val @val@oc.todon.fr

The comment “it’s rude to ask someone to do your research for you” is common on the internet. I just saw it (in another place) after someone asked if I could link to papers I’d mentioned. So I thought I’d clear this up. Asking an academic (or anyone at all) to cite their sources is not rude. It’s good practice. It ensures arguments are based on evidence. It makes sure people like me don’t take advantage of our PhDs etc to sound authoritative, without that evidence. Ask away for my sources!

@mcc @randomcat Windows has detected the scent of Linux on it and no longer recognizes it as its own

About ten years ago, the IT building for a local highschool burned to the ground.

My company donated a spare Juniper EX3200 switch to help get them back online. They had erected a small structure without any insulation, and left the switch inside unpowered for a day while the fiber splicers got them hooked back up.

They started the switch, and it immediately shutdown. They looked a gift horse in the mouth and bitched to us that our donation was garbage.

I was dispatched to assist. I connected to the serial console and powered the device up. It immediately indicated that the CPU temperature was 252 C, and shut itself down.

It was January, the outside temperature was -3 C. The Juniper device was storing temperature as an 8-bit unsigned integer value. It got so cold, it thought it was on fire.

Can't say I ever expected to use a heat gun to get a switch to start before that day. Got it warm enough to power on, and then it kept itself plenty warm to continue operating.

Data types matter, yo.

@fanf No, what we should do is dig up Greenwich and put it on rails so it can be shifted easy or west as needed, and then simply move all other longitudes to follow. No need to change time when space is right there.

I’m not concerned about AI outcompeting competent writers or impacting my career directly. I am deeply concerned about AI swamping submission systems and destroying the ability of editors and readers to find the next generation of writers.

AI is very much a danger to the long term health of the field not because of competition for quality readable fiction but because of its ability to create dreck in previously unimaginable quantities and drown submission systems and indie publishing in shit.

We are in the New York Times 😂
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/world/europe/france-pension-protest-saucepans.html

"A website created by a union of tech workers now ranks French regions for casserolades based on the level of cacophony and the importance of the affected government official."

We're making ourselves fully available to all comrades across the Atlantic who'd like to have some fun too!

me when gargron asks me for design ideas for mastodon

AN ALGAE BRA

too long has boring, security and safety minded thinking ruled the world of online services, and look where that got us. With my new “Rewrite it in C” initiative,

*utilise une expression*
"Merde elle existe vraiment ou pas attends je vais vérifier"

Soyons bien clairs, la description d'images c'est important mais *seulement* pour les images *porteuses de sens* !!

Ca n'a pas de sens (et c'est même contre-productif) de décrire systématiquement des images décoratives, donc quand vos petits robots vous signalent "cette image n'a pas de description", ça n'est pas forcément grave…

https://accessibilite.numerique.gouv.fr/methode/criteres-et-tests/#1.1

EDIT : https://framapiaf.org/@juliemoynat@eldritch.cafe/110422467496619590

TL:DR : Les RS gèrent de façon nulle

Definitely getting to the point where I'll be putting word filters up again.

I don't wanna be "blind" to the shit that's happening to #trans folks lately. I just can't take that being boosted onto my timeline every time I open up fedi. I'm genuinely begging you to CW. You're making fedi inhospitable to the folks you're trying to rally for.
#transrights #transgenocide

a lot of the "moderators have to see horrible things" articles fail to hit home how bad it is, but that "you start hoping the next one is worse" line hammers it home for me. the ways people learn to cope can be viscerally scary

found it https://www.ft.com/content/afeb56f2-9ba5-4103-890d-91291aea4caa

i cant find it now but i read an article the other day where they were talking to a social media moderator who said something along the lines of "after you've seen 100 beheadings, you start hoping for the next one to be worse / more gruesome" and that's really stuck in my brain

Sorry for the rants, but there are *so many* things totally broken with railways in France

Here is a list of what I would fix, and why: https://jonworth.eu/fixing-frances-railways-what-would-i-do/

Today is our 2nd Birthday! We wrote a little blog post about all the fancy things that happened on Libera.Chat in the last two years, have a look at https://libera.chat/news/happy-2birthday-libera-chat

A huge THANK YOU to all our volunteers, sponsors, projects and users, without you we wouldn't have lasted two years, and thanks to you we are still going and growing strong!

There is virtual cake and a small Birthday party in #libera-birthday, feel free to join us in our celebrations!

And whose fault is that?

A bit of (simplified) X history and how we got here.

Back in the 90s and 2000s, X was running display drivers directly in userspace. That was a terrible idea, and made interop between X and the TTY layer a nightmare. It also meant you needed to write X drivers for everything. And it meant X had to run as root. And that if X crashed it had a high chance of making your whole machine unusable.

Then along came KMS, and moved modesetting into the kernel. Along with a common API, that obsoleted the need for GPU-specific drivers to display stuff. But X kept on using GPU-specific drivers. Why? Because X relies on 2D acceleration, a concept that doesn't even exist any more in modern hardware, so it still needed GPU-specific drivers to implement that.

The X developers of course realized that modern hardware couldn't do 2D any more, so along came Glamor, which implements X's three decades of 2D acceleration APIs on top of OpenGL. Now you could run X on any modern GPU with 3D drivers.

And so finally we could run X without any GPU-specific drivers, but since X still wants there to be "a driver", along came xf86-video-modesetting, which was supposed to be the future. It was intended to work on any modern GPU with Mesa/KMS drivers.

That was in 2015. And here's the problem: X was already dying by then. Modesetting sucked. Intel deprecated their GPU-specific DDX driver and it started bitrotting, but modesetting couldn't even handle tear-free output until earlier this year (2023, 8 whole years later). Just ask any Intel user of the Ivy Bridge/Haswell era what a mess it all is. Meanwhile Nvidia and AMD kept maintaining their respective DDX drivers and largely insulating users from the slow death of core X, so people thought this was a platform/vendor thing, even though X had what was supposed to be a platform-neutral solution that just wasn't up to par.

And so when other platforms like ARM systems came around, we got stuck with modesetting. Nobody wants to write an X DDX. Nobody even knows how outside of people who have done it in the past, and those people are burned out. So X will *always* be stuck being an inferior experience if you're not AMD or Nvidia, because the core common code that's supposed to handle it all just doesn't cut it.

On top of that, ARM platforms have to deal with separate display and render devices, which is something modesetting can't handle automatically. So now we need platform-specific X config files to make it work.

And then there's us. When Apple designed the M1, they decided to put a coprocessor CPU in the display controller. And instead of running the display driver in macOS, they moved most of it to firmware. That means that from Linux's point of view, we're not running on bare metal, we're running on top of an abstraction intended for macOS' compositor. And that abstraction doesn't have stuff like vblank IRQs, or traditional cursor planes, and is quite opinionated about pixel formats and colorspaces. That all works well with modern Wayland compositors, which use KMS abstractions that are a pretty good match for this model (it's the future and every other platform is moving in this direction).

But X and its modesetting driver are stuck in the past. It tries to do ridiculous things like draw directly into the visible framebuffer instead of a back buffer, or expect there to be a "vblank IRQ" even though you don't need one any more. It implements a software fallback for when there is no hardware cursor plane, but the code is broken and it flickers. And so on. These are all problems, legacy nonsense, and bugs that are part of core X. They just happen to hurt smaller platforms more, and they particularly hurt us.

That's not even getting into fundamental issues with the core X protocol, like how it can't see the Fn key on Macs because Macs have software Fn keys and that keycode is too large in the evdev keycode table, or how it only has 8 modifiers that are all in use today, and we need one more for Fn. Those things can't be properly fixed without breaking the X11 protocol and clients.

So no, X will never work properly on Asahi. Because it's buggy, it has been buggy for over 8 years, nobody has fixed it in that time, and certainly nobody is going to go fix it now. The attempt at having a vendor-neutral driver was too little too late, and by then momentum was already switching to Wayland. Had continued X development lasted long enough to get modesetting up to par 8 years ago, the story with Asahi today would be different. But it didn't, and now here we are, and there is nothing left to be done.

So please, use Wayland on Asahi. You only get a pass on using X if you need accessibility features that aren't in Wayland yet.