𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 

Ceterum Lemmi necessitates reactiones

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • I’ve done the Arch to Artix. It wasn’t hard, per se, but it took a while. I think that should be Medium, because Artix isn’t just an Arch derivative.

    In fact, might I suggest a different way of looking at the difficulties?

    • Replacing the package manager: Hard.
    • Replacing the package manager without a live USB: Extreme.
    • Going from a basic systemd-based distro (init, log, cron) to anything else: Hard
    • Going from a systemd distro that’s bought into the entire systemd stack, including home and boot: Extreme
    • Going from one init to another: Medium
    • Changing boot systems: grub to UEFI, for example: Easy.
    • Replacing all GNU tools with other things: Extreme (mainly because of script expectations).

    And so on. You get 1 point for Easy, 2 for Medium, 4 for Hard, and 8 for Extreme. Add 'em up, go for a high score.

    I don’t think rolling your own is that hard, TBH, unless you’re expected to also build a package manager. If maintaining it would be harder than building it.







  • So I recently learned that, in the Cayman Islands, where they drove green sea turtles to near(?) extinction, they have had a successful re-introduction program. What’s interesting is that they collect, incubate, and hatch the eggs in a hatchery, and raise the turtles until they’re a year or two old, and then release them. By then, they’re too Big for the land predators, and 100% of the turtles make it to the ocean. They’ve brought the population back to tens of thousands.

    At some point, I guess they’ll consider the population stable and end the program, and let nature go back to what it was doing with the predators and all, but for now it’s nice to know that these turtles, at least, don’t have to face that sort of predation. It’s the least we could do, as a species.

    We’re also re-introducing mostly-Aurochs (re-bred, not genetically identical to the originals), and we’ll probably see thylacines brought back from extinction.

    I don’t know if anyone is working on Dodos, or whether there’s even enough genetic material to work with, but that’s one I’d personally really love to see brought back.


  • Related, but just hanging this on here. As the default (as installed) security of distributions has improved, so have the amount of headaches when trying to use tools like this increased. For decades, when I’ve had issues like this is not been because of a LAN firewall issue, and so now my first thought is never been, “I should check the firewall,” when it should.

    Sadly, firewall info is almost always locked down so that apps can’t even check by themselves and provide helpful hints to users.

    Anyway, it’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, for some reason. I need to practice my mantra: it’s always the firewall.










  • Get an automatic feeder.

    We have an overeater, and a self-limiter. When the overeater developed markers of being pre-diabetic, we finally hardened our hearts and put him on a strict diet. For us, this was extremely hard, as he begged 24/7. He would yowl at all hours of the day, and it woke us up at night. After a month of this with no sign of him changing his behavior, I bought an automatic feeder from Amazon for ~$30.

    The main change was that our’s quickly stopped seeing us as the main source of food, and this eliminated most of - and all of - the nighttime begging. It took a week or so, but it was pretty fast.

    Second, most have multiple feeding times. This helps in two ways: first, it allows more, smaller portions, which eliminates the binge/purge issue. Second, it allowed us to have feeding times throughout the night, which helped with stopping the nighttime begging.

    Third, it’s really easy to calculate caloric input from just the information on the food bag; the portion sizes can be set in the feeder, and it’s an easy, reliable control.

    As a minor benefit, it makes feeding easier.

    This obviously only works if you feed kibble.

    One issue we did have was that we initially gave the self-limiter free-choice kibble on the counter, and it was enough to keep him away from the feeder. This worked because our diet boy was too fat to jump up onto the counters. However, the feeder was so successful that one day he discovered that he had slimmed down enough to get onto the counter, and we had to change tactics. After much tribulation, we simply ended up getting a second auto-feeder and set them to the same schedule. It isn’t perfect, but the dieter is still slowly losing weight, and the self-limiter is maintaining, so it seems to be working for now.




  • Sure. My point is that it’s trivial to make and test packages for many distributions; it is harder to do so for Nix. It tends to get your software out there and used faster if you bootstrap the packaging - immediately, if you have an AUR account.

    IMHO, Nix is unreasonably harder. There are frequently small projects that don’t get packaged for most distros. When I encounter these, I have a couple of options:

    • Submit a packaging request. Hope someone is willing to accept it. Wait until it is packaged.
    • Install it from source and let it pollute the core system. Hope this causes no issues. Manually track and maintain the installation. If lucky, the software lets itself be installed somewhere non-standard, in which case I can use stow and keep things a bit cleaner.
    • Throw together a package for it and let my distro manage the installation.

    The third option is preferrable to the others, for a variety of reasons, and it’s easy on most distros. On Arch, I might submit the package to AUR, but I’ll often just make a -git package and install it locally.