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mshroyer

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:52PM (#50341687)
AlmaLinux is "boring" in the best possible way, and it works really well in WSL too. Their extended support for x86-64 v2 has also been useful on one my old computers.
Re:Dolly Parton's Imagination Library on Sunday October 25, 2026 @07:03PM (#50236917)
Funding is easy to get once you have an impressive and demonstrably good program. But without Dolly's work (and yes, the work of people she brought on to carry out her vision), none of this program would currently exist.
Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:43AM (#50115823)
I'm thinking the car from the Sega Genesis game "Outrun 2019" (and only a few years late!)
Why on earth is so much more expensive than an arbitrary pair of devices that could max out a cable?
Hey drop me an email
To be concrete and hopefully more constructive with my criticism, he's prone to saying things like "Fil-C is safer than Rust":

https://x.com/filpizlo/status/2053351119095791995

And "Rust let’s you corrupt memory / Fil-C doesn’t.":

https://x.com/filpizlo/status/2079253367587737841

These are false claims. The following compiles and runs fine with Fil-C, happily corrupting memory in a way that a safer language like Rust would not allow:

    #include <stdint.h>
    #include <stdio.h>
    
    struct Account {
            unsigned char name[8];
            uint32_t privileged;
    };
    
    void write_name(struct Account *account, size_t index, char value)
    {
            account->name[index] = value;
    }
    
    int main(int argc, char* argv[])
    {
            struct Account acct = {
                    .name = "foobar",
                    .privileged = 42,
            };
    
            write_name(&acct, 8, 1);
    
            printf("privileged = %d\n", acct.privileged);
            return 0;
    }
His claims about Fil-C being safer than Rust seem to hinge on Fil-C's ability to make safe-er an entire application stack, compared to a hypothetical Rust application that links to C dependencies which (currently) can't be compiled with Fil-C. This is true as far as it goes, but it's a far cry from justifying a blanket statement like "Fil-C is safer than Rust".
He's been especially arrogant and dismissive on X. I'm very glad Fil-C exists, but his behavior makes me doubt the whole project.
Re:Framework Laptop 13 Pro on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @06:25AM (#47861501)
I switched my main home computer to the Framework 13 (albeit on Windows) in 2021, after multiple weeks with my MBP sent away for AppleCare. I had some minor electrical issues with the original 11th gen Intel motherboard, but the 13th gen Intel board I've since upgraded to has been perfect.

It's by far the best primary computer I've owned. The tradeoffs in battery life, speaker sound quality, and so on didn't matter much for my use case, so I was happy to take them; but this new model seems to fix those issues too, so I think it'll appeal to a much wider audience.

Re:Framework Laptop 13 Pro on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @08:13PM (#47856752)
I was lucky enough to be at the event and I can say the 13 Pro feels great in the hand. Overall chassis stiffness, typing (I guess due to the increased chassis stiffness), and the new touchpad all feel premium. Between that and the battery life, I think this really has a chance to win over a lot more current MBP users.

FYI, the existing Framework 13 Intel motherboards do support Thunderbolt 4: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/usb-port-definition-matrix-... There's an additional, optional retimer update that's officially Thunderbolt certified, but I haven't bothered with that because my Thunderbolt dock was already working: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/framework-laptop-bios...

Re:How to Turn Anything into a Router on Monday March 30, 2026 @08:46PM (#47581490)
I had a similar experience with FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS): I'm sure it's great for some people, but I ended up fighting the abstraction layer way more than I benefited from it. I personally found it easier to just run Samba on plain FreeBSD/OpenZFS.
Re:How to Turn Anything into a Router on Monday March 30, 2026 @08:43PM (#47581462)
I've been running OpenBSD as a router for almost 20 years I think? These days, the only ongoing maintenance it requires of me is running `syspatch` and `pkg_add -u` periodically to keep things up-to-date, and then `sysupgrade` when a new release comes around. It's way more hassle-free than in the old days.
Re:Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors on Monday February 02, 2026 @12:26AM (#46852746)
> Asking for "no politics" is itself a strong political view

No, it explicitly is not, and this "deepity" doesn't change any rational analysis. The injection of politics into every aspect of society must and should be refused.

Re:HTTP Cats on Saturday January 31, 2026 @02:28PM (#46839915)
I didn't realize, until recognizing Bradbury in that image yesterday, that HTTP status 451 is an explicit reference to "Fahrenheit 451", but apparently it is: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7725

In the acknowledgments section,

> Thanks also to Ray Bradbury.

Re:HTTP Cats on Friday January 30, 2026 @10:46PM (#46833217)
Illustrating "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" with Ray Bradbury made me laugh
Re:Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux on Wednesday January 28, 2026 @03:28PM (#46801072)
I even had to switch my reading list spreadsheet over from LibreOffice to Excel when the former started seriously lagging with about 250 rows total
Yeah, I imagine this will help a lot of people who created retrospectively-cringey email addresses in their youth, but kept them over the years because of inertia

> After changing, Google details that your original email address will still receive emails at the same inbox as your new one and work for sign-in, and that none of your account access will change.

Not a perfect defense, but sufficient to make your key much harder to exploit: Use a Yubikey (or similar) resident SSH key, with the Yubikey configured to require a touch for each authentication request.
Re:Isn't WSL2 just a VM? on Monday December 01, 2025 @11:18PM (#46117485)
Some distros have better WSL support than others—some will only work with systemd disabled, others have issues with X11. Ubuntu is well supported of course, but on the RHEL-ish side I've found that AlmaLinux 10 works especially well.
Re:A Love Letter to FreeBSD on Monday December 01, 2025 @12:53AM (#46103974)
Really great book. Among other things, I think it's the best explanation of ZFS I've seen in print.
Re:A Love Letter to FreeBSD on Sunday November 30, 2025 @09:35PM (#46102891)
These days I use it as a home file server because for my needs, FreeBSD the best tool for that job.

But back in the early 2000s I got access to a free Unix shell account that included Apache hosting and Perl, and if I'm not misremembering, it was running on FreeBSD and hosted by an ISP in the UK using the domain names portland.co.uk and port5.com.

That was formative for me: I learned all of Unix, Perl, and basic CGI web development on that server. I don't know who specifically was running that server, or whether they have any relation to the current owner of that domain. But if you're out there, thanks! Having access to FreeBSD was a huge help to a random high schooler in the U.S., who wouldn't have been able to afford a paid hosting account back then.

Re:A Love Letter to FreeBSD on Sunday November 30, 2025 @08:22PM (#46102381)
Sure, but ZFS is much better integrated into FreeBSD. It supports ZFS on root with boot environments out of the box.

And when running a Samba server, it's helpful that FreeBSD supports NFSv4 ACLs when sitting between ZFS and SMB clients; on Linux, Samba has to hack around the lack of NFSv4 ACL support by stashing them in xattrs.

You can arguably get even better ZFS and SMB integration with an Illumos distribution, but for me FreeBSD hits the sweet spot between being nice to use and having the programs I need in its package library.

Re:We're (now) moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @05:51AM (#46044597)
The recent addition of dhcp6leased is a great example: Built into the base system, simpler to configure than either dhcp6c or dhcpcd, and presumably also more secure than either.
Yeah it's the most succinct explanation I've seen of weird machines and memory tagging. Definitely bookmarking this one. I wonder if video of the talk that presumably presented this is available.
Re:Vapor Chamber Tech Keeps iPhone 17 Pro Cool on Saturday September 20, 2025 @10:25PM (#45319471)
I use a screen protector to prevent wear to the oleophobic coating, which had noticeably degraded on my previous iPhone. I know you can also buy treatments to replace the coating on the screen itself, but I don't know how good they are, and the screen protector is easier to replace if eventually needed.

(I walk a good deal and also bike with the phone in my pocket, so it's possible my phone gets above average wear in this department.)

Re:I tried living on IPv6 for a day, and here's what happened on Saturday August 02, 2025 @05:38PM (#44771795)
You can additionally set up ULA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address

The way I do this, my internal DNS resolves hosts to their fixed ULA addresses. For the handful that are accessible externally, public DNS resolves to their address on the current public prefix.

Re:I tried living on IPv6 for a day, and here's what happened on Saturday August 02, 2025 @05:36PM (#44771767)
Huh, why IPv6 only instead of dual stack? Assuming you're talking about a home or small business network

The (occasionally, on Comcast) changing dynamic prefix was a pain for me too, when accessing things externally. For internal use I additionally set up a fixed ULA prefix.

Re:Speeding Up My ZSH Shell on Monday July 21, 2025 @08:46PM (#44642111)
I don't know if this is somehow particular to my setup, but on both macOS and Linux I find that simply running full `compinit` fails to update mtime on `~/.zcompdump` when nothing's changed. That causes this optimization to fail, for me, if my completions haven't changed within the last day.

This is fixed by adding an explicit `touch ~/.zcompdump` in the branch that runs a full `compinit`.

Re:Experimental Tauri Verso Integration on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @04:36PM (#43561221)
It's a great, easily-approachable framework too. I'd just recently picked it up for a pet project, and taking advantage today's powerful system webviews as UI frameworks seems like the obvious choice.

Also check out Wails if you'd like something along these lines with Go substituted for Rust

Re:Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:33AM (#43138839)
Yes but in their US integration, it's actually a bit more glitchy than Kindle especially if you're juggling multiple library cards. You can still make it work, and I do bother with that because my Kobo is such a better device than my Kindle, but it's more of a headache than using Libby to send to Kindle.

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