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[LordBaal]

Everyone knows that WW2 was won on the basis of who had the biggest mustache.

[Vector]

If only Nietzsche has lived to see it . . .

[King Zultan]

One mustache to rule them all!

[Naturegirl1999]

King Stache

[voliol]

Nietzschtache

[methylatedspirit]

I think the Linux From Scratch website is throttled on my network for some reason. Why, though? I get it's Linux, ooh scary, low-level whatevers, and it's a lot of stuff that looks like "hacking" to the public. I literally used Tor to download myself a copy of the LFS book, and I'm gonna get myself a copy of BLFS later with that same method. It's not illegal or anything; it's literally just instructions to build your own Linux system from scratch.

Like, the "hacking" is less hacking other systems, and more hacking away at your own sanity, getting some fatal error for the 7 billionth time because you forgot a small command-line switch while compiling some random tool. Or you forgot to mount a partition because you wanted a break. Or you fucked up the GRUB setup and rendered your host system unbootable. There's, like, a hundred different ways to fuck up the process, from what I've been able to guess from reading it.

That's my perception of Linux From Scratch. Everyone who successfully boots LFS must come out of it like some kind of Vietnam veteran, and they just have these flashbacks to when they didn't do this, or did this by accident. Or their many attempts to get LFS to actually boot.

[McTraveller]

That's my perception of Linux From Scratch open source.

There fixed that for you.

I have tried, at various times over the course of two-plus decades, to "get into" open source.  It is still a mess of lack of consideration of use cases, poor documentation, poor references to dependencies, etc.  And those attempts to resolve those issues, like package managers, end up putting you right back in a situation where you have to trust some third party to manage those packages and it's all a black box again.

The fact that you can look inside the box to see how it works is not helpful - it's still a collection of parts that just happen to work together, but don't change them because it might break and nobody will know quite why.

When I worked for a few years in a web-app company, instead of embedded electronics, I realized just how much of the software industry has become "empirical programming" (trying things until they work with no real understanding of why) instead of "engineering" (designing things and documenting them, including why they work, so that they can be used easily and reliably as building blocks).


Somewhat related WTF: My phone has some issues with its battery management. While I expect my battery to degrade, I do not expect this behavior:  Phone crashes under a moderate load, when reporting 50% battery level.  After restarting, it reports 10%.  It has now been running for a good 20 hours after that (with no additional charging!), reporting a fixed 10% battery level for the entire 24 hours. I'm not sure what the battery monitoring software is doing, but it's clearly doing something wrong.... I actually suspect a hardware problem in either the power supply or voltage monitor; I can't see how at 50% battery charge even a full load on the micro would cause the battery to undervolt.  Probably because I work in safety-related embedded systems, I do fault software here because there is no diagnostic on the voltage monitor itself for rationality, etc.

[TD1]

Nietzschtache

That's a fairly niche stache.

[Naturegirl1999]

When I typed King Stache, at the time I thought it was the word association thread

[methylatedspirit]

(snip, part about open-source)

Personally, I'm just filled with a deep respect for those who can work with this shit well from reading Linux From Scratch.


I run a Linux Mint machine as a HTPC, and that thing does everything I want to (play movies, browse the web, be a remote download proxy), apart from run fsck automatically. The open-source part doesn't matter to me. I just want a thing that works. I would've gone for Windows, but that actually costs money and my parents are cheapskates. Like, apart from that time I botched an update from 19.xx to 20.xx (which was a shitshow), it's been very reliable.

But that's a non-technical user's perspective; all an OS has to do for me is to be a bootloader for Firefox. I don't care about the details, I just want things to work.

I'm going on a tangent here, but I like thinking of this as the "illusion" that all things that you use have. Once you push it too far, start breaking things, that illusion vanishes. When a house is decrepit, falling apart, the illusion that it's a home that people live in breaks. When something goes wrong in (more user-friendly distros of) Linux, the illusion that it is a user-friendly OS vanishes. You see its inner workings. You see the cold, dead terminal telling you that something's gone wrong. You see it for what it really is. Busybox. initramfs. The Linux kernel.

And that's the thing. Most people don't like seeing their illusions break in front of them. Do you want to see a command prompt telling you to "run fsck MANUALLY", or a cold, grey-and-black text screen that vital system components are corrupted? Personally, I can handle a bit of illusion-breaking, but I'd rather be able to have them reconstructed with a simple command.

I dunno, there's an uncanniness to a broken illusion. I suppose that reading Linux From Scratch broke it harder, as if my time with Linux hasn't broken it already. I dunno, is it horror? Is it fascination, that all these things Linux can do can be reduced to some set of packages? Like, even sudo isn't actually necessary for Linux to work. First command you learn using Linux, and that's not even needed. You don't even need a package manager, strictly speaking. You could just literally just memorize every package you've installed, and that's a perfectly valid strategy. There's all sorts of things you don't actually need for Linux.

And I suppose those are my thoughts on Linux From Scratch. Spooky, yet fascinating. Can this go in the book thread?

[Iduno]

Here is a problem with banning the SS symbol, swastika, and iron cross.
They were not invented by the nazi.

The SS symbol is just the acronym, written in an old script (new Futhark). So banning it would essentialy be banning all words containing the group "ss".

All of the ones spelled with two lightning bolts, anyway.

[Arx]

That's my perception of Linux From Scratch open source.

There fixed that for you.

I have tried, at various times over the course of two-plus decades, to "get into" open source.  It is still a mess of lack of consideration of use cases, poor documentation, poor references to dependencies, etc.  And those attempts to resolve those issues, like package managers, end up putting you right back in a situation where you have to trust some third party to manage those packages and it's all a black box again.

The fact that you can look inside the box to see how it works is not helpful - it's still a collection of parts that just happen to work together, but don't change them because it might break and nobody will know quite why.

When I worked for a few years in a web-app company, instead of embedded electronics, I realized just how much of the software industry has become "empirical programming" (trying things until they work with no real understanding of why) instead of "engineering" (designing things and documenting them, including why they work, so that they can be used easily and reliably as building blocks).

Some of this depends on the size of the software, I think. I've used a lot of smaller libraries and tools where I've been able to pick things up by flipping through the source in the relevant places. After a certain size though it definitely falls off hard, I agree.

[hops]

I feel like the reason most open source you find sucks isn't because it's open source, but more because there's less open source softwares, thus there is less competition to compare oneself to.

Like, there are plenty of great open source art software, because stuffs like GIMP and Paint.net set the standard and there's no point making more crappy art programs.

If we supported open source projects with sane designs then one day maybe we would get the same for other stuffs.

[methylatedspirit]

I'm doing some further databending by abusing RTX Voice. I'm using interleaved RAW images, and a feature of these is that offsetting them by 0, 1 or 2 bytes shifts their hue ahead by 0, 120 and 240 degrees respectively (it loops if you go higher; it's modulo 3).

I put an image through that process at the "0" noise reduction setting (so it should be identical to the original image), and I noticed that if I cycled through the offsets of 0, 1 and 2, I could never get the image to look like the original.

So I placed 3-pixel-wide RGB calibration bars on the top and right sides of the image. It's supposed to go in the order R, G, B. An offset just shifts the hue, so it should just be rearranged under that offset. Here's a visual, reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom:

So it's RGB at no offset, then a 1-byte offset is BGR, then a 2-byte offset is GBR. Going higher just loops it back to the RGB -> BGR -> GBR thing over and over.

Here's the part that baffled me to no end. I went through that same process again with this calibrated version, and I sampled the colors to end up with:

So... it's Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan. Or, rearranged, CMY (but no K). Thankfully, it's still correctable; you just shift the hue by 30 (or integer multiples of 30) to go back to RGB, but it's still baffling that this happened anyway.

How? How would this even happen? I started with an RGB image with the RGB calibration strips, converted it to RAW interleaved RGB, then imported it as unsigned 8-bit. Then it went through the RTX thing. I exported it, and I ended up with CMY calibration strips. Like, when importing as unsigned 8-bit, how would shifting it by one sample (one byte) end up shifting the hue by 30 or 60 degrees? It doesn't make sense. A 1-byte offset should only produce a hue shift of 120 degrees.

[Mathel]

Depends on what formats you used. For .bmp as I know it, you would be correct. But if the program you used internally uses 2 bytes for each color, instead of one (or if you temporarily saved it as a format with the same property), it would result in a shift into CMY.