Posts by defanor@emacs.ch
(DIR) Post #AbEtgVlVpOs714P0KG by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-10-28T18:46:50Z
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@louis The League of Nations was similarly criticized, but to be fair, world peace does seem like a non-trivial goal. Meantime, UN does other useful business (humanitarian, court), likely at least discourages some wars, and those non-binding resolutions serve as statements to be recorded. It is far from ideal, but there does not seem to be anything better so far.
(DIR) Post #AbFSSaheAbJWfhgxou by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-10-28T20:51:19Z
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@louis I hear that the UN court (ICJ) is the only available international one to Russian citizens now, since the government expelled ECHR; I have not heard of it affecting conflicts, but it helps individuals as a last resort sometimes. Likewise with humanitarian aid: I believe there are cases in which it does not help, but it seems to provide aid in others (<https://crisisrelief.un.org/crises>).As for the military conflicts, they do establish sanctions, too (<https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/information>). But even if vetoes were not there, and the UN automatically issued binding resolutions to cease conflicts whenever those happened, surely the members engaging in those conflicts would simply ignore those or quit, similarly to ignoring and quitting ECHR when it becomes inconvenient.
(DIR) Post #AbPCLlHRDziMyp7Dv6 by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-10-31T18:19:12Z
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A few months ago I had to set export of the files I process and remove to an FTP server. Thought a shell script would suffice: copy incoming files into two subdirectories, then process and remove files from one, upload and remove from another. To ensure that only successfully uploaded files are removed, and to avoid anything error-prone in a shell script, I have set it to upload files with curl one by one, which seemed fast enough. Recently the receiving party complained about delayed uploads, which turned out to be caused by FTP PASS command hanging occasionally, curl giving up, and their server apparently still counting it as an active connection, but not allowing more connections from the same IP address. I tried to relax timeouts and to introduce delays between uploads, but eventually decided to rewrite the shell script as a program.Since it does not have to interact with my other programs (which depend on a Haskell library for IPC), I decided to give #Rust a try: have not used it at work yet, and with rexmpp it is quite messy, with raw pointers and "unsafe" everywhere.Planned to use an FTP library, preferably netrc, parse command-line arguments, write logs into syslog or stderr, preferably with a runtime choice. The "ftp" and "netrc" crates worked, for argument parsing "clap" seemed suggested and popular, but one of its dependencies did not like my rustc version, and suggested for me to find out what is the last version of that dependency supporting it. I poked around, did not find a sensible way to find it out, and gave up: used "env::args()" instead. Same happened with env_logger, so I use "eprintln!" instead.I observed seemingly everything requiring a nightly Rust compiler the first time when I tried it, and then each time afterwards, even with such commonly needed libraries. Coupled with pulling everything from Rust-specific repositories and not picking appropriate older versions automatically, it is disappointing.The program works though.
(DIR) Post #AbPCLmG3acCi0pTdPE by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-11-02T13:14:02Z
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Looking into other alternatives to #C now, and from documentation alone #Zig looks nicer than I expected: I pictured it as basically C with possibly more of static analysis by default, tweaked syntax and library, and so on, but without substantial changes. Well, it still looks like that, yet it may be that the small changes do add up: it has generics, slices, seemingly good C interfacing, and sum types via compiler-supported tagged unions. Although apparently those tagged unions do not play nicely with the C interfacing yet, but the issue to improve that is open since 2018: <https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1072> (while #Rust's enums with fields have a C representation as tagged unions, which is convenient, though as observed in other confusing cases, mutations do not happen if not enough code around attempts to mutate their fields is wrapped into "unsafe", when raw pointers are involved). And Zig is not in Debian repositories.Probably will look into more C alternatives, started writing notes on those into <https://defanor.uberspace.net/notes/c-alternatives.xhtml>. Perhaps it would also be fair to consider newer C standards and use of helper libraries, not to compare new languages to plain C89.Out of those low-level languages, I think I like (or somehow sympathize with) Rust the most as a language at this point, but the infrastructure (stable libraries available from system repositories, POSIX and C API orientation of those, documentation) is much better for C.
(DIR) Post #AbbX7D6ttu2tsrbnCi by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-11-08T18:05:51Z
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@mms I wonder how long it is until somebody draws things on those graphs.
(DIR) Post #AblIlHomyTm0XXF8IC by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-11-13T11:12:08Z
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@galdor On the one hand, it makes sense; on the other, it would make sense for pretty much any potentially confusing mixed output and input, and the confusion may arise not just between different programs, but also different processes, sessions, commands, etc. I guess proper multiplexing may better be handled by a program mixing them together (such as a shell script) at that point, with "| sed -e 's/^/foo: /'" or something along those lines. I.e., if you (as a program, a shell script) mix them together, it is also your responsibility to make them distinguishable, if that matters.
(DIR) Post #AbpVUzu6QhvdodjPhg by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-11-15T11:53:42Z
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@galdor Until the last year I thought the competition would be stressful and did not even try it, but then it turned out not to be: with the leaderboard being filled up in minutes (or is it in seconds for earlier puzzles?), there is no chance to compete without serious preparation and some automation; only towards the end (apparently when automation and other preparation do not help as much, on trickier puzzles) it seems viable even to approach the leaderboard. But the story and the puzzles are fun, and it can be challenging to solve them daily, while the motivation waned for me once it was over, even though I planned to solve the past years' puzzles after it.It certainly can be enjoyable if you approach it that way, ignoring the competition if you are not into that part.
(DIR) Post #AcABOxYcK6dS2LgSHo by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-11-25T08:24:10Z
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I use a public email service (#Yandex) for work mail, so that neither personal (hobby) server issues would affect the work, nor issues with work infrastructure disrupt communication channels needed to fix those. But with my domain name, so that there is no vendor lock-in. That worked fine for a while, but now Yandex decided to charge for using own domains, and disabled SMTP. Warnings were sent to the administrator account, which I have not checked after setting it up more than a decade ago, while the actually checked inbox only received warnings about discontinuation of a service I never used.So I went looking for alternatives. The situation with those keeps worsening: many smaller email services are blocked here, or do not serve users from around here. The few large remaining ones tend to require phone numbers. I know a couple that work without a phone number and are not blocked, though not sure for how long. And no custom domain names there. Though if things will not improve soon, it would be tricky for me to renew the domain name, being disconnected from payment systems.Maybe I will request a company-provided email, or set sending (SMTP) via a work server and keep receiving (IMAP) via Yandex. Could also switch to paid services, though a single email account (at Yandex or elsewhere) costs like a remote VM (aka VPS, VDS, a cloud thingy), at which point the latter would be preferable. But I would normally consider foreign hosting providers, and there is the issue with payments again: proxy payments must be possible, yet reliance on those makes this setup less reliable.Though it looks like some Russian hosting providers have servers in Europe; likely those are accessible to various local entities, and local laws on checking clients' identities and spying on them apply, possible future weird laws will apply as well, but I wonder whether connection blocking applies to those servers. Apparently to some of them it does not, yet, so those may be an okay option.
(DIR) Post #AcCJDph8P6PuPonDea by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-11-26T11:54:27Z
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@fsf I think there should be a warning message telling that people should not rely on that alone, and I am usually accompanying references to h-node with such a warning: one should also ask or look around, preferably finding people using the exact same model, confirming that it works, or finding an opportunity to try it out before buying the hardware. Maybe look into more specialized wikis with lists of hardware (OpenWRT, GNU Radio, LinuxTV, etc), too.As an example, I checked on my former graphics card now, GTX 660, and h-node still says that it "works with 3D acceleration" with free software (as it used to say years ago), while I had to use a proprietary driver for about a decade of its usage, and then had to take it out when the proprietary driver ceased supporting it, with nouveau still leading to the system freezing after a few minutes, as it did back when it was a new card.I was just about to finally edit at least that one, after getting around all the 403 errors, adjusting the password to match the website's odd restrictions, authenticating via plain HTTP (it seems to use HTTPS for everything but authentication), and then it asks to write the "kernel libre" version it was tested with (I assume it matters more for claims that things work: those not working on a regular kernel likely will not work with Linux-libre, either), as well as the lspci output I no longer have access to; there is a tiny chance that a slightly different model actually worked fine, or that it worked fine with a certain kernel version, so just switching it to "does not work" seems potentially wrong. But leaving it as it is feels wrong as well.
(DIR) Post #AcXQam52mtbHrg1Nj6 by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-06T16:26:02Z
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@mms Did YouTube allow to do that via its UI? Either way, it should be possible to hide "##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope" with uBO or an equivalent, or even with user CSS.
(DIR) Post #AcZFbn1w1zmvv8li4m by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-07T13:32:23Z
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@galdor Does it lock the root user's password by default, or is it about something else?I tend to lock it myself, so that there are fewer active users and passwords to manage and worry about, especially on servers. But since Ubuntu is advertised as being user-friendly, perhaps it also makes sense for them to nudge users away from running everything as root, as particularly newbie users may be tempted to do.
(DIR) Post #AcZK0XPLeS8uWbmBGa by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-07T14:21:41Z
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@galdor Oh, did they rename "root" user into "ubuntu"? I thought in your first toot you mentioned "using ubuntu" jokingly, as having sudo(1) available in the system, but now it sounds more like there is an "ubuntu" user. It is also tricky to search for, an "ubuntu" user on Ubuntu systems.
(DIR) Post #AcZlxBzpbGmpxx2AK0 by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-07T19:18:12Z
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@thees It might be one of the least unique project names in English: so many things are called "Gemini", without any relation to each other or to that word. Locally I notice it with "Sphere", "Vector", and perhaps "Spectrum": all kinds of things have those names.
(DIR) Post #AdBLeVXFHBmnJy251U by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-25T22:39:06Z
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@mms If you dislike it so, what keeps you there?Never had a Reddit account myself, only briefly considered it around 2010, I think. But centralized systems did not look great back then, either, and then it seemed to follow the way of other systems like that. Now I only find it somewhat annoying to run into Reddit from a search engine, occasionally having to add "-site:reddit.com" when the Reddit results drown others (which is the opposite to what I hear some people are doing: they restrict search to Reddit, rather than exclude it). But it is still not completely closed, the UI is even usable without JS (with the "old" subdomain, and unlike GitHub, the default Mastodon web UI, and many other websites).
(DIR) Post #AdBNcMKiiZoe6vHFtg by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-25T23:01:10Z
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@mms Ah, I view Hacker News that way, and it appears to be a common situation: people often mention "signal-to-noise ratios" of such communities and periodicals. I think that when in doubt whether to keep following a certain source, it might be helpful to take a break from it and see how that goes: whether you manage to fill the time with something more rewarding. Making use of the fact that you do not have to decide at once whether to follow or quit it forever, and can adjust the time spent on it.
(DIR) Post #AdBy4Mv1jNi4Nvum1I by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-26T05:49:36Z
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@mms Russia is still sort of occupied by itself, but there is a history of creativity with this hobby in particular, similar to samizdat: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_(recordings)>. I imagine it should be easier these days, with more options to produce those.And then there are many hobbies not dependent on availability of materials, or those where you can similarly adapt to a local situation. Actually some hobbies, ideologies, or cultures have low or restricted resource consumption as their part.
(DIR) Post #AdKWphEhUcvIqZlsWm by defanor@emacs.ch
2023-12-30T08:56:48Z
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@mms Not sure whom to count as a "full normie", but for people who do not even install software or register accounts themselves, there is not much difference between, say, WhatsApp and Conversations: they use what others have set for them. I have set Conversations that way, it works well; regularly using it for voice calls, text messages, file transfer.Slightly more tech-savvy people seem to be reluctant to set additional clients or to try new protocols in general, probably occasional issues with software reliability (and message loss, into which I ran many times myself) not helping to build the confidence, while larger centralized IMs are somewhat more predictable.Some also mention the lack of attachment to phone numbers as an issue, or the lack of "sticker packs". Both are available now (IIRC there is at least one XMPP server with phone number attachments, and XEP-0449 for "stickers"), but apparently some people want for them to be available and the same for everyone, not just to set them for themselves: to be able to communicate to anybody knowing their phone number, or to send those stickers and know that they will be presented as they are supposed to. Though I struggle to see the appeal of those "features" in particular, apparently it adds to the overall impression people have of a messenger.I think it is similar with other technologies, including programming languages and operating systems: at first people use whatever they are given, then they care about seemingly unimportant aspects (like syntax, visual design, other appearances, or what they are used to), and then possibly start paying attention to more important ones, clustering around a few of the more advanced options.
(DIR) Post #AdRj0EBYP09BUPo6Ua by defanor@emacs.ch
2024-01-02T20:16:09Z
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@mms For composition, there are multiple ones: at least mu4e and mew come with their own modes, and a few options are listed in the `message-user-agent' docstring. For sending (with SMTP, sendmail, etc), there are multiple options as well, some of which are listed in `message-send-mail-function'. They are usually connected via message.el, which resides in the "gnus" directory, but not sure if counts as a part of Gnus, or rather a part of Emacs in general (but either way this is a single variable and interface connecting composition to sending, AIUI).
(DIR) Post #AdSeBuGny2fuaMyN0a by defanor@emacs.ch
2024-01-03T06:56:57Z
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@mms I have settled on ~/Maildir/<account>/.~/Maildir/ is mentioned as an example for Maildir format in both Dovecot's conf.d/10-mail.conf and postconf(5), perhaps helping to avoid confusion with mbox, and the Maildir format seems to be relatively reliable (see <https://doc.dovecot.org/admin_manual/mailbox_formats/>), as well as convenient to manage in various ways: can inspect mailboxes with ls(1) and less(1), synchronize with rsync(1), particularly if you have SSH access to the server, and so on. While keeping mail in home directories is convenient for backing up your personal files on a server, including mail, and may help with resource management (to set per-user quotas, find who took all the storage space): akin to ~/public_html/ and ~/public_gopher/ directories.I would keep it the same on my local machine, but since I use multiple email accounts (and corresponding mailboxes), that additional split is needed, hence the account subdirectories.
(DIR) Post #AdZRiNgeC2Elmzvzwu by defanor@emacs.ch
2024-01-06T12:17:53Z
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@nthcdr Oatmeal is nice: in a porridge, in granola, cookies, crisps, smoothies. Are there people who only like it ironically? @oatmeal is even named after it!