• 5 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • That is not a repost, this is an other article from ProPublica

    Ah, I just assume that was a slightly different title for the same article. Maybe a mod made the same assumption.

    Are you joking with me? They are using a paraphrased title.

    Well, the first part is. But, I don’t know what “munching” means. The second part of the Ars title actually says what it’s about. Don’t get me wrong, I can probably make a guess. But when you’re scrolling social media, I don’t think anyone is stopping to think about what a title really means. If it’s not obvious at first glace most people are just scrolling by. The Ars title, at least to me, skims as “AI bad” since those are the words anchoring each end of the title, that’s probably enough all by itself to get some people to upvote.

    I am really curious, what sort of evidence you want/expect to see?

    Literally anything vaguely conclusive. I’m not saying you should go find more evidence for me or anything. I’m just trying to explain why I don’t find your evidence here convincing.

    I suspect that Reddit has more than enough money to be competently shitty. So, if they are doing what you suggest, unless they fuck up or decide they don’t care, you might not be able to find solid evidence.












  • I’ll start off with a proviso, I haven’t s much touched my Librem 5 in at least a year (maybe even 2?), so if they’ve had some massive turn around in that time I don’t know about it. All of this post is just what I think I remember, if you want actual facts go dig around in the wayback machine or something.

    The promise of the L5 was super grandiose. They were going to create this mobile device that could completely replace your android device. It was going to launch with a custom matrix client that would let you make voice and video calls, which no other matrix client at the time could do. It was gonna be great and it was going to be delivered in a year.

    Now clearly that was never going to go off without a hitch. I don’t blame them for being late nor for not delivering all their promises right at launch. But when things started getting delayed they seemed to be doing everything in their power to not communicate with backers. And anytime they would say something, they would say “well we didn’t hit that deadline, but we promise we’re totally super duper close now”. And then they’d blow through that deadline without a word too.

    I did eventually get my phone, obviously, but it wasn’t anything like a usable device. The battery that it came with was smaller than advertised and it didn’t have any power management so you got a few hours of battery life. The cameras just didn’t exist as far as the software was concerned. The privacy switches would randomly kill power to the modem when you lightly brushed against them without the switch moving out of the ‘on’ position. Which was super annoying since you had to reboot the phone any time you wanted to turn the modem back on. And rebooting took ages.

    Even at this point I was still rooting for them to succeed. I really want a proper Linux phone and have since 2008.

    But ever since then, I really haven’t seen much of anything change with the software, at least for as long as I was paying attention to it. One of the cameras got support added by a community member at some point, but the pictures it was taking were so bad it looked like some 1999 digital camera taking pictures in a dimly lit room even in full sunlight. There was no way to know if an application in their store was going to work or not, most didn’t, mostly because they were meant for a larger screen & a mouse.

    I pulled it out a few times on and off over the years, but the last time I did, I couldn’t even figure out how to get it to update. So, I haven’t really even touched it since then. (I’ve got it out connected to power to see what it’s like now. Though, I’m not sure it’s charging, is flashing green (with an occasional flicker of red) a good thing?)

    Since receiving it, the only communication I’ve gotten from Purism has been “Investment Opportunities”. I’m not sure why I’d invest in a company that still hasn’t delivered what it promised me over 5 years ago.

    I absolutely want them to succeed, and I hope they prove my pessimism wrong, but at this point I absolutely would not put my money on that happening.







  • IMO, yes. Docker (or at least OCI containers) aren’t going anywhere. Though one big warning to start with, as a sysadmin, you’re going to be absolutely aghast at the security practices that most docker tutorials suggest. Just know that it’s really not that hard to do things right (for the most part[1]).

    I personally suggest using rootless podman with docker-compose via the podman-system-service.

    Podman re-implements the docker cli using the system namespacing (etc.) features directly instead of through a daemon that runs as root. (You can run the docker daemon rootless, but it clearly wasn’t designed for it and it just creates way more headaches.) The Podman System Service re-implements the docker daemon’s UDS API which allows real Docker Compose to run without the docker-daemon.


    1. If anyone can tell me how to set SELinux labels such that both a container and a samba server can have access, I could fix my last remaining major headache. ↩︎