When it was first released, I was interested in the decentralized nature of it as a currency. I liked - well, I still like - the idea of a currency that isn’t controlled by a government. At the time (2009-ish?), I also thought it was anonymous, which also appealed to me; cash is mostly anonymous, but it can’t be used online, and even then the fact that society was increasingly moving toward cashless - and very traceable, and usary-heavy - credit cards was clear. Stripping privacy is critical to control.

Bitcoin isn’t anonymous, but other cryptocurrencies are, and bitcoin laid the groundwork. To your question, I, and many other people, paid some money to get some bitcoin - I think I spent $120? Mainly so I had enough to explore the space and play with it, because even then mining seemed painfully slow. Once money was spent on it, by whomever and for whatever reason, it acquired value: the value that, if you had some, you could sell it to someone else, or trade it for goods. In that way, it has the same value as an IOU on which I’ve scribbled “Good for $10 from Ruairidh Featherstonehaugh” and signed my name. Flawed metaphor, but you get there idea - the paper itself has no intrinsic value.

Despite that mining is so horrible for the environment, the concept that motivated Bitcoin still IMHO has value. An entirely digital, cashless system, not controlled by any one organization but rather by the community of participants. If Bitcoin didn’t have the environmental cost - if it has been proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work, or if the computational work was actually something useful to society like gridcoin.us, it wouldn’t be so controversial. Sure, people are still going to be bitter about not buying into it early, but as long as people are willing to trade goods and services for it, it’ll have real value based on market rates.

I’ve been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.

The thing I don’t like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the “do one thing, do it well” Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.

My issues with systemd is that it isn’t an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it’s slow and doesn’t seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).

Recently I’ve been using dinit on a system, and I’m pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I’m running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.

Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?

Alligator. Venison. Duck. Butterfish. Trout. Mussels.

Become homeless, I suppose.

Can’t get into my bank? Work won’t let me in because they don’t recognize me? Nobody’s going to hire me without ID or a background check. So I guess I’m a bum now.

Folks here hoping to reclaim their identity: how, exactly? No birth certificate, no drivers license, no passport… how, exactly, are you going to prove you’re you?

Yeah, I wasn’t saying it was bad; I meant only that Linux didn’t have to worry about device drivers for it, because the fob handles reading the fingerprint chip.

I had a roommate who had a python of some sort. It was 6’ long-ish.

I wouldn’t say it was affectionate, but it was fine with being handled. It’d just get comfortable, hang out, and watch whatever was going on. Sometimes it might slither around, but it always seemed to me it was just finding a place to get comfortable. It seemed to spend most of its time sleeping. It didn’t seem to care who it was hanging out with; I never saw it demonstrate a preference between people, even its owner.

It was a really easy pet to keep, all things considered. The worst thing about it was feeding it. It refused to eat dead things, so my friend had to go get live mice from the pet store, put the snake and the mouse in the bath tub, and then leave them alone for an hour or so. It was such a fussy eater - sometimes, it just wouldn’t, so we’d sometimes also have a pet mouse for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t interested in watching it kill the mouse, but my friend said it just wouldn’t eat if anyone was in the room watching it. Thankfully, it only needed to eat once every few weeks.

Honestly, I never saw the attraction. It didn’t do much, you couldn’t do much with it, it didn’t seem to seek out contact with people, didn’t seem to care one way or the other about being pet. I think it mostly liked being held because it like the warmth - but it’d be just as happy on its rock under the heat lamp.

Oh, shedding was cool. Once. After the first time you watch it, it’s kind of like watching paint dry.

But, some people really like snakes, and that’s cool.

Yup! It’s very much like mpd, except streaming without an additional component.

They use the SoundCloud API. You only need either gonic or Navidrome, plus a client (like ostui).

It’s not, really. All of those programs are Go, and single executables. There’s no “install” for either gonic or ostui (IIRC, also Navidrome): you download or compile the executable and run it, and you’re off and running.

Someone mentioned Docker; in this case it’s unnecessary unless you’re doing it for security. They’re just each a single binary. You’ll have to either create a config for gonic or Navidrome, or run them with commands telling them where your music lives, but that’s it. Running on the same machine, you don’t even have to open the ports on your firewall. However, if you do, Tempo for Android lets you stream the music to your phone from gonic or Navidrome, too.

These are very, very simple programs to run. ostui is a TUI, so if you prefer GUIs you’ll want a different client, but both of the servers are easy to run and nothing to install - just run them as you, not even root.

I think that’s because Yubikey handles the fingerprint reader part, not Linux, right? As far as Linux goes, it’s a black box security fob - but I might be wrong about that.

CUPs is simply ancient. It’s due for an overhaul; I keep expecting someone to come along and Poettering it, only I’d hope without also making it take over cron jobs and logging.

An alternative would be to run gonic or Navidrome - both are OpenSubsonic servers, and provide synced lyrics support. Then use the ostui client which plays music and displays synchronized lyrics.

Broadcom, as you’ve discovered. That’s the one brand that I’ve always had trouble with; they go out of their way to be closed source: never publishing specs, never responding to developers. They’re horrible to the point where I will not buy any product that uses Broadcom chips. Which used to be a PITA because they were also common.

Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.

One of my computers has a MediaTek wireless chip where WiFi isn’t supported but Bluetooth does.

A lot of people have problems with NVidia cards; I’ve not had trouble with either AMD or Intel GPUs (although, I think all Intel GPUs are CPU integrated?).

Multifunction printers are still iffy, and even just plain printers can give grief; I’ve come to believe that this is simply because CUPS is ancient and due for a completely new, modern printing service. It’s an awful piece of software to have to work with.

I just created another account on piefed, because someone said it had repost deduplication. I still browse using both, but the other shows up a newb.

Not so dumb for a bunch of us using VPNs with exit nodes in other time zones.

I’ll be back.

You must bring us… a shrubbery!

A bridge, you say? Then we can cross to other galaxies! Our overpopulation problems are solved!

On a more serious note, I wonder how much this would increase our ability to cross the gulfs. Assuming we could eventually build machines that can endure for hundreds of thousands of years, would the presence of a gas bridge would make ramscoops a more viable intergalactic option?

So:

• Lemmy provides the information
• It’s the client responsibility to do the interleaving

Yeah?

I worked at a place once that had a system that was all bash that would take hours to run. I rewrote it in Ruby and got the run down to about 10 minutes.

This was 2000; I don’t recall anymore how much of that was the runtime and got much was just refactoring and hindsight - god knows how old that jumble of bash scripts were. A lot must have been the interpreter; even just looping is far slower in bash than probably anything else.

Not a comment on your script; just remembering that win.

Does that include network latency? Is it faster with install media?