drosophila

The sacred texts

I thought The Outer Worlds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:

• Parvati says she's not interested in physical affection, but I don't recall her ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she's better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn't mean the same thing.

• I also don't recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?

• how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?

Yeah, it doesn't actually make much of a difference:

Fundamentally the idea of having a separate admin account, which is completely protected, and a user account where everything can mingle together and see everything else, is a 1960s security model. It was originally created for a world where the owner of the computer and the user of the computer were two different people. In that world the user provides all the software that they want to run in their account (they probably wrote it) and the OS's job is to protect the admin account from users and the users from each other.

Fast forward to the present day and this security model is completely mismatched with the reality of a personal computer. The internet exists, the user and owner are the same person, and they're probably not writing all their software themselves. A piece of malicious or compromised software can encrypt every file in your user folder, steal your browser history, your saved passwords, and (on xwindows) record your keystrokes and make your screen display anything it wants, all without privilege escalation. But you can rest assured knowing that the user account can't violate any timeshare limits that the root account placed on it.

The one thing you could argue is that a separate admin account makes it easier to detect and fix a compromised user account, but:

1. Most people are not in the habit of regularly logging into their root account and examining all the processes that are running in their user account. In fact many distributions do not even have a separate root account.

2. If you do think your computer has been compromised the sensible thing is to wipe the disk and restore from backup. It just doesn't make any sense to fiddle around trying to figure out just how compromised you are and trying to reverse the process in a running system.

3. If you're running xwindows I hope you never install updates or type your password for any other reason while some malicious software is running, since, as previously stated, anything running under your account can record your keystrokes. In that case your admin account is compromised anyway without having to use any privilege escalation exploits. Can you see how all this stuff was built with the assumption that the user and owner are two separate people with two separate passwords?

With Wayland and containerized applications we are slowly moving away from that 1960s security posture, which is something that's long overdo. But currently something like Linux Mint is not really much better off than Haiku, from a pure security model standpoint.

In any case its security model is not the interesting thing about Haiku.

Yeah, a tortoise can't come out of its shell any more than a human can come out of their rib cage.

Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they're both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).

If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that's small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.

I don't daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my "favorite".

1. Some sort of sex thing
2. This comes to mind, even though its specifically for dads:

Lol the little antenna

An FoV slider tag might be a good addition to the camera comfort section; I've heard many people say that narrow FoVs can make them motion sick.

Ideally the speed limit should be set such that it would always be possible to stop in time at such crossings. Even more ideally the road would be designed such that it would be impossible to exceed that limit.

Unfortunately there are many places where this is not the case.

I feel like raising the height of the hood so it lines up with the bottom of the windshield would instantly fix this car.

Don't know if that would create frontal visibility issues though.

Phones can figure out its location using gyroscopes and accelerometer

This is plainly false.

The error stack-up from the imprecision of a phone's MEMS sensors would make positioning basically impossible after a couple of dozen feet, let alone after hours of walking around.

There are experimental inertial navigation systems that can do what you describe, but they use ultra sensitive magnetometers to detect tiny changes in the behavior of laser suspended ultra cold gas clouds that are only a few hundred atoms large. That is not inside your phone.

This is a little bit like having AIDS, getting a flare-up, and then saying "well I'm glad at least something is happeing".

I understand the frustration at the general political ambivalence following "the end of history" in the 90s and the endless wars in the 2000s, but a flare-up isn't going to make the aids go away. In the absolute best case impossible scenario where everything that's been going on miraculously stops tomorrow we're still locked into another 50+ years of consequences from this administration, just like we have problems decades afterwards that can be traced back to the Reagan administration.

In a worse case scenario, well, let's just say that neither Germany nor Italy today are particularly better off or highly progressive compared to their neighbors. Like I said, having a flare-up does not cure your AIDS.

If someone has a counter example from history I would unironically genuinely love to hear it, because at this point I've given up hope of the world becoming a socially better place in my lifetime.