Weirdly, I think it all got me my first job. I interviewed at a graphics card manufacturer and the interviewer placed one of their cards on the table and said “tell me what’s on that card”.

I picked it up and pointed out all the components because I knew them all by their part numbers that were written on them. I hadn’t seen them before, but I knew they were options in XFree86. Then add in that the regular array of chips was likely VRAM and the chips with the same logo on them as was above the door where the companies own video processors.

I didn’t know how any of it worked, but he didn’t know that. All he saw was a fresh graduate that just effortlessly identified some quite esoteric components of a design he’d personally made.

The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.

EDID solved that last problem.

Since Apple’s keynote this week.

You are, if you’re calling for Apple like features.

You might argue that “private cloud” is privacy preserving, but you can only implement that with the cash of Apple. I would also argue that anything leaving my machine, to a bunch of servers I don’t control, without my knowledge is NOT preserving my privacy.

While I was vacating my colleagues…

I’m reminded of a scene from The Wire:

https://youtu.be/h5d82ndui_s

(I know. I removed a comma from the quote, but that’s how I read it)

It does matter in distributed application on LANs. The thin client model is still in operation at a lot of HPC and similar environments. Laptops and Desktops just display what is being done elsewhere.

Remote X11 is a better user experience in that environment than anything else I’ve tried. It feels like the application is local even if it’s not.

Still worth trying.

The word “support” is used in a very corporate way in the ROCm docs. They mean in terms of support contracts, sending engineers out to customer sites, having people dedicated to specific customers.

The code works on more devices than they list, but they won’t enter into a support contract with anyone using anything but their latest and greatest.

“set the magic environment variable because the tool chain will mis-detect the architecture of your unsupported card”

I don’t think it’s misdetecting it. Rather it detects it correctly, tries to use specific support for that device, but then finds that the support was switched off at compile time. The environment variable forces it to pretend to be a different (very similar) device.

Clunky, yes.

I keep trying catalog but it doesn’t do anything.

For me the answer is always “snapshots” and normally because of docker.

If you run a docker image store on a BTRFS drive, docker creates snapshots at various times. It never cleans them up; It has no commands that clean them up, and it means that if you delete a file it doesn’t free any space because the snapshots keep the file alive.

They’ve got problems in their tests though. There are 5 packages in core that are “unreproducible” and one is the kernel. Pretty significant package, except it fails because of a timeout.

Nah. Wayland is buggy as hell on AMD too. That’s not the only issue.

So rather than having one single app that deals with screen reading, it’s now down to every individual application to make accessibility a priority.

Huge retrograde step.

We can all agree that authors should all value accessibility, but we also all know that they won’t.

None of that really matters.

What’s your sync algorithm? How are you detecting when a file changes? How do you resolve conflicts? How do you guarantee against data loss?

These are the reasons people use rsync.

• Slurm cluster
• MPI development

I think you’re right to be suspicious. The XZ attack has showed that there are people and organisations out there that would love to get hold of a piece of trusted critical infrastructure like Nix. They’ll go the long lengths to do it, manipulate people, and exploit the maintainer’s desire to do the right thing.

And if the person can’t stand by their critism and can only give wooly examples, then best to ignore it.

Honestly, without concrete examples of why this is a problem, I just wish people wouldn’t do this. Open source projects aren’t democracies. They are do-ocracies. People get “positions” by getting off their arse and contributing. Nix OS surviving doesn’t depend on how many users it has. It depends on how many developers it has.

If critisism is coming from the developer base, fair enough. If it’s coming from the user base then all they are going to do is stop the developers wanting to do what they do, and then the project is dead.

I know there was the poor choice of sponsor for one of the live events recently, but I suspect this has opened the flood gates for people to pointlessly criticise from any direction.

100% of silicon chip development depends on it I’d have thought. Anything which needs clusters of compute power for simulation, rendering, data analysis, etc.

…because that would make Ctrl+C Cut/Copy and that would be really bad. It would kill whatever was running.

So, it becomes Ctrl+Shift+C and paste got moved in the same way for consistency.

I get the feeling this was the pragmatic winning over the perfectionist.