Alexander Martin (alm) @alexbuzzbee@fosstodon.org

I would like to remind everyone that if I follow someone or boost their post, that does not mean I think they are a good person. It means I find their posts interesting, and that is it.

It's been far too long since I saw the first three, but I'd like to know whether I should plan to watch just those or include the new ones.

Is the new Star Wars trilogy good?

Apparently they updated the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds. It's been at one minute before, but that's not exactly common. We were at two minutes from 2018 to this newest change.

Is there a way to atomically exec() and seccomp()? Just trying to figure out a good way to run binaries in a restricted environment. I don't intend to, like, download and run arbitrary untrusted binaries or something crazy like that.

Relatively soon Microsoft will ship a vmlinuz in every Windows system as part of WSL 2. It won't be used unless you turn WSL 2 on, but it'll be there, ready in case you want it, hiding in Windows\WinSxS somewhere.

Windows will soon technically count as a very weird kind of Linux distribution.

What is happening.

The ultimate secret weapon of our heroes: Actually knowing what an integral is.

Nobody understands how anything works because nobody knows anything beyond PRIMARY SCHOOL MATH with vectors and matrices thrown in.

Except the damn humans because they figured stuff out for themselves.

I think this is going to be a total upheaval in book 6. Unbreakable encryption, trivially breaking enemy encryption, ACTUALLY UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF REALITY, well-designed computer systems, efficient simulations...

I got at this point in the book where Brin over the course of three chapters just suddenly shoves in your face that the two-billion-year-old galactic civilization is so stagnant that they never bothered to use any higher math.

They do everything by shoving massive amounts of compute at basic arithmetic models and simulating things directly.

THEY DON'T DO ANY ACTUAL MATH!

But it makes sense because it's so stagnant.

Reminder to specify your pronouns fully because there are people with "mixed" sets. You can use https://pronoun.is/, which provides a tool for building descriptive URIs that point to dynamically-generated documents explaining how to use your pronoun set correctly.

Busybox is nice because you can do busybox --install bin and it will create hardlinks to itself in the bin directory for all the applets it has compiled in, which gives you a basic userspace with very little effort.

Gentoo has a long guide at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Custom_Initramfs but it boils down to:

1. Create a directory with a basic root directory skeleton.
2. Copy all the binaries in.
3. Write a script called init in the top-level directory that switches to the real system.
4. While in the top-level directory, find . -print0 | cpio --null --create --verbose --format=newc | gzip --best and redirect the output to a file in /boot.
5. Pass the file you sent the output to as the initramfs.

Hey where should I put my System76 stickers? I've got a little circular one with just the 76 and two bigger ones with the full logo.

Book: *introduces new side character*
Me: I don't care about what happens to this person!
New character: *joins main group*
Me: I now care about what happens to this person!

I built my own initramfs. It wasn't hard. It's 2M and consists of busybox, cryptsetup, and a shell script that's only a few lines long if you don't count the echo commands.

Yeah "enp38s0f1" is totally more predictable than "eth0." Nice job there.

(Yes, I know it makes it easier on machines with multiple network cards but wow does it make it harder to know what to use if you're trying to write documentation or help someone remotely or prewrite config files.)

My textbooks this semester were "only" $250...

no space left on device

???????? There's 456G unallocated!

!!!!!

Finally have a login prompt on the real #Gentoo system!

...

I already forgot part of the root password.

And I just tried to rmdir the new one. Thanks [whoever wrote the original rmdir], "directory not empty" just saved my whole install...