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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • People stopped taking Brian seriously when he helped create Go. That was pre-Rust.

    Even the “talking points” here seem to be re-used from “Go vs. X” ones. Also, his experience speaks of someone who only tried Rust pre-v1.0.

    Anyone who actually knows Rust, anti- or pro-, knows that what he said (partially in jest) is factually wrong.

    Feel free to prove otherwise, especially the part about the performance of Rust programs. Don’t be surprised if he simply didn’t pass --release to cargo build, a common pitfall for someone in the “hello world” stage of trying Rust.

    And this is why appeal to authority was never more fallacious, considering we live in a world where Dunning-Kruger is a universal reality.


  • man 7 hier is much older than linux itself. The 1994 start date in the article is not doing the history of the tradition justice.

    It would have been weirder if the creepy “init system” (with its 58 executables and counting, 52 + 6 arg0 links) dictating the future of that tradition didn’t raise some eye brows.


  • What’s wrong with it

    • It’s a random crate no one uses.
    • You’re not even really “using” it. You are just importing a re-export of reqwest, which is what I expected you to immediately notice after I brought it into attention. You can obviously just remove it and use reqwest directly.
    • Still, trusting a re-export is not a trivial matter. The random author of the no-name crate could replace the original reqwest with something malicious, or bad in some other way, in a v0.1.1 release. That (theoretical) release will be picked up after a cargo update call, or when Cargo.lock is not checked, which is the case by default with libraries.








  • If they have “souls”, then they don’t have brains. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have ever worked in that place.

    Facilitating genocide is not even needed to keep you away from that company, despite the New M$ PR push from a few years ago.

    Further more, they wouldn’t have thought “protest” was going to force a change, when world-sized interests are at stake.

    So, while commendable at first glance, one can’t help, with a more elaborate look, but see this as yet another posturing attempt, if still, in this case, worthy of very little praise for the potential personal sacrifice that could be incurred.

    You want to do something actually useful, even if passive? Let’s see at least 10s of millions of Americans refusing to pay federal taxes all at the same time. Then the world might start to believe that anyone is really that bothered about genocide, and consider it an actual moral deal breaker.




  • reflector uses https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/ to get mirror status info, and caches it under ~/.cache/Reflector/. So as long as that end-point works, reflector should work.

    I just grabbed a copy and pasted it at http://0x0.st/Ki3Y.json.

    Anyone can grab that JSON data and use file:// URLs so they are never out. e.g.

    curl -L https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/ > /tmp/mirror_status.json
    # or if down, use pasted json
    curl -L http://0x0.st/Ki3Y.json > /tmp/mirror_status.json
    # and then
    reflector --url file:///tmp/mirror_status.json ...
    

    But, as you noted, this has been mostly a nothing-burger from a user perspective anyway. Other than the homepage being unavailable on occasion, everything else has been mostly available just fine as you can see from https://status.archlinux.org/.

    I didn’t notice https://gitlab.archlinux.org/ going down either.


    BTW, and as a general rule of thumb, NEVER take specific technical advice from these editors. They don’t actually know much, and this is me trying to be nice.

    Take for example:

    For AUR disruptions, it’s a bit of a pain if you’re not a regular git user, but you cloned packages directly from the GitHub Arch Linux mirror. To do this, use the command:

    See that link ;) At least he got the command below it correctly, somehow.



  • and of course you as a user are only protected as long as the chain of TOR doesn’t for some reason snitch on you.

    Off-topic, but how come you don’t know that the whole point of TOR is that, theoretically, the chain can’t (trivially) snitch on you even if it wanted to?

    What you describe incidentally can be done trivially with three servers from three good free VPNs, by creating chained tunnels yourself with network namespaces. Which means, taking the opposite of your point, that you can use good free VPNs with very good confidence about your safety/privacy, as long as there is no end-to-end collusion going on.



  • “free” vpns and privacy are basically contradictory.

    While this has been swallowed as a fact for a few years, it happens to be both not intrinsically true, and can be potentially very dangerous.

    It assumes that non-profits and collaborative endeavors don’t exist, where there is no “product”. And it’s like saying networks like TOR are unsafe because they are free.

    Someone else already covered the danger of the reverse assumption that “paid” equates “safer”, regardless of what service we are referring to.

    People will look for and use “free” VPNs no matter what, unfortunately. So while we can’t guarantee safety for anyone, the least dangerous course of action is to guide people to the least suspect options. e.g. using Proton’s free tier, or Bitmask (Riseup, Calyx) via known open-source clients with known permissions/modes of operation.

    As is often the case, clever-sounding generalizations usually end up being shit for advice.