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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • Systemd is trying to stop a service. To do an action to a service (or any unit), it runs a job. The job to stop a service is called a stop job. Once the stop job is taken off the job queue, the stop job is running.

    The method of stopping a service is configurable, but the default is to send a kill signal to the MainPID, then wait for the process to exit. If it doesn’t, after a timeout, the kill is reattempted with a harsher signal.




  • I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.



  • I think we’re still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.

    Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that’s a weakness or not. If it turns out they can’t do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.

    As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable, “then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million” step. I think they probably can’t do anything world shaking.





  • Modern operating systems have made it take very little knowledge to connect to WiFi and browse the internet. If you want to use your computer for more than that, it can still take a longer learning process. I download 3D models for printing, and wanted an image for each model so I could find things more easily. In Linux, I can make such images with only about a hundred characters in the terminal. In Windows, I would either need to learn powershell, or make an image from each file by hand.

    The way I understand “learning Linux” these days is reimagining what a computer can do for you to include the rich powers of open source software, so that when you have a problem that computers are very good at, you recognize that there’s an obvious solution on Linux that Windows doesn’t have.









  • I managed a CentOS system where someone accidentally deleted everything from /usr, so no lib64, and no bin. I didn’t have a way to get proper files at the time, so I hooked the drive up to my Arch system, made sure glibc matched, and copied yum and other tools from Arch.

    Booted the system, reinstalled a whole lot of yum packages, and… the thing still worked.

    That’s almost equivalent to a reinstall, though. As a broke college student, I had a laptop with a loose drive, that would fall out very easily. I set it up to load a few crucial things into a ramdisk at boot, so that I could browse the web and take notes even if the drive was disconnected, and it would still load images and things. I could pull the cover off and push the drive back in place to save files, but doing that every time I had class got really tiring, so I wanted it to run a little like a live system.