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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2024

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  • By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don’t -need- cars.

    Most of us would be using our feet and transit (and possibly bikes); both our households and our economies would be better off financially and bodily if car use was restricted to goods hauling and some few other uses (not to mention the environment). Mass motorism has turned out to be mostly a way to enrich the auto industry, not our societies, with North America as a warning to the rest of us. (See !fuckcars@lemmy.world for more.)

    There are plenty of times where humanity has chased the latest fad without considering the costs & benefits properly. The amount of energy and hardware being blown away on LLMs are another example; same goes for creepto and NFTs.

    That said, having a look around for various applications, including terminals, is generally good. If someone finds something that covers their needs but with lower costs, that’s good. And if they find something with a shiny new bell or whistle at exorbitant cost, eh, maybe think twice before choosing it.


  • Yeah, Rust tries to find as many problems as it can during compilation. It’s great for those of us who want the bugs to be found ahead of release, not great for those who just want something out the door and worry about bugs only after a user reports them.

    Different platforms have different values, and that also affects what people consider fun. At the other end of the scale you find the triple-equals languages like js and php, which a lot of people think are fun and normal, but some of us think are so wobbly or sloppy that they’re actually much harder languages than other, stricter languages.

    If you value correctness and efficiency, Rust is pretty fun.






  • I think I wouldn’t find it particularly useful, as I’m used to the quasi-programming I can do in a terminal. The shell commands take some time & effort to learn, but once you’re over that hump, being able to extract and compose information is really good. The primary shell tools I’d miss in a gui are |, jq, awk, sed and grep/rg, as well as for, if, while, variables, and having everything in one lightweight window.


  • Ultimately clients pay good money for me to look after their systems, systemd or not, so I probably shouldn’t grumble, but I miss the days when Linux was a clean and elegant system, without this multi-tentacled thing sitting on top of it.

    I also have a sysadmin/devops/sre type career, and my impression is rather the opposite: With systemd Linux became a lot cleaner and predictable, compared to the mess of shell scripts we had before. There’s never been anything clean or well-architected about shell scripts, they’ve always been a messy collection of not-quite-the-same languages that have all safeguards turned off by default, and it’s up to the programmer to turn them on and hope they actually work. Good for one-shots and exploration in the terminal, though.

    I also don’t miss logrotate or finding out that some app places its logs somewhere mystical. Being able to read app logs just by knowing the service name is wonderful, as are the timestamp and boot arguments.

    systemd didn’t appear as just one guy’s brain child, nor could it rise to the dominance it has if the way it works was as controversial or bad as it is in your opinion.

    I haven’t been on-call for the past few years, but my impression is that there have been fewer and fewer on-call events over my career. That’s also largely on app developers and a shift to Kubernetes, but it’s a generally pleasant change. There’s nothing I hate more than being woken up.


  • I also find that calling systemd “SystemD” is a tell that someone is unfamiliar with or has a conspiratorial relationship to it. It’s named “systemd”, all lowercase (but I’m likely to capitalize it on sentence starts like a normal word). Using an ungrammatical uppercase D at the end of the word, that isn’t even something the creators claim is correct, is … a choice.

    (And it’s a choice that reminds me of e.g. how rabid anti-cyclists in Norwegian can’t even spell “cyclist” correctly, but instead consistently use “bicycleist”.)


  • The name is constructed from two parts:

    1. ls: list
    2. usb: usb

    It lists usb devices that your machine (/kernel) knows has been connected; they may not necessarily be usable.

    E.g. I have some sound output device connected via USB to one machine. On most of my machines I’ve switched from pulseaudio to pipewire¹, and I figured I’d bring that machine closer to the others so there’s less variance. Unfortunately the sound output device didn’t want to work with pipewire. The problem manifested as no sound and pipewire not listing the device. lsusb helped me know that the machine at the very least recognized the device, but wasn’t currently able to use it. (It did actually also show up as an error in dmesg -H, but reinstating pulseaudio let the device work again as normally. So now I just have to live with a situation where some machines use pipewire because bluetooth and others use pulseaudio because … usb?¹)

    ¹ There’s a memory of ALSA vs OSS I didn’t want to be reminded of