I’ve never talked to an Arch user about Linux, so I dunno how toxic their community is. But I do read Arch documentation, and it’s fantastic. Arch’s documentation has (for me, anyway) taken the place that used to be held by the old HOWTOs back in the early days.

The kind of cooperation required to accomplish this doesn’t speak of a toxic community to me. I didn’t watch the video since I don’t watch YouTube on my phone, but I’m guessing it’s not the Arch community that has issues but annoying teenage “I’m more 1337 than you” jackwads that are the turd in the Linux punchbowl. Those little cretins are drawn to distros like Arch because they like feeling superior to the “normie” users.

I should know, I used to be like that thirty years ago. Most of us grow out of it after we start getting laid.

Install xterm. Bam, you’ve got sixel support.

So it did. That’s interesting.

It was the fact that they used RPMs that made me think they were a Red Hat derivative. I didn’t care for Red Hat (I ran Slackware back then, switching to Debian around Hamm) so I never gave them a chance. Pity.

It never caught on in the states.

IIRC it was originally based on Red Hat (back when Red Hat Linux was a thing), wasn’t it?

Have you tried burping and jumping up and down?

It’s can’t in the sense of “I can’t eat another bite.” Yes, until your stomach bursts and you die, you can eat another bite, but everyone understands what you mean.

I can’t watch YouTube with ads. The “without forcing myself” is implied.

I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

It’s difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you’d have them on a battery backup.

Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They’re pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.

I don’t see it as irrational. You’re thinking about it the wrong way round.

Manufacturers buy chips from proven sources, where the chip can be traced back to the fab that made it. The entire system of trust is built on the assumption that the chip designers and fabs are trustworthy and that the shady stuff happens elsewhere in the supply chain.

When the designers can’t be trusted, it breaks everything. Up until now it hasn’t been a problem except in extremely sensitive areas like military equipment - only governments can force a company to risk everything by compromising their own products. But take the risk away - make it cheap enough to design new microcontrollers - and what’s to stop a chip designer from taking money from (for example) the Russian mafia? IoT is huge, everywhere, and Risc-V is ideally suited for it.

I don’t think it’s so much “security by obscurity” as it’s an issue of a much lower bar for chip production. Intentional back doors or malware represent a huge risk for a product line, so manufacturers won’t put them in without someone like the NSA leaning on them. It’s a simple risk/benefit calculation.

But the risk is much lower if you can snag a processor design off the 'net, make your modifications, send it off to a fab and sell it under a fly-by-night operation. If it’s ever discovered, you take the money and run.

I see this sort of thing all the time.

There’s a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won’t run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there’s nothing wrong with it.

Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we’ve seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.

Or make your own, like the tankie mod is doing.

It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn’t the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it’s the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).

Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

A few notable things about DEC:

• They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
• The PDP-10 - one of DEC’s only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
• UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
• The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
• Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that’s what the VAX used.
• TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
• After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.

Looking at pictures of external design is usually pretty safe to look at when you’re at work. I imagine architects do it all the time.

Search for “Friede sei mit Dir”

Sometimes NSFW images are appropriate in otherwise SFW communities. For instance, imagine a community on exterior design that had a post with a picture of that building in Germany with the five-story-high penis on it. Or a community for desktop themes that has a post with nudes wallpaper. Or a community about a certain celebrity that posts pictures of her car wreck.

I miss Wordperfect, although I don’t miss the templates everyone had on their keyboards.

I mostly wish Word had “show codes.”