JATth

hardmode: I did a fresh install on a HDD that is on verge of being dead. Every-time this thing boots it’s a miracle. Somehow dd blanking the disk, plenty of smartctl offline disk surface scans and finally putting btrfs with data in DUP profile resurrected the HDD. I have run btrfs scrub daily or else the os install may bitrot and well… expire. :D

Edit: Todays catch, I was too late and now I have fix 3 files:

Error summary:    read=112
  Corrected:      109
  Uncorrectable:  3
  Unverified:     0

So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.

The \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI is the only file the UEFI standard says it is required automatically lookup from an EFI system partition. There can many EFI partitions but the UEFI is only required to find a single file per such a partition.

efibootmgr -u can show all bios auto created boot entries (don’t touch those, the bios can/will reset them at whim) and the manually created entries that don’t launch a BOOTX64.EFI named file.

True Arch: you write the image to the usb stick yourself, boot it on bare hardware, and don’t use archinstall. This is the minimum requirement BTW. If you use archinstall you can only use “btw” in lowercase. /s

Nah, I’m not that paranoid and I need the mic for calls.

This might just push my fear of targeted ads enough to give in to my idea of a nearly soundproof box for my phone when I’m not using it. :(

I’ll just comment about one thing that keeps popping up in the discussions: grid-level storage. There is no such thing yet really that would last a full day cycle, and the 100MW or so units we are building are mostly for frequency stabilization and for buying enough time to turn on a base-load plant when the renewables drop out. I’m not arguing against storage - it is absolutely needed.

The problem is the scale, which people don’t seem to get. Largest amount of energy we can currently repeatedly store and release is with pumped hydro, and the locations where this is possible are few and far between. Once the batteries reach this level-of-capacity, then we have a possibility to use them as grid-level storage that lasts a few days instead of hours.

Well I meant two weeks is the longest period i can leave the system without updating and have no problems. And i have yet to break it with 300 pkgs updating at once.

Arch maintenance: 0. Install it once. (The proper way)

1. Every 2 weeks minimum pacman -Syu
2. Every 3 months merge/update configs in /etc.

I don’t get what is with this so hard? Yes, configs can be undecipherable but 90% time the merge involves just deleting the .pacnew versions.

The point when the AI hallucinations become useful is the point where I raise my eye brows. This not one of those.

I do this exact same expression when I’m forced to gain knowledge of something potentially personally catastrophic…

This was truly a wtf moment of the month.

Last time I spent time watching him was when he freaking fixed the kexec syscall for IBM PowerPCs. for free

permanently attached USB SSDs are supposed to be mounted

Just mount them somewhere under / device, so if a disk/mount fails the mounts depended on the path can´t also fail.

I keep my permanent mounts at /media/ and I have a udev rule, that all auto mounted media goes there, so /mnt stays empty. A funny case is that my projects BTRFS sub-volume also is mounted this way, although it is technically on the same device.

For example, the new .config directory in the home directory.

I hope slowly but surely no program will ever dump its config(s) as ~/.xyz.conf (or even worse in a program specific ~/.thisapp/; The ~/.config/ scheme works as long as the programs don’t repeat the bad way of dumping files as ~/.config/thisconfig.txt. (I’m looking at you kde folks…) A unique dir in .config directory should be mandatory.

If I ever need to shed some cruft accumulated over the years in ~/.config/ this would make it a lot easier.

They could be very well using the earth’s orbit around the sun to get better resolution - two data points from opposite sides of the orbit. What I know is that the largest “virtual” radiotelescope is literally the size of earth. The data points are synced with atomic clocks (or better), and a container of harddrives gets shipped into a datacenter to be ingested. Thats hundreds of streams (one per antenna) of data to be just synced up, before the actual analysis even can begin. (I’m just guessing after this) At this point, you have those hundreds (basically .wav files) lined up at timepoints they were sampled (one sample, one timepoint column). So row by row, so you can begin to sort out signal phase differences between the source rows.

I.e to put it shortly: an image is not taken, it is inferred and computed. Not that you even could in the first place, it’s a blackhole after all.

Jokes on merge… when a rebase editing goes wrong after +15 commits and six hours, and git hits you with a leadpipe: “do it. Do it again, or reassemble your branch from the reflog.” I.e. you commited a change very early, went over bunch of commits resolving/fixing/improving them and at middle way forget if you should commit --amend or rebase --continue to move forward. Choose wrong, and two large change-sets get irreversilbly squashed together (that absolutely shouldn’t), with no way to undo. Cheers. 👍

The default systemd target to boot into can be overriden from the kernel command line.

If the GUI ever gets broken, having a such fallback boot entry just for the (VT) console mode is invaluable. (The boot-entry can reuse the same kernel and initrd images from the regular boot.)

I tried Luks and BTRFS more than 6 times leading to a script error each and every time.

This was actually my experience also, so I went back to a manual install to just get it done. I think the archinstall script won’t get any configuration of device-mapper/LVM right (including disk encryption with cryptsetup). The disk encrypt setup had even more hoops to go through than just LVM.

I didn’t even think what the questionnaire was about, and filled the entire thing. It’s a rare thing to see for a FOSS project to ask what I’m staring at this very moment, how to make it better. But yes, the questionnaire was a bit oddly structured.

Why would learning be gatekeeping? I wish I could just teach my secrets… The manuals are only a shallow guide to knowledge. E.g. ls, has condensed for me to ls -laR mostly, and that ls<tab> usually gives tools that list something. ch<tab> gives tools to “change something”, like chmod. mk<tab> to “create something” mkdir etc.

I may navigate in the terminal, but putting me at front of Blender etc. and I’m back to crawling speed of RTFM, and all I would see is a zoo of buttons.