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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • I see you point; but not even 200 years ago the people couldn’t imagine most people working in other “industries” than agriculture.

    Historically, most people worked in agriculture. (I’m not sure of the percentage, but it was >80% IIRC, but we can take a low estimate at 50%).

    Nowadays less than 5% of the world population works in agriculture, due to increases in automation (machinery that can plow and harvest), and better understanding of the process (more efficient use of land).

    While some of that turned out to be bad for the environment (who knew biodiversity is good, actually?), it did free up most of the population to do other things.

    I hope it’s not “AI” that will automate the future (because of the huge energy costs to the environment), but automation more generally could help us free more time for passionate pursuits.

    Jobs like software engineer didn’t even exist a century ago, and who knows what kind of new jobs will be created in the next 100?









  • IIRC, within RHEL it goes fedora (next major) -> centos stream (next minor) -> RHEL (current major.minor).

    With Debian and its derivatives (e.g Ubuntu) this means that Debian-unstable corresponds to fedora, Debian-testing corresponds to CentOS stream and Debian-stable corresponds to RHEL. (Roughly of course).

    Ubuntu is based off of some flavor of Debian and is therefore downstream of it: Debian (unstable I think) -> Ubuntu -> Ubuntu LTS.

    But as far as which version has the newest packages then sure, your list is correct.





  • They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

    I do have several questions:

    Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

    Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

    Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?





  • You can also do the following to prevent unwanted writes when something is not mounted at /mnt/thatdrive:

    # make sure it is not mounted, fails if not mounted which is fine
    umount /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # make sure the mountpoint exists
    mkdir -p /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # make the directory immutable, which disallows writing to it (i.e. creating files inside it)
    chattr +i /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # test write to unmounted dir (should fail)
    touch /mnt/thatdrive/myfile
    
    # remount the drive (assumes it’s already listed in fstab)
    mount /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # test write to mounted dir (should succeed)
    touch /mnt/thatdrive/myfile
    
    # cleanup
    rm /mnt/thatdrive/myfile
    

    From man 1 chattr:

    A file with the ‘i’ attribute cannot be modified: it cannot be deleted or renamed, no link can be created to this file, most of the file’s metadata can not be modified, and the file can not be opened in write mode.
    Only the superuser or a process possessing the CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE capability can set or clear this attribute.

    I do this to prevent exactly the situation you’ve encountered. Hope this helps!