varsock

joined 1 year ago
[–] varsock@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I always thought about this. What about those with disabilities, like ADHD? Can companies really maintain their "equal opportunity employer" position while stripping privacy in the workplace? That's an over generalization for moving to an open office.

They will make a few exceptions then at some point say "that's enough" when all the employees need is less stimulation and more privacy

[–] varsock@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

People like having choice, it was never about saving space in phones.

If you look at which company (apple) and the time of removal of headphone jack (around the time their wireless buds were announced), you'll notice they removed choice so the consumer can only buy more expensive wireless buds, or many many dongles.

The "save space" is an absolute lie. The international (EU, Asia, etc) version of the iPhone has a dedicated SIM card tray. The US model? No tray, just a freakin placeholder where the international version has the SIM tray. Yes, there is a volume of space that can fit 2 headphone jacks on the US iPhone that is just empty.

Look at this iFixit video where they call apple out on it. The placeholder is huge. at ~1:17+

[–] varsock@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

cool thanks.

Well I'm glad to hear these things being worked on and worked out

[–] varsock@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I agree that by design Flatpak aims to provide a secure environment through sandboxing; in practice, the implementation has gaps that can lead to security risks, particularly when apps are granted extensive filesystem access. This can undermine the effectiveness of the sandbox and potentially expose systems to vulnerabilities. HOWEVER, being on an immutable system, these risks are mitigated to some degree.

I'm particularly hopeful for Flatpak's promise of fine grained permissions. Flatpak is developing a fine-grained permission system with portals for external interactions, BUT this system relies on integration with toolkits like GTK, rather than app-specific APIs, complicating its implementation. There is more info in the linked article in the previous post, and here it is again.

Admittedly I'm not familiar with distrobox, but my caution is for any approach that distributes containerized programs with their own runtimes; they proved to be a real headache on my "mutable" system and my nvidia GPU until I switched to rolling OS.

I'm glad you found some candidates to potentially resolve your issue. What distro did you end up using? I'm curious to give it a go next chance I have some free time. Cheers.

[–] varsock@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

TL;DR: If I were to choose an immutable OS to run on my propriety graphics cards I'd choose an immutable distribution with rolling releases or hardware enablement packages, which tend to do a better job of keeping these graphics libraries up-to-date for new hardware.

I don't have a recommendation but I just learned about immutable Linux OSes from this post. I could see benefits of immutable OS files, but I've been skeptical about package distribution like flatpak and snap, at least in their current state.

Dont get me wrong, the workflow of flatpack is great, but in my experience, apps from flatpack typically ship with their own runtime and don't rely on system runtimes (likely why you have GPU driver issues). As a software developer, I obviously prefer to ship with all dependencies and runtimes so I don't have to rely on the system to be updated but this comes with downsides:

A major problem with alternate runtimes is drivers. New graphics hardware needs new graphics libraries which have a ton of dependencies. Mesa depends on LLVM for compiling shaders. The NVidia driver depends on a kernel module whose version must exactly match that of the library. All of these libraries have their own transitive dependencies like libdrm, libstdc++ and glibc. If you want new hardware to work, you need to be using new versions of all of these libraries.

Linux distributions, especially those with rolling releases or hardware enablement packages, do a great job of keeping these libraries up-to-date for new hardware. Bundled runtimes do not. Source.

I'd recommend checking out that article I linked as source. There are also security concerns of using apps, some of which are mitigated by having an immutable filesystem, but there are more points and this comment is long enough as it is.

EDIT: I reread my comment and it comes off as "immutable bad, blah blah". Truth is I don't know much about these OSes but I wanted to point out that distributing apps in containers comes with its own challenges; which I gather is necessary for immutable OSes. So my TL;DR is to narrow down to a distribution that is immutable and has a rolling release or distributes hardware enablement packages.

[–] varsock@programming.dev 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The statement is very informative. The bug happens under increased read/write operations to the same file causing a race condition.

I also found interesting:

Despite the bug being present in OpenZFS for many years, this issue has not been found to impact any TrueNAS systems. The bug fix is scheduled to be included in OpenZFS 2.2.2 within the next week

[–] varsock@programming.dev 24 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I'd really want to know what's driving them

likely ego

[–] varsock@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I heard in their Q3 2023 quarterly earnings call that 6 years ago they left a PCIe slot free in every server so they could accommodate upgrades in the future as they grew. They were suspecting it'd be with the boom of AI/graphics cards but didn't want to commit to it yet.

Now they are plugging up that empty PCIe slot with newest gen graphics cards with their launch of Workers AI.

This is cool because they had foresight to make an uncomfortable decision initially but were able to respond to their growth objectives without spending capital expense to upgrade the entire servers.

Their recent blog on the design of the new servers is mostly around temperature, efficiency, and rack density. So unfortunately no hints at what's to come.

[–] varsock@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago

This is interesting. Don't have an opinion on it yet.

I wonder what effect this will have on developers' code reuse practices and how it comes across in the interview.

At work I often look at my previous work for how to do boilerplate stuff. And in my recent interview experience I had more opportunities to use the internet and other examples. Very practical

[–] varsock@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

When I was in college, two older classmates whom I respected got into a hilarious argument of why Gnome was awesome and now eats rocks (their views, I had no views).

Their elaborate and very specific descriptions of functions and inconveniences drew up a picture of functionality and a e s t h e t i c I had never experienced on windows. So I proceeded to install a distro and take it for a ride

[–] varsock@programming.dev 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I would appretiate if someone could explain the practical utility of snippets because it just dawned on me how useful they might be.

[–] varsock@programming.dev 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

  • How It Was:

    • Strong adherence to the "don't be evil" ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
    • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
    • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
    • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google's immediate interests.
    • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.
  • How It Is Now:

    • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
    • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
    • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
    • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
    • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
    • Overall deterioration of Google's unique, innovative culture and values.
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