. They could have done nothing, and focused on holding onto power, as Keating had done. They could have dressed it up as a VAT. Or they could have just introduced it with their majority. Instead, Howard gave a speech where he plainly recognised that he had said never, and said he had made a mistake, and his conviction was it was the right policy.

He then called an early election, in full knowledge that he was bad in the polls, and made the GST cause the centrepiece of that campaign.

This was the greatest act of political courage and decency of our lifetime. They risked everything on that conviction. Costello then ran a meticulous publicity campaign in which he made not a single mistake to open ground to the rerun of the ALP scare campaign. Against those odds, the Coalition won the election and made the reform, which now has bipartisan support.

But if you think there was a better reform to the indirect tax system available, let’s hear it.

If not a GST, what do you think was the appropriate reform to the indirect tax system?

> It's only certain strains of right-leaning governments that > figure out you can grow the pie so rich and poor alike become > wealthier.

Credit to a few. Roger Douglas in New Zealand. Contemporary Peter Walsh in Australia, the Hawke finance minister, also got it. Keating somewhat got it, and put his neck on the line for politically-difficult but structurally-easy growth-pie macro reforms as treasurer, but did not follow through for the politically-difficult and structurally-hard reforms, like wholesale sales tax, and then became a fixed-pie prime minister. Walsh was gone by then.

Howard/Costello era in Australia. Reagan 80s. Pinochet - fits your criteria.

Arden is indefensible. She increased the size of government, decreased social cohesion via critical theory, housing promises went nowhere. Worse balance sheet, worse outcomes, across the board.

"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.

Do you dislike type inheritance? Or only implementation inheritance? My view is that type inheritance is incredibly useful, both for single system programming, and rpc. Whereas implementation inheritance creates brittle systems.

"The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance."

That's not the only difference. I have had situations where I ran equivalent optics side-by-side, and then touched one and it was hot, and touched the other and it was not hot. They do contain different components. In the case of that test - the atgbics SFP was cool, and the other clone unit was hot. My dealer was able to get me in contact with someone technical at atgbics (the cool-running unit) who explained the difference, "The DSP might be say 13nm where more modern more expensive ones are 5nm."

But you definitely do not need to pay for "genuine" optics to get high-reliability optics. You just need to shop around the clones - atgbics is a clone.

Before I comment, a disclaimer about my small scale. I am running probably three hundred SFP+s running and less than five years of experience with optics. I don't have stock tracking for the individual manufacturers, and the failure rate comments here are based on gut-feel only. (there will be other people here used to far larger scales)

I bucket it into there being three options: genuine, clone, and good-clone.

We had a bad run with fs.com QSFP+s. Their SFP+s have been better to me, but reckon I have had a couple fail.

Atgbics SFP+s have been a reliable clone supplier for us. I don't think I have had any of those fail, and they have been my main vendor for a while now. You can order them programmed with personalities for Cisco, etc.

Part of the edge of fs.com is that it is so easy to place an order and get fast delivery. My main site is in another country to where I live, and I do a few trips a year. Several times they have made low-notice projects possible.

Yes, Valve controls supply. That strengthens my point.

Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.

Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.

User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.

Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.

Microserfs?

Without convenience it will not be successful as a common currency. It does not need convenience to succeed in other ways. For example, as a store of value.

I tend to run my tmux session for months at a time on my office workstation. When I remote in to that computer, I can type ‘tmux attach’ and all my context is there. I might have four long arc dev projects running at once, and my planning system, all within those windows.

On our datacentre servers, I also have tmux running. It is fast to connect to these hosts, attach tmux and continue from where I left off.

Another use case: it is common for corporates to require devs to use windows desktops, but to then give them a headless linux host in a datacentre for development work. Here, you use putty to connect to the linux host, fullscreen it, run tmux. On your desktop you have outlook and office and putty and a browser and no dev tools. You can do all your planning and dev work on the linux host, using your favourite ten thousand hours text editor and building your own tools, and this becomes your hub. You lose awareness that you are connected to this from a locked down windows host. Corporate security reboots your windows host for patching several nights in a row, and it does not cause you any hassle because your work context is in the tmux session on another host.

Summary: The mainstream ear has changed. As a result, traditional choral compositions have become less accessible to mainstream audiences, but the form of choral music remains accessible. People who participate in choral music tend to train traditional tastes in themselves as a side-effect of participation.

Sung pentatonic music seems to be accessible to everyone from a young age.

For most things beyond that, our brains need exposure to the form to be able to appreciate it. This affects rhythm, melody and instruments.

My three-year-old hates the sound of guitar distortion. I am confident he will acclimatise to it.

Accessibility of traditional choral music will be influenced by what the audience knows. People who grew up with Anglo-German carols on at Christmas will be more open to it than people who have grown up with post-war pop Christmas.

Everyone now in the developed world has been exposed to beat-backed major/minor easy-listening music by growing up around television, films, cars, shopping centres. This is recent. People a hundred years ago did not have the same ear. The large choral work Elijah was easy-listening to audiences who had heard sung mass hundreds of times.

In 2025, a church music director wanting a twentieth century composer would schedule Rutter easily - Rutter writes music that suits the ear of pop Christmas. They would prefer Howells if they thought the congregation had a more traditional ear. They would schedule Messiaen only for a particular occasion.

The mainstream ear may be experiencing another shift now to more sophisticated beats with closer melodies (smaller pitch jumps) and simpler chords.

(Opera has grown in relative popularity - really? News to me.)

The OP wrote - "It has struck me that most recommenders and lovers of choral music [are] themselves singers (or conductors) of choral music." People who have participated in choral music will tend to build a taste for traditional styles as a side-effect of their exposure to the existing repertoire.

Some forms of choral music will have a different relationship with pop. For example - Gospel, accompaniment to rock songs like /Under the Bridge/ or /You can't always get what you want/. The Beatles were a mainstay of post-war pop, but /Because/ on Abbey Road has the character of a Renaissance choral work - George Martin was classically trained.

It is a terminal multiplexer. You will be able to find youtube videos. The gp is talking about a tool called gnu screen. If you need a more distinct token to search on try “tmux”.

I want to ask about the bureaucracy aspect. I have never written a science grant application, but expect that some of it comes about because the applications want to ensure good governance around the proposals. Do you agree? For the fluff that genuinely has no productive value, do you have any explanation for why it is there?

Could LLM participation be blowing holes in good-governance measures that were only weakly effective, and therefore a good thing in the long-term? Could the rise in the practice grants arrangements to better governance?

My comment did not talk about where awk is useful today.

Unix gurus will recommend awk as a pattern matching and substitution tool.

But my comment was about awk the vanguard imperative scripting language. I don't know of anyone who recommends use of awk's imperative style over python in 2025.

As an exercise, I tried writing a simple roguelike in awk in an imperative style. Within twenty minutes, it felt obvious where perl came from.

I came here to write - I think awk would fit in the list.

Awk is sold on pattern matching, and there are earlier technologies that do that - ML, SNOBOL.

But awk's historic significance is something else: it was the embryonic scripting language. You could use it in an imperative manner, and in 1977 that showed a new path to interacting with a unix system. It allowed you to combine arithmetic, string manipulation, and limited forms of structured data processing. Without using a compiler.

Two language schools grew from this. (1) The scripting language that expose convenient access to filesystem and OS syscalls like perl/pike/python/ruby; (2) The tool control languages like tcl/lua/io.

It may also have influenced the evolution of shell programming. Note that awk predated the bourne shell by a few months.