Incoming links: Microsoft Windows
- the best full featured free OS we have today, since POSIX gave up short of any UI specification, and Chrome OS is not there yet
- usable and likely efficient Java API for apps if Oracle doesn't manage to destroy it with its lawsuit
However, many, many, many terrible horrors come with it:
- it hasn't made the move to desktop for too many years. It could destroy Microsoft Windows and replace it with open source, but they just won't budge towards an unified mobile/desktop setup.
- vendors litter it with uninstallable bloatware that should be illegal. European Union to the rescue!!! www.cnbc.com/2020/12/15/digital-markets-act-eus-new-rules-on-big-tech.html
- vendors lock down devices so it is very hard to get sudo, let alone to modify their images!
- there isn't enough hardware standardization for open source distros to thrive like on desktop
- code drops mean that "master" is useless and trying to contribute from outside vendors' closed walls is a waste of time: stackoverflow.com/questions/1809774/how-to-compile-the-android-aosp-kernel-and-test-it-with-the-android-emulator/48310014#48310014
- if you ever go below the Java API, e.g. to C++ or AOSP build, everything is horrendous and undocumented
- Google doesn't care about the CLI, even the hello world requires creating infinite out-of-control boilerplate from a GUI: stackoverflow.com/questions/20801042/how-to-create-android-project-with-gradle-from-command-line/46994747#46994747
- the boot is uber bloated and takes forever in cycle simulators
- battery life:
- 2023-04: on-browser streaming + light browsing on Ubuntu 22.10: about 2h45. Too low! Gotta try buying a new battery.
- 2022-01-04 updated firmward after noticing that ubuntu 21.10 does not wake up from suspend seemed to happen every time when not connected to external power.
dmidecodediff excerpt:used the "Ubuntu Software" GUI as mentioned at: support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/ht510810-how-to-do-software-updates-linux. Kudos for making this accessible to newbs.BIOS Information Vendor: LENOVO - Version: N1UET40W (1.14 ) - Release Date: 09/28/2017 + Version: N1UET71W (1.45 ) + Release Date: 07/18/2018After doing that, another update became available to: 0.1.56, clicked it and was much faster than the previous one, and didn't auto reboot. After manual reboot,dmidecodediffed again:plus a bunch of other lines.BIOS Information Vendor: LENOVO - Version: N1UET71W (1.45 ) - Release Date: 07/18/2018 + Version: N1UET82W (1.56 ) + Release Date: 08/12/2021 - 2021-06-05 upgraded to Ubuntu 21.04 with a clean install from an ISO. SelectedAfter this, the GUI felt fast, who would have thought that erasing a bunch of stuff would make the system faster!
- "Minimal installation"
- "Erase disk and install Ubuntu". Notably, this erased the Microsoft Windows that came with the computer and was never used not even once
- "Erase disk ans use ZFS"
- Encrypt the new Ubuntu installation for security
lsblkcontains:andzd0 230:0 0 500M 0 disk └─keystore-rpool 253:0 0 484M 0 crypt /run/keystore/rpool nvme0n1 259:0 0 476.9G 0 disk ├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi ├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 2G 0 part │ └─cryptoswap 253:1 0 2G 0 crypt ├─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 2G 0 part └─nvme0n1p4 259:4 0 472.4G 0 partlsblk -f:zd0 crypto_LUKS 2 └─keystore-rpool ext4 1.0 keystore-rpool nvme0n1 ├─nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT32 ├─nvme0n1p2 crypto_LUKS 2 │ └─cryptoswap ├─nvme0n1p3 zfs_member 5000 bpool └─nvme0n1p4 zfs_member 5000 rpooThen:contains:grep '[rb]pool' /proc/mountswhich gives an idea of how the above map to mountpoints.rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq / zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/USERDATA/ciro_czngbg /home/ciro zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/USERDATA/root_czngbg /root zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/srv /srv zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/usr/local /usr/local zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/games /var/games zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/log /var/log zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib /var/lib zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/mail /var/mail zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/snap /var/snap zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/www /var/www zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/spool /var/spool zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/AccountsService /var/lib/AccountsService zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/NetworkManager /var/lib/NetworkManager zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/apt /var/lib/apt zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0 bpool/BOOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq /boot zfs rw,nodev,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0Had two GUI freezes since installation, a fixed images shows no matter what I do, possibly graphics only, but impossible to tell (next time I'll try SSH access). No Nvidia drivers installed yet.
2020-06-06: dropped some lemon juice on the bottom left of touchpad. Bottom left button not working anymore... I'm an idiot. There are many other alternatives, but very aggravating, I'll replace it for sure. Can't find the exact replacement part or any videos showing its replacement online easliy, dang. For the T430: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lzV9uXRjU Asked at: forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P-and-W-Series-Mobile-Workstations/P51-left-bottom-button-below-trackpad-mouse-left-click-stopped-working-possible-to-replace/m-p/5019903 Also I could not access it because you need to remove the HDD first: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Klawxc7T_Y and I can't pull it out even with considerable force, unlike in the video... And OMG, those button caps are impossible to re-install once removed!!! Then when I put the whole thing back together, the upper buttons were not working anymore. FUUUUUUUUCK. When first opening I pulled on it without properly removing the cap and it came off, but it didn't look broken in any way and I put it back in. Keyboard works thank God, so right black connector is fine, left white one oppears to be the one for upper keys and trackpoint, both of which stopped working. The hardware manual confirms that they are both part of the same device, so basically a mouse :-) TODO can it be bought separately from te keyboard? Doesn't look like it, photo of keyboard part includes those buttons. The manual also confirms that the bottom buttons are one device with the trackpad "trackpad with buttons", thus forming the second entire mouse.
2019-04-17: popup asking about "ThinkPad P51 Management Engine Update" from from 182.29.3287 to 184.60.3561, said yes.
Ubuntu 17.10 setup after buying it:
- partition setup: askubuntu.com/questions/343268/how-to-use-manual-partitioning-during-installation/976430#976430
- BIOS:
- for NVIDIA driver:
- for KVM, required by Android Emulator: enable virtualization extensions
- TODO fix the brightness keys:
Battery life shown by Ubuntu battery app after installation:
- before NVIDIA driver setup: 8h
- after: 6.5h
Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!
Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free?
One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use
diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdfNot long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.
- at the University of São Paulo that they had some "UNIX" computers in some classes, and at the library
- at École Polytechnique, he took a course about mathematical analysis and there was a "lab" where students were supposed to use FreeFem, great initiative BTW. And Ciro distinctly remembers being paried with a nice Chilian colleague, and the guy was alreay super at ease with the shell: "cd", "ls", etc. WTF was all that!
Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.
And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!
Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.
The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.
Closed source on offline products used by millions of people is evil, when you could just have those for free with open source software! Thus Ciro's hatred for Microsoft Windows and MacOS (at least userland, maybe).
All companies with investors are evil, make no mistake.
They may have nice looking save the world charity campaigns, but once you get even close to affecting their revenue stream, the axe falls. The charity is only a publicity stunt to reduce wages.
Some level of government intervention is needed to control investor's greed.
It is just a question of business model: some business models are eviler than others. Making people pay for operating systems being possible the most evil of all.
One thing must be said however. You can learn a lot by working in a good company, because it ends up putting you in contact with practical real problems that you wouldn't otherwise see by just doing your own random low-tech startup. This is especially valuable if said company is also enlightened enough to use and contribute back to open source software, thus improving the world and paying back the moral debt of using other people's work for free.
Another important point to consider is who in the company is evil. In a sane tech company, the lowly engineers are going to be non-evil. And then the more you go up the management chain, the more aligned you have to be with investors, and thus the more and more evil you get. HR is just evil from the bottom though, it's just the nature of their job.
Things that are not nice such as:
- Taboola, Outbrain, and other chumbox
- BLOBs
- Europe cookie law
- adhesive inside mobile phones and more generally, planned obsolescence
- Jupyter Notebook
- typographical characters that look like ASCII ones, but are not the ASCII ones, e.g. typographical quotes, em-dash. The non-breaking hyphen is not even whitespace, and by def Why not stick to ASCII when ASCII is good enough?
- excessive encapsulation
- replacement of master and slave terminology from technology
- mailing lists. And to add insult to injury, HTML on mailing list messages instead of plaintext.
- blank lines in code added by people trying to increase clarity, especially when there is already indentation for that. Every blank line must be preceded by a line comment explaining what the following block is about, or removed.
- messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone
- advertisements by telephone/SMS
- "state" such as global variables and object members, long live functional programming?
- mosquitoes, the only intrinsically bad thing about tropical countries
- projects with slow compilation times
- Microsoft Windows
- the 2019 Chinese government
- e-learning websites that only allows verified teachers to write content. Cowards who can't handle ranking algorithms.
- domain-specific language
- a build system without an out-of-tree option
- non-linear Git history: stackoverflow.com/questions/20348629/what-are-advantages-of-keeping-linear-history-in-git
- visual programming languages like Scratch. Waste of time. Text programming languages are already equally as visual due to indentation:Just make good serious gamedev libraries and integrated development environments for those real languages instead.
if x == 0: x = 1 - software that prevents you from running as root. Let me fucking shoot myself in the foot if I want to. It is better than having to deal with your hand holding bullshit, which is done in a different way for every project. E.g.: stackoverflow.com/questions/17466017/how-to-solve-you-must-not-be-root-to-run-crosstool-ng-when-using-ct-ng/53099177#53099177
- Medium
- luxury goods
- euphemism
- closed access academic journals are evil
- websites without OAuth
- shower room without a window to the exterior (mould!!!)
- single programs with their interface split across multiple windows, e.g. GIMP, ZynAddSubFX
- graphical user interfaces
- logograms
- infinitesimals. Just use limit instead, please
- country
- knowledge olympiads
- programming languages without a decent dominating package system
- closed source offline software used by millions
- exams
- security through obscurities
- dots in Gmail address
- things in websites that look like links, and behave like links, but don't let you middle click to open them on a separate tab
- K-pop
- numerical computing language
- fiscal paradises
- when the front-end of an website changes an important permanent state, but the URL does not change
- splash screens: you should show boot messages so that people will know what to Google for when things fail. Do you think computer newbies will be afraid and have nightmares?
- milk chocolate: why would you eat that instead of dark chocolate if you are older than 10?
- to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience
- mathematical symbol that looks like a Greek letter but isn't. Or perhaps mathematical notation in general
- when more than two people gather to play a board game or video game, and two or more people start chatting on and on about random subjects rather than concentrating on the game
- watching television while eating. Same for reading, or doing basically anything else but eat. The only acceptable activity is talking relaxedly, not about work.
- noises coming out of your bicycle. It is so hard to find where they come to fix them!!!
- code drop
- private cars as opposed to public transport. As a cyclist, you can just see the effect that large roads have on nearby areas, it just destroys nature.
- closed standards
- double consonants that make no difference to sound. Dilema? Dilemma? Dillema? Dillemma? Please!
- social media websites that show stuff from people you don't follow when you don't explicitly want that, including things which are not ads, just random suggestions. Twitter starting being like that cirac a 2022. Facebook got worse around that time. It is a constant fight against those stupid websites.
- socks with short legs that don't protect your ankle/lower calf from cold/scratches/dirt, e.g. liner socks
- Presta valves. Why would such a flimsy tech have become so popular compared to the infinitely superior Schrader!
It ain't perfect, but it's decent enough.
From a technical point of view, it can do anything that Microsoft Windows can. Except being forcefully installed on every non-MacOS 2019 computer you can buy.
Ciro Santilli's conversion to Linux happened around 2012, and was a central part of Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, since it fundamentally enables the discovery and contribution to open source software. Because what awesome open source person would waste time porting their amazing projects to closed source OSes?
Ciro's modest nature can be seen as he likes to compare this event Buddha's Great Renunciation.
Linux should track glibc and POSIX command line utilities in-tree like BSD Operating System, otherwise people have no way to get the thing running in the first place without blobs or large out-of-tree scripts! Another enlightened soul who agrees.
Particularly interesting in the history of Linux is how it won out over the open competitors that were coming up in the time: MINIX (see the chat) and BSD Operating System that got legally bogged down at the critical growth moment.
You must watch this: truth Happens advertisement by Red Hat.
xkcd 619: Supported Features
. Source. This perfectly illustrates Linux development. First features that matter. Then useless features.Nice looking and expensive operating system by Apple. Ciro Santilli believes that:
- if you want to be ripped off, just use Microsoft Windows which has more software available
- or if you want to attain Enlightenment, just use Linux, which is free and open source
The story of how OS X was ported to x86 from PowerPC with large initial work up to boot by a single man in the year 2000, John Kullmann, is really worth reading: www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg on Quora, see also:
They are evil because they produce closed source offline software used by millions: Microsoft Windows.
And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.
So, as put in Video "Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs by Epic Rap Battles of History (2012)" by fake Steve Jobs to fake Bill Gates:
Why'd you name your company after your dick?
However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:
- Lean
- their quantum computing work. C is of course a bad idea, we don't need yet another domain-specific language, Python library based solutions like Qiskit are obviously the way to go
What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.
Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.
Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.
Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.
Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.
That is why Ciro Santilli thought:
Life is too short for closed source.
But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:
Every software is open source when you read assembly code.
While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.
bitcoin.org registration: 2008-08-18
2008-08-22: first private contact to Wei Dai email. Reproduced at www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto on gwern.net from address
satoshi@anonymousspeech.com. Email provider shutting down entirely on 2021-09-30 as per archive.ph/wip/RRNKx, homepage now juts contains useless Bitcoin stuff.First public Bitcoin whitepaper announcement: 2008-10-31 www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html linking to www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, email sent from from satoshi@vistomail.com. Claimed one year and a half development time. Provider apparently closed in 2014: www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h80mi/vistomailcom_closed_and_domain_changed_owner_in/, as of 2021 just reads:
Once upon a time a man paid me a visit in cyberspace, at this very domain. He planted a seed in our heads that would become the path we are walking today.
Replies in November: www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/thread.html#14863 under satoshi@anonymousspeech.com claims source code shared privately by request at that point.
First open source release: 9 January 2009. Announcement: www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html "Windows only for now. Open source C++ code is included" Arghhhhhh how can those libertarians use Microsoft Windows??? Had a GUI already.
2011-04-23 Satoshi sent his last email ever, it was to Martti Malmi. www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-enigma-of-satoshi-nakamoto-and-the-birth-of-bitcoin.html mentions:
May 2011 was also the last time Satoshi communicated privately with other Bitcoin contributors. In an email that month to Martti Malmi, one of the earliest participants, Satoshi wrote, "I've moved on to other things and probably won't be around in the future."
How Satoshi hid his mining IP address:
Hal Finney:
- Jan 11, 2009 twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988 "Running Bitcoin"