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Cake day: May 22nd, 2023

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  • Then those containers or virtual machines should add this or create the home as needed.

    systemd has its own containers, so this is the implementation of that requirement; “virtual machines” might use this exact binary to create home, among other directories like srv and what not. Someone at one point probably said “we always need to create these when spinning up systems, maybe systems can provide a mechanism to do that for us?” and then it was implemented.

    Having/home listed as a tmp file on regular systems is problematic by the nature of what tmpfiles claims it does.

    systemd-tmpfiles claims the following:

    systemd-tmpfiles creates, deletes, and cleans up files and directories, using the configuration file format and location specified in tmpfiles.d(5). Historically, it was designed to manage volatile and temporary files, as the name suggests, but it provides generic file management functionality and can be used to manage any kind of files.

    I rather think having a purge command was the issue here, at the very least it should print a big fat warning at what it does, better even list all affected files and directories. There’s no reason a normal user needs this and with the name of the binary, it’s totally misleading, which is an issue in these situations.


  • E.g. for quick provisioning of containers or virtual machines, this is also to make sure the required directories always exist. In a normal distribution, /home already exists, so systemd-tmpfiles does nothing, but there are cases where you want to setup a standard directory structure and this is a declarative alternative to scripts with a lot of mkdir, chmod and chown.

    The name systemd-tmpfiles is kind of historic at this point, but wasn’t changed due to backwards compatibility and all.




  • Even water can have harmful side effects - you can drown, or get bloated, or dilute your body’s store of catalysts, you can over-work your kidneys, etc. Granted, water has fewer side effects than most things you could put into your body:-).

    Water however is something the body absolutely requires and if it’s fit for consumption (e.g. clean, not distilled, etc) has no downsides when consumed in the required amount. There’s no metric that gets better without drinking water compared to with. Also, the possibility of drowning in isn’t limited to water, but rather a property of all(?) liquids.

    Alcohol can be used well though - e.g. half a serving not even every day has been shown to have fantastic benefits, especially when it is red wine and the recipient is male (though it is unclear whether that is any better than just red grapes, although even if not, the latter can get quite expensive). e.g. it can help to alleviate stress, and lowers blood pressure (ofc it can also raise stress if used improperly, e.g. if you combine drinking with driving).

    I’m not aware of any such studies living up to current scientific standards, which is why the WHO now states that there’s no safe level for consumption. https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health note that this is mostly about cancer only, not the other detrimental effects:

    there are no studies that would demonstrate that the potential beneficial effects of light and moderate drinking on cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes outweigh the cancer risk associated with these same levels of alcohol consumption for individual consumers.

    For studies showing a positive effect, it has recently been claimed that there are issues with how the control group, consisting of people who don’t drink, is selected, which this quote on the article hints at:

    “Potential protective effects of alcohol consumption, suggested by some studies, are tightly connected with the comparison groups chosen and the statistical methods used, and may not consider other relevant factors”

    Because often, the group of non-drinkers contains ex-drinkers who stopped drinking because of the negative health impact from drinking. So you’re comparing a moderate to light drinker (selective from the first group) to the average of the second group, which is problematic because of the previously mentioned fact.

    Escapism is part of the human nature, and so is the desire to do drugs, the latter not even exclusive to humans. Both are fine in moderation.

    Again, idc about it very much, but shifting away all responsibility from the substance and by extension, the profiteers, towards the sometimes uneducated users is just wrong, and creates a stigma for those who are affected by a dependence on alcohol and its effects detrimental to health. A substance that can have these effects just be at least partially to blame.


  • Oh, there are definitely some things wrong with alcohol itself, as for basically any psychotropic substance. I can’t think of one with absolutely zero downsides.

    I don’t want to say you should abstain from all substance, in fact I don’t either, though I don’t drink anymore. But current academic consensus is that alcohol is rather harmful compared to other substance (and, in fairness, less harmful than others) and not only is it problematic itself, but also our approach towards it as a society.

    Saying there’s nothing wrong with it shifts blame to the affected individual. Meanwhile, companies are raking in billions from sales and not being held accountable for the damage they cause.




  • I think they’re a great format to buy, but nowadays not that great to use. They offer the best audio quality of all physical media (fight me, vinyl enthusiasts), are really easy to handle (on par with cassettes), offers track selection (later cassette decks could detect silence but this doesn’t work for gapless tracks), the equipment is rather cheap nowadays, it’s a digital format without DRM… red book CD might be the best consumer media industry has ever created, my only gripe in the modern world is that its sampling rate is a bit off today’s 48kHz.

    However, I only rip the CDs to lossless and then rarely take them out of my cupboard anymore, don’t even have a CD player. Using CDs in a mobile setting is a whole different beast, it requires a buffer and can also damage the discs in the worst case. But at home, pressed CDs live very long without any degradation in sounds quality, regardless of use. And ironically, buying them is often cheaper than buying non-physical only, though it often means that you end up with tracks you don’t want. But that’s an issue all physical media has.


  • In addition to what was already said - use Firefox instead of anything chromium-based - I think it’s equally important to stop using the services offered by big tech companies and not just try to keep using them on our terms. Google wants me to watch a ton of ads on YouTube? Fine, I’ll stop watching it. In fairness, on my smart TV, YouTube ads have been what I consider adequate, while Twitch can be a disaster. The alternatives already exist with Peertube and Owncast. Are they perfect yet? Far from it probably but there won’t be big improvements if nobody uses it.






  • Very first paragraph:

    The first really good video codec was MPEG-4 H.264. I remember in 2001 my housemate watching a movie on his telly — playing off a CD-R. A whole movie crammed onto a CD, encoded with DivX!

    DivX was an implementation of MPEG-4 ASP, also known as H.263. H.264 came much later with x264 being the most well-known encoder (hence its name).

    ASP in my opinion never got the biggest chance to shine with regards to quality because the target medium was often the CD which limited file size to 700MB, and once DVDs became an option, people went back to MPEG-2 because that’s what the players were all compatible with. Sometimes even (S)VCDs were used still. Standalone players with ASP support came rather later.


  • yEnc isn’t a cipher, but rather an encoding for mapping binary to text, similar to base64 (but much more effective). So this denotes yEncc encoding.

    The files you’re seeing are PAR2 files, which are used for repairing. They’re useless without the base file. The file in your example contains 32 recovery blocks. That means if your base file has 32 or less damaged blocks, this parity file can repair it.

    Usually, you’d download all files belonging together in a single download and let your downloader do the rest. This is normally done by loading an NZB file that you either get from a Usenet search engine or an indexer.



  • An old encrypted drive

    All of these use ciphers that are only affected by Grover’s algorithm. This basically halves the exponent on your key space (so instead of 2^128 keys you only have 2^64 keys), however this doesn’t necessarily mean that the algorithm is faster than a good parallel brute force on classical computers.

    The more problematic algorithms are the ones affected by Shor’s algorithm, which are all algorithms in broad use today that involve some sort of agreeing on a shared secret.