The name is strange. Reminds me of a product-naming story I heard years ago. Papenmeier from Germany was once planning to create a small notetaker with built-in braille display. They originally planned to name it
"Braille Assistant", but the US distributors objected on the ground that they can already see users shortening the product name to "Braille Ass". I have a similar feeling with Carp, isn't the obvious transposition an issue? :-)
This brings back fond memories. When I came back from CCC Camp 2003, OpenBSD got me interested. So I gave it a try, and had a real fun time in the ensuing 12 months. The simplicity, pretty good docs and the installer ("Do you want to edit /etc/hosts with ed now?") got me really hooked. I eventually didnt make it away from Linux for several reasons, but I still miss playing with OpenBSD. It felt so right and unbloated, something I cant say about Linux anymore these days.
I do not fully agree on this statement. Arch uses systemd which cannot be caled "keeping things simple" in my opinion. I think Voidlinux is a bit closer to what you description.
It's much better than monstrosities like debian and the like, but still more bloated than OpenBSD.
I have raw installs of OpenBSD 6.9 and Alpine on virtual machines. Running "ps ax" fills half of my terminal screen on OpenBSD, and requires several screens on Alpine.
I don't think kernel threads are a good measure of bloat. And a base install of Alpine is smaller than OpenBSD.
But that's a fair point about presentation. OpenBSD seems to be more 'quiet' by default, and tends to only show relevant information. dmesg on OpenBSD seems much cleaner compared to the mess that Linux outputs.
Thanks for the clarification! It is indeed true that alpine is very clean an not bloated at all; just that openbsd seems more intentionally polished.
As a matter of fact, I don't think this has anything to do with linux itself, just with the large distributions. If you use alpine, slackware or void you get a similar streamlined experience.
openbsd will definitely feel from 10000 feet more "bloated" because its simply not as performant as linux. that's not a bad thing, it purposely does things the "right" way for security purposes and doesn't take any shortcuts.
alpine is a lot smaller than openbsd but it really was created for an entirely different purpose. i always take alpine as "a muscl distro that makes a good docker container, oh and it runs on bare metal too, i guess". i've never seen alpine on metal in prod and i've been around the block a whole bunch. ive seen it in a metric ton of docker containers though.
a chatty dmesg also isn't really bloat as well. although dmesg is a bit of a mess (and only recently default restricted to privileged accounts at least on arch).
I don't consider poor performance to be bloat (though poor performance can be a symptom of excess bloat). Bloat is more about obesity, and it shows in disk usage (upgrades take forever? yeah two gigabytes of data across 2000 packages; kernel doesn't fit in flash? keep unticking those kbuild options..), excessive memory usage, ridiculously long man pages, etcetra. Bloat doesn't necessarily impact performance in normal use, e.g. those 2000 packages I got on Fedora mostly sit on my disk untouched. But it's still there and it shows when it's time to update (and sometimes while doing other stuff).
OpenBSD might not scale well to a large number of cores, and the program running on a 8-bit microcontroller (with 512 bytes of ram) on my breadboard isn't fast, but neither are particularly obese.
I don't think the purpose between Alpine and OpenBSD are that far apart. Alpine aims to be a simple, small, and secure general purpose OS. OpenBSD is very similar, even if Theo has been pushing the "research OS" angle. There's obviously a big difference in how much software include in the base install.
> I don't think kernel threads are a good measure of bloat.
It kinda is. Totally unrelated, but there is nothing quite like seeing hundreds of [nfsd] tasks hard-blocking in D on each server in a cluster. Time to reboot... well... everything.
You can build Debian up to anything you want. I prefer installing new systems from the netinstall image and skipping the mirror configuration step completely. This produces a very minimal system that has all the basics (bash, ssh client, vi, and coreutils), but without anything else. If you throw away apt caches, it weights around 500 MB (half of which are various kernel modules).
You then install the minimum amount of software necessary to cover the use case
I'm not super fond of rolling releases. It always feels weird when people recommend Arch or Void to an OpenBSD user. OpenBSD has very nice releases with a tested & documented update process between each.
And one of the most common pieces of advice I've seen for desktop OpenBSD is to use -current . I don't on desktop because I haven't needed to, and wouldn't want to on a server though.
But how would you force people to vaccinate if they are on UBI and dont have to jump when their employer says so? Or do you crack the U of UBI then, attaching strings to the basic income to make people comply to what you want them to comply with?
Same here. Margarine was something inflicted on us by parents. I didnt touch the horrible thing the day I moved out of my mothers house. Margarine, and the lack of creative pasta sauce are the two food related things I shudder when thinking about childhood. All we haad as sauce at home was damn bolognese. So I havent touched both since I moved out.
This finger pointing style of saving the planet feels so extremely juvenile, its no longer funny. Yes, bitcoin uses a lot of energy. But so does artificial snow. Or gaming for that matter. What would we see if we add up all gamers on the planet? All the VR and AR nonsense that is being developed and sold? We have chips, we have electricity. You will not regulate what people are going with these chips and that electricity. And wanting to do so makes you look pretty foolish.
And what you and awrence wrote is precisely what I meant by how Bitcoin shills and addicts ignore and deny and marginalize and whataboutify its environmental impact. Thank you two for such an unwittingly perfect and prompt illustration of my point.
Artificial snow doesn't cause shilling and gambling addiction, and HN isn't plagued by thousands of foaming-at-the-mouth Artificial Snow Shills who leap to its defense with rationalizations and excuses and whataboutisms and diversions like you and awrence just leaped to Bitcoin's defense.
awrence> I was just emphasizing how people point fingers at Proof of Work without considering the immense negative environmental externalities generated by the current fiat system.
No you weren't. Your comment didn't mention anything about Proof of Work or the current fiat system. We can all agree that it was pure unadulterated whataboutism, which proves my point (edit: as does your following reply. You even admitted yourself that what you wrote wasn't an argument for Bitcoin. It's pure whataboutism!). Thank you.
awrence> Whether bitcoin is a net positive environmentally or not is a different debate.
That debate is long over, and you already lost it. But you're trying to divert the conversation away from that debate you can't win, instead of offering any proof of your ridiculous theory that bitcoin is a net positive environmentally, because you and I and everyone else all know that bitcoin has a terribly negative environmental impact, and very few practical applications.
Even if true, I don't think calling another poster a shill (or addict) is a good tone - you could have just countered all those points without the smug "Thank you for unwittingly proving my point.";
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
You made a straight up declaration about proof of work in a pretty condescending and unsubstantiated way. I literally applied your exact framing and wording to present that approach from my point of view, and you hated that version of exactly your text. I could reply it proves the exact same point about you. I think either of those versions are not helpful to anyone, which is what I was trying to illustrate.
Wrong. I am not defending Bitcoin. But I am opposing people like you who think they have some kind of monopoly telling other people what to use their silicon and electricity for. In fact, I couldn't care less about BTC. But I hate private police like you.
It also demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how the energy markets work and how as just about the only intermittent buyer of last resort, proof of work is about to positively impact the energy infrastructure in a pretty substantial way and will probably converge on tapping into exclusively stranded / wasted energy (about 30% of energy production vs less than 0.1% of global production used by pow today). If anyone is genuinely interesting in educating themselves on the topic I'd recommend the two fairly recent episodes of What Bitcoin Did with guest Harry Sudock.
> It also demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how the energy markets work
Which energy markets?
It's not like bitcoin mining is legally or geographically constrained to countries with well-functioning energy markets and a reputation for environmental thinking.
Proof of work schemes could provide a positive marginal return when energy would otherwise be curtailed, but that's just a side effect of being a very price-elastic source of demand. These schemes can just as easily operate with polluting energy made cheap through local political corruption.
For that matter, the freest energy is stolen energy, so mining malware will forever have the edge on that front.
Bitcoin is neither clean nor dirty because it has no governance to make it such. At absolute best it is a neutral energy buyer of last resort, replicating all our political flaws on the world stage.
Bitcoin mining is not a buyer of last resort, it's a capital asset that the owner wants to be run continuously in order to make back the capital expense, and produces no ultimately useful output.
It's a misconception to think a miner will only locate on energy sites with continuous supply. It can still make perfect sense for a miner to locate on a site with variable demand (which by the way is basically every energy production site in the world that is by design compelled to build to accommodate peak demand). What a miner will do is then negotiate energy costs (which are 80-90% of their variable costs) with the producer who is happy to sell his excess production at any cost above 0 for all excess power untapped. All it takes is enough excess production at a (much lower) price than conventional rates for this to breakeven positively vs full operation alternatives.
As chips commoditize and energy trends towards 100% of all costs, miners will step into these situations exclusively.
As far as your claim that bitcoin is useless that's a personal judgement. My personal judgement is that reintroducing sound fixed supply censorship resistant money to the world is of enormous benefit. But that's beyond the scope here. I don't think it's constructive to make judgements about what people value and chose to expend resources towards. If you have a problem with externalities then have a debate about that. But who are we to judge if someone wants to heat their pool? If they do so through carbon emissions then consider taxing that. The sustainability of the energy production is your issue really, not the energy use.
Wrong. Stop making false excuses and rationalizations and shilling for Bitcoin's Proof of Waste. Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere. Bitcoin shills also produce huge quantities of hot air and CO2 by endlessly repeating false claims like "Bitcoin doesn't run on coal".
>The vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses
>Millions of people who have neither mined nor traded a bitcoin are nevertheless paying for bitcoins to exist. That’s because the vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins consumes enormous amounts of electricity and has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses, according to University of California at Berkeley’s Matteo Benetton and Adair Morse and Chicago Booth’s Giovanni Compiani.
> What would we see if we add up all gamers on the planet?
A gamer can only run one machine at a time and, as much as they might try, they can’t play 24/7. It wouldn’t even come close to the cost of powering Bitcoin.
It's also notable that in developing nations (which are often the most populous) there maybe little appetite for luxuries such as gaming, but plenty of reason to invest in crypto precisely because of lack of faith in government/banking infrastructure.
> If the top of whatever Nobel prizes are handed out for remains white men nobody that doesn't fit that category will feel like they have a chance.
Wow, this is incredibly racist. So you imply you know about the motivation of all non-white non-male people on earth? And you assume they are all so chicken that looking at past winners will immediately kill all their motivation to do similar or even better? Do you actually realize what you are saying here, or are you just echoing the latest sentiment of your circles?
To be fair, the use of "nobody" in that sentence is a bit over-generalizing but isn't the sentiment of the sentence quite clear? If a group is a very homogeneous, outsiders might think that they're not welcome/ have lower chances of getting in.
I don't have any scientific proof to back up that claim but I can certainly relate from personal experience without belonging to any minority.
I think calling that "incredibly racist" and implying
Cthulhu_ is just "echoing" something from their circles is quite out of line. In the future maybe you could just point out what you think is wrong with the wording instead of attacking OP personally.
Also: There are things in this world which are "incredibly racist", which is beyond horrible. But do Cthulhu_'s remarks really belong into that category?
I have some experience with outsiderisms. I am an outsider almost my whole life, being a person with a disability.
I always had to find my place in groups where I was the outsider. If I felt like people like you seemt o imply all the time, I would have ended up in total social isolation. And no, I never felt like me being different was a reason to not interact with these groups. Quite to the contrary. If you are an outsider, you learn quite early that this sort of thinking is masochistic. And I find it extremely problematic that these days, certain people seem to feed this false belief of not belonging. So no, I cant agree with your simple analysis, and no, I cant see the sentence I replied to as innocent either.
I am suspecting the problems you have are due to the name of the scene. It appears certain keywords do overrule locally-defined names. Whenever I put an address book entry for a taxi company with the name "taxi" in it, Siri isnt able to call it because it assumes I want to search for a taxi nearby. A similar thing might be going on with "apartment" and homekit. Frankly, a bit cynical, but by now, I am suspecting some intern put a rule in which contains "apartment" and has a very high priority, or somesuch...
Not directly related to Siri, but VoiceOver icon labels are also getting worse and worse over the years. For example, the weather app. In the beginning, when you scrolled with the VoiceOver cursor through the hourly forecast, it would say "Sonnenaufgang" and "Sonnenuntergang" (Sunrise and Sunset) at the appropriate places. Starting with iOS 12 (or was it 13?) the spoken label changed to "Sonne aufwärtspfeil" (sun arrow up). So someone went in there, decided that the nice description from earlier wasn't good enough, and replaced it with a literal description of the icon, ignoring context altogether.
> “I am suspecting the problems you have are due to the name of the scene.”
yah, for siri, i’ve found simple nouns (apartment) better than phrases (apartment lights off) for naming things in the home app, and for “all lights”, you don’t even need to create a scene (as others have pointed out). for rooms, you can just say “turn kitchen on” and it will turn all lights in its kitchen room on (which may or may not map to all lights in your actual kitchen, depending on how you set it up).
oh, and siri will refuse to do something if you curse at it: “hey siri, turn on the lights, you asshole” ominously responds with “sorry, i can’t do that (…dave)”
Except I don’t have this issue with Google Assistant. It guesses the correct word/phrasing nearly every time. Siri, OTOH, fails much more than it succeeds.
