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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Not when taken to such an extreme so as to obfuscate the meaning and behavior of code, and make it difficult to understand how you would arrive at that code.

    Sane defaults serve to reduce verbosity without obfuscating meaning, simpler syntax with different ordering and fewer tokens reduce verbosity to make the code easier to read by reducing the amount of text you have to pay attention to to understand what the result is.

    I imagine there’s also a distinction to be made between verbosity and redundancy - sometimes extra text might fail to carry information, or carry information that’s already carried elsewhere. I’m not sure where the line should be drawn, because sometimes duplicate information can be helpful, and spacing out information with technically meaningless text has value for readability, but I feel like it’s there.






  • I think the trick might be that nothing is stopping you from using more than one 32-bit integer to represent addresses and the kernel maps memory for processes in the first place, so as long as each process individually can work within the 32-bit address space, it’s possible for the kernel to allocate that extra memory to processes.

    I do suppose on some level the architecture, as in the CPU and/or motherboard need to support retrieving memory using more than 32 bits of address space, which would also be what somebody else replied, and seems to be available since 1999 on both AMD and Intel.




  • I got the impression that the PolyMC situation was quite different, with that developer masking it and doing a minority of the work, but after one change made by the rest of the developers they snapped, used their control over the repository to remove the rest of the maintainers and take sole control over the repository.

    I was aware of some shenanigans and hostility from PolyMC and never used it, but I got the impression there were no major outward signs before that happened?


  • I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but I do want to clarify - the drivers in the repository are still proprietary drivers from Nvidia, just tested and packaged by the distribution maintainers, dkms is just some magic that lets them work with arbitrary kernels with minimal compilation. Unless you’re using nouveau, which I don’t think is ready for most uses.


  • I’d definitely recommend against using drivers downloaded from a website, on general principles.

    custom kernels don’t work with the drivers from apt

    Check if there’s a dkms version - I know that’s the way it’s set up on Arch, if using a non-standard kernel you install the kernel headers, and dkms lets you build just the module for your kernel.




  • Archlinux is good if you accept that you’ll need to spend time to learn it, and that those moments might be frequent and unavoidable early on. Definitely wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who needs their computer to work, since a new user with no experience might find themselves breaking their boot images and spending hours trying to figure out how to fix their computer not booting.

    So yeah, I think that’s an important caveat: if you don’t know Linux already, and you can’t afford to spend time learning and fixing your system, don’t use Arch.