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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • It’s a society (or the whole humanity) becoming big enough to survive even when ignorant murderers are the elite and the majority of it, and civilized people - a smaller part and almost a property, similar to animals in a zoo.

    When such a point is reached, the former will make the transition, and the latter will diminish over time. Then it just has no future.

    A bit like with Ottoman empire and Qajar Iran, only on the scale of the whole humanity there won’t be someone else to buy weapons and technologies from to keep going. Then some of the previously passable filters will kick in. Like hunger or resource scarcity.











  • Matrix I have doubts about. The idea of Tox was nicer, but the implementation quality and the scandal at some point didn’t help.

    Tox felt more playable, like piping files over it or a remote shell over it (I know, bad associations, but still), or even using it for VPN. I think there were clients allowing to do such stuff, and the protocol allows it.

    EDIT: I mean, it’s still alive, just don’t see it claiming the place of FOSS old Skype replacement as it did.

    GNUNet - all you people mentioning it have peers? I tried to set it up a few weeks ago, couldn’t get peers.

    Yggdrasil - feels cool.

    I2P - not intended for that, I think.




  • In Russian it’s called Вендекапец and is a bit like second coming.

    Maybe it’s not happening yet, but the bigger share it has, the faster it’ll grow.

    And MS and Apple have only themselves to blame.

    20 years ago, when the first Linux offensive happened, so to say, with Mandrake and a wave of Linux-native games and proprietary products, and IBM support, people would criticize Linux for having inconsistent chaotic UIs and experience. I was a Windows-only kid, so this is retrospective and people can correct me.

    Not sure if anybody remembers, but then you could find most of Windows’ important settings in one place, and it looked so polished and patient and relaxing, both 2000 and XP.

    Mac OS X was all about toys and shiny colors, but there was also the spirit of it being very polished and consistent and light and fresh.

    So - Linux can still be very usable. While both MacOS and Windows even look cheap, I wonder how they managed to achieve that. Even Gnome doesn’t look cheap despite desperately trying to imitate MacOS. Not even speaking about ergonomics.


  • Well, people blamed old (archaic, what it had when it was an Amiga program) UI for being hard to use, but the new one is even harder, so dunno.

    I touched Blender with the old UI somewhere in late 00s on Windows, managed to sculpt and render a few clumsy objects. I don’t remember how long it took, but it feels as if the new one took twice that for the same.

    EDIT: On the actual subject - yes, that too. I sometimes think that (moderate) positive inflation is not always better than deflation. It encourages a narrow way of thinking where we always stop at first local optimum. Say, MSO is cheaper right now than LO - then we choose MSO, period. Nobody thinks about finding a bigger optimum, because constant inflation psychologically encourages you to think that way. That’s just clumsy philosophy.



  • I actually don’t remember why I lost my patience and just tried Void then (4 years ago). Maybe had something to do with installing a Linux on a laptop after using only FreeBSD for some time, and sound setup and brightness control being confusing (actually everything in Linux is more clumsy and messy, so wanted a simple distribution).

    Debian I like, but it has a bit older versions of packages, as everyone knows, and also kernel versions, thus hardware support.

    Fedora - I don’t like the culture.

    OpenSUSE - I like it, but didn’t bother back then and now why change anything.

    Arch - I don’t like the idea of regularly solving problems which can be avoided by maintainers. AUR is attractive. The culture of clueless people proud of the fact that they installed Arch is a bit irritating.

    Gentoo and Funtoo - I like them, but time spent on compilation could be used better.

    Slackware - my favorite distribution, but it’s a bit manual, so even more chores than with Arch. I think I might try it again.

    And also Void has something just a bit similar to FreeBSD ports. I’d prefer it to be a real ports collection like in CRUX (which I might try some day), and I use pkgsrc anyway for such things now.