It may be fixed and perfect, now, but I will never forgive Redhat for RPM, and by extension, every derivative. Fedora. CentOS. Anything rpm-based. I’m not a huge fan of debs, either, but I have never experienced dependency hell as bad as on rpm systems.

Lots of people like it. It’s really popular for installing on a desktop configured to run an obscure, but mission-critical, service, putting the computer in a closet, and then later walling up the closet so that the physical computer can never be found again. It’s great, as long as you never upgrade it.

No, no. CIA imports are exempt.

Are you me‽

I put 64GiB of RAM in my mini desktop just to never have to deal with swap paging. AMD with integrated GPU, so it immediately steals, like, 4GiB for graphics, but even so I think I’ve never seen it go past 50% usage.

I think 60 is just a default. That’s what mine says, too, and I have 0 swap allocated:

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            59Gi        16Gi       2.1Gi        72Mi        41Gi        43Gi
Swap:             0B          0B          0B

Exactly this. API. ABI. UI. The Interface between human and program, in this case.

Thank you; you’re one out of 6 people who didn’t need an explanation that “UI” and “GUI” or “TUI” are not synonymous.

“No, no, they’re not dead. They’re just restin’! Remarkable investments, American bonds, idn’t it? Beautiful returns!”

Again, github. If Mercurial had had something like github, it would have been closer. Github was git’s killer feature; git itself provided nothing except a bunch of kernel devs were using it - and I’m not convinced that alone would have propelled it to success. Kernel contributors don’t make up a large percent of all developers in the world.

Mercurial isn’t perfect. Being written in Python frequently makes it a pain, but it’s slowly converting to Rust.

I do wish darcs - also hindered by the language choice of the author - had done better. Theory-of-patches was incredible to work with, and practically eliminated merging being an issue. Pijul is going that route, but until they open source a server, it’s a non-starter for me.

All of my personal stuff is in hg repositories at Sourcehut. Mercurial is, thankfully, still popular enough that it’s got a reasonably large dev team and still has regular releases. As long as that holds, I’m good.

You know what markets love? Chaos! Tarrifs today; none tomorrow; the day after, who knows??

Markets love that shit.

I had my rant here. Even I have a limit for angry vitriol. Honestly, I wouldn’t care, except there are two things I’m collaborating with where I have to use git. Actually, for one I could probably use Jujutsu, but the other is One Giant Monorepos and has very specific requirements about how history looks, and I just can’t ensure that without using git directly. And it drives my utter bonkers every time I have to commit, because: despite the fact that there are only ever one or two people editing any given file; and none of the files has anything to do with any other; because there are hundreds of people editing hundreds of files in this repo every month or so when I want to make a change it’s a nightmare of pulling and fetching and rebasing and trying to squash things down so it’s pretty enough for an MR to get accepted into master. I’m about to give up contributing to that one; it’s not worth the git pain.

Then, I was collaborating on another project as a contributor; the project owner was slow to merge PRs, so at any point in time I had 6 feature branches waiting to be merged. Sometimes, they conflicted with each other, so I had to wait until they merged one, then I’d have to go in and fix the other so it could be merged. It was a nightmare, and I eventually just hard-forked the project. Granted, this would have been a challenging situation for any VCS, but git’s merge and rebase are so awful it was especially painful. It would have been easier with Mercurial - it’s smarter about merging and rebasing, mainly (I believe) because it doesn’t have to contend with the possibility that someone caused a temporal paradox by changing history, but it would in most cases not been at all problematic with darcs.

My preferred VCS is Mercurial. It used to be darcs, but I started having performance issues with larger projects and gave it up years ago. If it had been able to keep up, I’d probably have stuck with it.

The other tool I use is Jujutsu. It’s in heavy development, and there are still some warts, but I can work with git projects with it without having to suffer git.

I’m keeping my eye on Pijul, which is patch-theory-based, like darcs. I’m a bit concerned about the fact that it smells a little like it’s going to be monotonized through never releasing a self-hostable server - right now they offer free project hosting, but it means you have to host your source on their servers, or not publicly at all, and that gives me the heebes.

Hm. Well, I’ve answered in angry detail in a response to someone else, but as evidence that I’m not some loner, I present you with:

• Mercurial, for which it’s hard to find usage estimates
• Pijul, the spiritual successor to Darcs, much younger that git; also hard to find usage stats
• Jujutsu, an interface currently on top of git, as an attempt to make git suck less by giving it a more Mercurial-like interface (or, “workflow” since a large number of people seem to be struggling with the concept that the set of commands of a CLI tool is its user interface). This one’s a little easier, because we can see it’s got 12k stars on github.
• On the Jujutsu README is a link to a list of “other tools trying to solve similar problems”, the “problems” being how much the git UX sucks. That page mentions git-branchless, sapling, gitless, and sturdy – all front-ends to git with less bad UIs.

Why? It’s clearly an opinion.

But, ok: pull and fetch are really similar, but not really. Here’s a hammer, and another hammer that looks almost exactly the same except it works just a little differently, and if you use the wrong one situationally you can fuck up your history and have to spend an hour unfucking it.

You can change history. Not only can you, but it’s a common workflow, and it, too, easily leads to messed up clones. This was simply a really stupid design decision for a VCS.

The vast variety of errors you can encounter working with others - the one key feature of a DVCS - is astonishing. TF is “fast forward?” Don’t answer that, I know, but you know what no other DVCS suffers from? Fast forward restrictions. Or, how about detached heads? That’s a pretty uniquely git-level idiocy.

Merging is so badly implemented, it’s a common requirement for projects to demand that MRs be squashed down into a single commit.

Rebasing is even worse, such that users find themselves squashing history just to be able to successfully rebase.

git contributed no clever features, such as Darcs’ patch-based management; it provided no simplicity, like Mercurial; and, frankly, if it weren’t for github, it wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is. Github was so innovative and useful, it overcame the handicap of being implemented on git. git eventually got a bisect command, so I can’t complain about that anymore.

I’m really pinning my hopes on jujutsu; so far, it makes working with git better enough that I don’t mind using it, although it’s still not quite as good as Mercurial, and it’s still very much a work in progress.

You know where git doesn’t suck? If you’re working on a project, alone, and you never branch. Then it’s not so bad. But, then, you may as well just keep your code in btrfs and make snapshots instead of commits.

The shitty set of operations and how they modify history. It’s an interface, the same way that an API is an interface. User Interface =~ Application Programming Interface =~ Application Binary Interface. git’s interface - the set of commands through which the user interfaces with the tool - stinks.

UX. The UI also sucks, though, in that the commands are obtuse, the behavior is complex and demands a relatively high cognitive load, and for very little gain. I guess if you interpret “UI” as “the command line,” I won’t complain. But the interface for me is the set of commands and operations you perform with them, which are awful and poorly designed - bad UI leading to a bad UX.

I just came to say: I hate git with the passion of a thousand burning suns. There is no other open source software I hate nearly as much; not even Poetteringware. It’s astonishingly poorly designed, given who wrote it, has an awful UI, and is just one big footgun.

Edit: honestly, I was expecting far more downvotes by now.

Imagine the secondary market.

Caveat first: I’m not a hardware guy. I tend to fuck up anything more complex than replacing an m.2 drive.

But if someone was, say, selling a case and components that would turn a Pixel into a mini computer without too much soldering, I’d go for it. I’ve got a couple of Pixels and an Xperia that I never got around to disposing of. They’re all underpowered and incapable of running any modern mobile OS, but I think they’d be fine running a Linux kernel without all of the mobile cruft. Built-in WiFi, powered over USB - heck, even a built-in UPS! Even if the battery is degraded, you’re still looking at a couple of hours, at least, of runtime without mains.

If you could repurpose the display, even better, but honestly with a different OS I could replaced a couple of dedicated minis around the house doing things like acting as streaming music receivers.

Those are great suggestions; I don’t use them only because neither is keyboard oriented, so I tend to vacillate between Luakit, Surf, vimb, and Nyxt (although the last still has serious hard-hanging issues and an obscene configuration).

On this topic, I’d be interested in a terminal browser that tries harder on the layout front. w3m, links, links2, elinks - they all work, but none focus on layout and rendering even as much as terminal Markdown renderers such as glow and hike.

These days, with the proliferation if SPAs and descendants of Ajax, much of the web is inaccessible unless you also execute JavaScript.

TBF, far more dinosaurs perished in tar pits than humans have or ever will be consumed in quicksand. For dinosaurs, tar pits were an actual menace.

However, in a few million years, they’ll be thrilled to have her on display as a perfect specimen of the now-extinct Homo Sapiens.

Nice try, NSA.

I’ve been to Ontario and BC, which should count as two countries, but it’s only 1. We really liked Niagara on the Lake, in Ontario, and went there a few times. It’s a nice area to bicycle, and you can make it all the way to the falls without getting on the roads much. I liked Vancouver just fine, but I was a kid when we used to go and would probably appreciate it more now as an adult.

I’ve been to Mexico several times; most times, just trips across the border with my parents, again, as a kid. I spent a couple of weeks in the Yucitan more recently, on Isla Mujeres. It was nice than I expected; most of the parting is in Cancun, so it’s more relaxed on the island. Nice place to visit if you have money and can stay in the best resort you can afford.

I’ve spent about a month in Bengaluru, India, and environs. Interesting, and the trip to Mysuru was both intensely depressing and amazingly beautiful. I was traveling for business, so was basically treated like a VIP: 24/7 chauffeur, 5-star hotel, everything. The chauffeur even drove me on the trip to Mysuru, which was a weekend personal trip. I was very careful most of the time, and avoided getting sick, which vastly impacted my enjoyment. Although I did once get on the back of one of my team member’s motorcycle to go to a little local restaurant, which I didn’t think much of, but when I told my boss, he was appalled.

I spent so much time in the UK, I can almost claim citizenship. Same for France. The UK was for two weeks every other month, for three years, on business; and then a couple of vacations; mostly around and about in England. My wife’s sister and her husband did two years as expats in Paris, and we visited then for a couple of weeks two or three times every year during that. I’ve spent a month driving around Provence, and a two week vacation in Normandy and the Loire Valley. I love both countries - London is a great city, and we seriously thought about buying a property near Bath; Paris is a bit too Big City for me, Provence is beautiful, and I’d happily own a cottage in the Loire somewhere.

I lived in Munich for two years, and would buy an apartment there if I could afford it. It’s my favorite place in the world. Bavaria is my soul-home. I tried for several years to find work there, somewhere, in vain - Regensburg is where I’m going to retire, if at all possible.

I spent a couple of weeks in Prague. Beautiful city, and I hope to go back one day for another visit. I wouldn’t live there, though.

Salzburg, Austria, is my second favorite city, and I’ve been about a dozen times. Again, I’d buy a place around there if I could afford it. Vienna is a wonderful city, with a lot to do. I find out a little strange, with a lot of Eastern European influence.

I’ve spent several weeks in northern Italy, mostly around Chiavenna. My third favorite place, although it’s a small town. German friends of mine owned a cabin in the Alps and we went there often, summer and in the winter for skiing.

I’ve driven through Switzerland a few times, and have been to the Swiss Alps twice on ski vacations. It’s like the whole county is Disneyland - very sanitized, very clean, very precise. It’s absolutely beautiful, but it’s far too tidy for me to want to live there. Bern is an exception; it’s such an amazing city; I’d live there, too.

I’ve been to Singapore a couple of times, for a couple of weeks each time. Beautiful, clean, and very safe. Actually, I really enjoy Singapore, but I think it’s best if you have a lot of money to spend. I wouldn’t enjoy it “on the cheap,” I think.

And I’ve been through the Dubai and Tokyo airports - both of Tokyo’s international airports, actually, which required a bus ride around the city, so I actually saw more than the airport. But I can’t say I saw much of them.

I’d equally live in Salzburg, Austria or Regensburg, Germany, with no hesitation. Munich would be third. Some town in Normandy, or Bath, England, fourth. Chiavenna or Bern, fifth.

No.

Use S/MIME or PGP and directly encrypt emails to your recipient. This is the only E2E encryption available to email.

The best metaphor for email I’ve found is that you’re writing your message on a postcard and handing it to your neighbor closest to the destination, who hands it to her neighbor, and so on, until it gets there. There are usually fewer hops, but also your email is broken into packets which could go through god knows how many routers, each of which can read your email.

E2E requires setting up a private key; RFC 821 provided no such mechanism. Your only option is out-of-band negotiation, like PGP.

There is a good proposal out there that sets mail headed announcing that you accept encrypted emails, and includes information about your ID, which clients could parse and verify against public key servers; it hadn’t really gained a lot of traction, as it causes issues for data harvesters but also at the end user side. Like, how is notmuch and mairix supposed to handle these? They’d need permanent access to your private key to decrypt and index the emails, and then now your index is unencrypted.

There’s been a fair amount of debate about this, and it’s a lot of work that would need coordinating between teams of volunteers… it hasn’t made much progress because of the complexity, but it’s a nice solution.