This is the decade where every company bought into flat design, monochrome, chonky whitespace, extremely radiused corners everywhere. Pulling up my instance, Nextcloud apes that to a tee. You'd be hard-pressed to find any "modern" UI trend that they haven't shoe-horned into their design somehow.
The _did_ completely redo their UI a few years back, and for the worse in my opinion. The Calendar in particular is far less usable and (and much more buggy) than it was around the time it was forked from OwnCloud.
I'm not sure how you are holding it, but I ran Nextcloud on a VPS with under 1GB RAM for many years, now it's on a 12GB RAM cloud instance and is only using a few GB of RAM last time I checked.
I use quite a few Nextcloud features where access via tailscale is either inconvenient or impossible. My whole family uses the calendar on their phones and other devices, which means they would have to either learn about VPNs, or I would be the one managing all their devices for them. (Neither are likely to happen.)
I also often share individual files or folders with external contacts as a more private alternative to dropbox or google drive.
To play devil's advocate, this starts to get into the territory of, how do you define a computer? If the analog circuitry is using sensors and passive components to inject fuel at spark at just the right time under varying conditions, "computing" them, one might say...
Maybe "no integrated circuits" might be a finer line.
A stored program computer, that is a device which can run arbitrary programs from storage, is a pretty rigorously defined thing. Like, we all have a pretty clear shared understanding that things like FPGAs and microcontrollers are computers, whereas you can have integrated circuits which don't have these capabilities.
To be clear, I don't think making elaborate analog ICs would be really "cheating" so long as they don't put a generic von Neumann machine on it.
EDIT: to be more clear, what I'd be trying to achieve with a rule change like this is making "computation" a somewhat larger investment in time and difficulty. By and large, at least in my opinion, profligate, non-essential computation has enabled many of the things that have made the sport less interesting. It's also made cars suck a lot. This would impose kind of a tax on those things.
I need to turn this into a blog post at some point:
Some of my early bad experiences with Linux arose because I installed software in ways that broke the system quite impressively. This taught me that with most Linux systems, you are not really supposed to just download random packages and shoe-horn them into your system. Or blindly compile and sudo make install things that could conflict with already-installed software.
The curlpipe pattern feels like a return to YOLO'ing your software installations, like the bad old Windows days where any INSTALL.EXE could overwrite another program's DLLs, wherever they lived on the disk. I trust the developers of my operating system to know what they are doing when they package software for it because most Linux distro communities have a vetting or code review process. I even sometimes trust people and projects who build their own packages for my distro and host them in their own third-party repo. Because that alone shows they probably have learned the bare minimum of things necessary to not break their users' systems.
But a curlpipe script? In my experience, the percentage of developers on GitHub who can write decent Python or Javascript code, and yet don't understand the basic concepts of The Unix Way and how to write safe, portable shell scripts is Very High. I am not going to hand control of my computer over to a random shell script on the Internet, end of story. If your program is any good, provide some generic hand-written instructions on how to build and/or install it, and I will follow those so that I can vet or modify each step as needed. I don't have time in my life to code review your shell script for a project that I was only mildly interested in to begin with.
You are going to have a bad time when your / filesystem fills up, regardless of the filesystem type. This is one of the reasons for separate /usr, /var, /home, etc that many seem to have forgotten. Smaller blast radius when there is a problem.
The reserved space in ext4 doesn't do you any good if root is the user that filled up the disk in the first place, which is far and away the most common thing I see.
On ext4 things will start failing with -ENOSPC but recovery is as simple as deleting files that are taking up space - which may or may not require a reboot into single-user mode depending on how badly the running system is borked - but the filesystem remains intact, you don't have to drop the journal, you don't have to run fsck or any other repair tool. You can just delete files and get the space back.
This is true of XFS too; I have run it in production on both RedHat and Debian/Ubuntu based distros for decades and have never had issues after an FS full event. I usually reboot a server that has had the root FS full because sometimes service logging will not recover from write failures, but I've never had to xfs_repair.
On servers I've usually had a bad time when / fills up. But using Linux as a desktop with ext4 I regularly fill the file system up (laptop with a too small SSD, so this happens quickly when batch downloading) and nothing bad happened so far. Which is approximately the same experience I have on Windows
Companies are beginning to gate previously existing features behind the requirement to connect their devices to the cloud and/or install an app on your phone.
Dishwashers, refrigerators, even (and perhaps especially) cars.
"Just don't connect it to the Internet," is sadly less viable option as time goes on.
>"Just don't connect it to the Internet," is sadly less viable option as time goes on.
I feel compelled to quibble with your word choice here. Not connecting appliances to the Internet remains a viable option. It is simply one that is increasingly not common or not readily available.
This may just be me being idiosyncratic with vocabulary.
To me, "less viable" implies there some outside factor or internal failure preventing it from working. But non-internet appliances will continue to work just fine, if you can get one. I.e. it's a viable choice, just one with less and less availability.
This is the decade where every company bought into flat design, monochrome, chonky whitespace, extremely radiused corners everywhere. Pulling up my instance, Nextcloud apes that to a tee. You'd be hard-pressed to find any "modern" UI trend that they haven't shoe-horned into their design somehow.
The _did_ completely redo their UI a few years back, and for the worse in my opinion. The Calendar in particular is far less usable and (and much more buggy) than it was around the time it was forked from OwnCloud.
reply