/dev/chat

8:46 AM

@NordineLotfi oh no "popularity-contest" is something i have encountered on every debian distro ive installed. It's malware thats almost as bad as "javascript"

forest

@AdamLedger Eh, I don't think it's that bad.

It's not as bad as Canonical's Amazon ads stint.

Adam Ledger

you're right nothing is evil as javascript

forest

JavaScript, where 1 + '1' = 11 but '1' + '1' = NaN... Or whatever the hell it is.

Adam Ledger

lol thats why i stopped ubuntu, all of a sudden the amazon logo appeared on my desktop side bar, and i was like thats it nuuuup not cool

forest

Yeah that was just pathetic.

<- Happy Gentoo user here.

I get only what I want and nothing else! Nothing shoved in my face!

Adam Ledger

8:49 AM

Stop you're not going to get in my head today, im still recovering from trying to understand the difference between firmware and software

fine i shall take a look at aforementioned distro

forest

It has a steep learning curve if you're not used to Linux. But it's very worth it!

Adam Ledger

yeah absolutely for tutoring my grand children it will be, which is around the time ill be qualified to do so, even if im not getting paid

and im almost 40 and single, so that's assuming i live to be 80+

forest

Ah, yes unfortunately using Gentoo will guarantee you stay single.

Adam Ledger

dating tip 405434443: to really assure women you are single, mention on your dating profile you have pigeons

@forest you see? this is because you didnt trust the entity "popularity-contest"

forest

:D

Stephen Kitt

9:10 AM

@forest otherwise it would be called Gentwo ;-)

(Of course the distro for couples is Debian, it’s right there in the name.)

Adam Ledger

9:24 AM

@StephenKitt its just deb now, as far i can tell that's because the San Francisco police department were incredibly corrupt at one point, and like all police probably still are

forest

@StephenKitt Debian isn't for couples. It's for divorces and mysterious suicides.

Stephen Kitt

@forest that’s another way of looking at it, indeed

Adam Ledger

lmfao and i thought i was on the nose

forest

Now if you really want for an exciting time, use Debian with ReiserFS for the root filesystem...

Adam Ledger

seems like a trap but look at that anime profile picture, how could that be anything but benevolent and innocent

Faheem Mitha

9:28 AM

@forest ReiserFS, I think. But isn't that unmaintained?

Stephen Kitt

@forest well, ReiserFS is still built in the default Debian 11 kernel, so that is indeed an option

forest

Yeah, typo.

Faheem Mitha

@forest That sounds like a monstrous calumny.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha it’s supposed to be dropped from the kernel this year

Adam Ledger

well the source sites for bullseye are http, not sure if maintenance is a factor here

forest

9:29 AM

Yeah they finally decided to pull the plug on it.

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt So it is unmaintained then?

forest

Although I'll miss tail packing. That was a neat feature.

@FaheemMitha It's been virtually unmaintained for years.

Faheem Mitha

@forest That's what I thought.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha yes, it’s on life support

Adam Ledger

beats getting choked to death with a vacuum cleaner cord

presumably by "popularity-contest"

forest

9:34 AM

Actually it was JavaScript who did that one.

Adam Ledger

yeah one or the other they are both omniscient cold blooded apex predators

Nordine Lotfi

@AdamLedger uhm, as forest said, I don't think it's that bad. I think I installed Debian more than a hundred times now, and on different hardware (not that it matters, since I know people here would do it way more anyway) and I never ever saw it as "malware".

@forest I see what you did there...

forest

:^)

Nordine Lotfi

@forest hey, it doesn't really count if your processor is right by your side...unless it does?

forest

They'll be by your side, but first they gotta finish compiling WebKit...

Nordine Lotfi

9:46 AM

@StephenKitt I can't believe you made that joke, but I'm happy you did still

@forest yep

I remember compiling chromium once. Took me 4 hours I think

for Webkit, it took like 30min-1 hour or so

forest

I only use Tor Browser, which luckily is precompiled and based on Firefox ESR.

And I don't use a full DE so there's very little heavy software that I have to compile. It's pretty much GCC itself that takes the longest.

Nordine Lotfi

I can relate. I only ever use WM like i3, or whatnot.

forest

Tiling WMs are great.

Nordine Lotfi

Indeed.

which one do you use?

forest

I like DWM.

But I've also used RatPoison before.

But tbh most of the time I'm in a VT with tmux.

Nordine Lotfi

9:54 AM

Nice. I did think of only using tmux like those unix ricing post on reddit, but there is always something that needs a GUI at some point (I guess I can use a framebuffer display to open it though, but it's slow)

I tried DWM but don't know enough C to really make full use of it (I could copy-paste other people's patches but I prefer to know how to really use it)

Never tried RatPoison though.

forest

I only need the framebuffer for non-text browsing and video.

Everything else I can do on command line.

Nordine Lotfi

hopefully will comes a moment in life where it'll the same for me too.

It's too bad there isn't any good tui/cli browser with javascript support, otherwise I would probably do that

forest

I think w3m supports basic JS.

Nordine Lotfi

yeah, but it's "basic" as you say :P I tried every option out there, even some project that draw firefox on a TUI, etc. The closest is maybe using a framebuffer that supports graphics instead of just ascii, but it's slower than using Xorg.

forest

You know, FF used to actually have a native framebuffer option, many years ago.

Nordine Lotfi

10:03 AM

I know, I heard about that too on some github issues

I think we even talked about it once on the tavern_on_the_meta (or was it on the anime room?)

forest

Probably anime.

Nordine Lotfi

hmm, yeah I think you're right

Adam Ledger

11:48 AM

@NordineLotfi hey sure forest is a very knowledgeable entity, and yes, im an ahole, i consider everything malware if it;s presently beyond my comprehension, that's an integral part of the learning experience, this one time i came on here whining about finding the drivers for a printer my neighbour put in his garbage, and jesse some how convinced me i need to dismantle a DVD player in order to solve the issue

Faheem Mitha

12:23 PM

@forest Is this in Debian? If so, how hard is it to use? And are there any problems with using it?

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha wiki.debian.org/TorBrowser

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt OK. Thank you.

@StephenKitt Do you use Tor Browser on Debian?

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha no

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt OK. Thank you.

Adam Ledger

3:13 PM

@NordineLotfi HEY i logged on to the SE philosophy community, this unsolicited response affirming the righteousness of the entity "forest" is against SE policy, you're going to trust anime girls now? look at "Nauutica" the girl has adapted to live in an environment surrounded by mutant post apocalyptic insects, insisting she must wear her mask lest the spore kill her, yet scoots around on an electric glyder in a miny dress, is that something you consider trusty?

exactly go to bed you're drunk

Nordine Lotfi

3:47 PM

hmm, I don't know how to answer to that

Faheem Mitha

4:19 PM

@AdamLedger Is it just me, or is this gibberish?

jesse_b

5:40 PM

I was reading up on random number generators and many of the documents I'm finding classify time based seeds to be "true random" rather than psuedorandom but I don't see how

Faheem Mitha

@jesse_b Well the sequence obviously isn't "true" random, because the value of the seed, whatever it mght be, doesn't determine the randomness of the sequence.

jesse_b

@FaheemMitha yeah but I also think the other examples of true random are flawed

I think using a seed of miliseconds would be just as random as measuring atomspheric noise or nuclear decay

Faheem Mitha

@jesse_b I don't follow. What is supposed to be true random in this case?

jesse_b

@FaheemMitha true random is defined as non deterministic where psuedorandom is deterministic but even by that definition time based would be deterministic

even though the same sources that define true random as non deterministic also define time based seeds as true random

even something like atmospheric noise or nuclear decay could be deterministic though depending on how that is actually being measured and who has access to it

Faheem Mitha

5:57 PM

@jesse_b Deterministic is not terribly well defined. In practice people use tests to to decide whether pseudorandom numbers are "random" enough.

jesse_b

agreed

> predictable as it uses mathematical algorithms through software

They all use mathematical algorithms through software the real question is how is the seed derived

and if you can determine the seed AND know the algorithm you can determine the outcome

Jeff Schaller

8:59 PM

Lavarand

Lavarand was a hardware random number generator designed by Silicon Graphics that worked by taking pictures of the patterns made by the floating material in lava lamps, extracting random data from the pictures, and using the result to seed a pseudorandom number generator. == Details == Although the secondary part of the random number generation uses a pseudorandom number generator, the full process essentially qualifies as a "true" random number generator due to the random seed that is used. However, its applicability is limited by its low bandwidth. It was covered under the now-expired ...

:(

> From 1997 to 2001, there was a Web site at lavarand.sgi.com

:)

> As of 2017, Cloudflare maintains a similar system of lava lamps for securing Internet traffic

forest

11:16 PM

That's a really silly way to generate randomness.

@AdamLedger You mean Nausicaa, the Miyazaki film? Not Nauutica.

Transcript for