I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.ml•BSOD
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    2 hours ago

    “This just in - running commands that induce a kernel panic causes a kernel panic, we’ll have more at 11.”

    The QR code is pretty dense , probably plenty of space to include the panic reason and stack trace.

    Edit: For those of you that don’t know, exiting or crashing the init process (PID 1) causes the kernel to panic. Essentially it’s the, “Well what the hell do I do now if I have no processes to serve?” response.

    Still, a QR code is a marked improvement on the “Something went wrong :(” message of recent Windows releases.



  • There’s some sort of electrolytic process similar to aluminium available, but yes the reaction that turns iron ore into iron is:

    Iron oxide + carbon monoxide + heat ->

    A redox reaction where oxygen atoms are transferred from iron oxide to carbon monoxide ->

    Iron + CO2.

    Heat and CO is conveniently provided by burning coal/coke in a blast furnace in the presence of a lot of oxygen.

    You can pretty much just chuck layers of coke and iron ore in the top of your blast furnace, pump high pressure oxygen into the centre, and get molten iron straight out the bottom.







  • Now if you turn anything off (like that stupid autobrake that brakes for cars in the left hand turn lane beside me), they’ll use that to say “it’s not our fault, the driver turned it off!”

    Don’t try and spin this as a convenient liability-limiter for manufacturers.

    Unless it is an actual failure of a safety critical system, with no warning, that then directly leads to harm, manufacturers are in no way responsible for how you operate the chunk of metal and technology that you bought from them.

    All this stuff absolutely helps to reduce the overall risk of injury when operating a vehicle. Is it also a pain in the ass sometimes? Sure it is. Can you turn it off? Sure you can. But sometimes that shutoff is just temporary, because governments - not manufacturers - mandate that some things are now required, because they’re sick of hosing body parts off of highways.




  • Oh your new phone can fold in half and it’s got a 600MP camera and it has a 37Ah battery that lasts for 3 days even when it’s churning on its internal navel-gazing AI 24/7? That’s greaaaaat.

    But I want crazy shit!

    I want a row of clicky buttons down one side as direct shortcuts to apps.

    I want a TV tuner and a pull-out antenna so I can watch Judge Judy serve some proper smackdown to some entitled neighborhood dispute when I’m on the bus, nearly poking someone’s eye out when we hit a pothole.

    I want a phone with a laser pointer and an IR blaster (again).

    I want a phone that looks like the palmtops of old, with a clamshell case and a little hardware chicklet keyboard and it runs on AA’s, except it’s also a phone.

    I want a phone that slots into a boom box and fully controls and plays tapes with auto-reverse.

    I want a phone that’s a drone, throw it in the air and it takes group photos.

    I want a phone that has gyros and can self-balance on one of it’s corners, and do little party tricks, and can hop along behind you if you leave it behind somewhere.

    I want a phone that’s also a mini 1080p laser projector.

    I want its calculator to also have an I Ching mode and print “a suffusion of yellow” instead of any answer greater than 4.

    Where’s all the FUN stuff?


  • The article is quite fixated on how dialup was around in the early 2000s, and how Americans used dialup in the early 2000s with screeching modems, and how AOL turned off their dialup last year and only a thousand people were using dialup by then.

    But there’s no indication that this has anything to do with the application, except for maybe everyone used a popular means to connect to the Internet to use it when it was first built.

    Now if someone maintained a bank of modems and people legitimately called them up and connected to the system like it was an ISP, and it was secure by way of that was the only way to access it as opposed to over the Internet, then sure, I can see that maybe it’s time to work on that part.


  • Firstly, suspend might be an option compared to hibernation for your subsequent startups if you can suffer a slow startup the very first time.

    Otherwise look up “Linux from scratch” .

    A lot of boot time is decompressing and mounting initrd, loading modules there, mounting the root filesystem, jumping to that.

    Build a kernel that has exactly the minimum modules needed for your system, skip initrd and jump straight to a root filesystem and call your init binary (it can be BusyBox even) do exactly what’s needed there to get your network+graphics card up and running with a single shell script, done.

    Also look at COW filesystems. Read only base with an overlay file for writes. Discard that file on each boot and you basically have a system that is always at the same state on startup.




  • You’re not thinking black-swan enough.

    You’re typing your comments using a blob of goo with about a hundred million neurons in it that cycles under a hundred hertz and draws less than 20 watts.

    I don’t think that we’ll be running packs of goo in our PCs any time soon. But I do think some entirely different way of looking at the problem will emerge that will reduce computational requirements by many orders of magnitude. And it won’t involve gigantic statistical engines trying to find the best average response to a question.