I love that Pixel C. Except it’s showing its age; battery life is starting to stink, and I can’t get Linux on it. Even with whatever I have on it - Lineage or something - it still struggles with performance, which got progressively worse with each Android version upgrade.

Well, I’ll be watching your post to see if you get any good suggestions. You’re definitely in tablet space, whether you need to be or not.

She was born in October; shit, you’re right. She’ll be barely legal in time for the election, and certainly eligible by the time she’d take office. So she won’t be too young to vote for by the time of the general election.

Wow.

Yeah, fuck giving examples, because people ignore the stated problem and focus on the example. You’re exactly right. It’s stackexchange all over again, and I should know better than to provide any specifics, because people can not resist solving the wrong problem.

There’s an actual term for this behavior, but it escapes me. It’s the opposite of the X/Y problem, where people fixate on some irrelevant detail. I need to learn to ignore “can you give an example” comments, because all that leads to use someone trying to fix a specific instance of a larger, more general problem.

The problem is that upvotes serve two conflicting proposes. Upvoting raises visibility, so one use is to say, “this is a post people should see.” In that case, you may not necessarily agree with the content of the post, but rather believe it’s worthy of debate. A good example of this is c/unpopularopinion, where the community rules specifically state to upvote if you agree it’s an unpopular opinion, not whether you agree with the opinion.

The other, conflicting, use is to signal approval or disapproval.

You can’t do both at the same time. It’s a flaw in design Reddit had, which they fixed but monetized. Lemmy did not learn from Reddit’s mistake and instead repeated it.

Two conflicting uses for the same action is terrible UX design.

Yah, absolutely. I’m frankly a little surprised Trump is still alive.

We know who Biden’s running mate is going to be, unless there’s a surprise upset. Trump’s is still up in the air and the weasels are currently fighting for it.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds, for example, has suggested that a lack of a standardized desktop that goes across all Linux distros has held back Linux adoption on desktop.

Yeah. Well, in on Linux in large part because of the diversity, choice, and options. If I wanted a monolithic, incestuous lock-in culture, I’d be on Windows, or a Mac.

Linux may have been simply making an observation, not a judgment, but fuck monocultures.

Thank you! So, in that situation, instead of 3 consecutive terms, we could see 4.

Assuming she’s successful, becomes far more popular, and there are no major crises that work against her.

The most reliable way to get re-elected is to be president when a war starts. Like how Bush Jr engineered 9/11 so he could ensure re-election(*). But it tensions escalated with Russia and we got involved, that’d do it.

(*) Yeah, no. I don’t really believe that. It’s just a joke.

2 years and 1 day

OK. This is a specific reference to something about our laws of succession about which I’m embarrassingly ignorant. Can you save me a web search and elaborate?

I agree, there are places where a totally stripped down BB makes sense; I’m not arguing that. I’m arguing against stripped down BB when it isn’t necessary.

Also: Lua is 1.536MB on my system. Bash is 1.1MB. I don’t know how big ash is, because I didn’t easily find the sources for it, but even if it were half the size of bash, replacing ash with bash would make the cost of adding bash only 0.6MB - a third of including Lua. If you think you have enough space for Lua, you probably have enough space for bash instead of ash.

And you be able to do normal scripting with proper regexp support and not forcing your users to learn another language just to hack together a small solution.

I want to thank you for a calm, reasoned, sympathetic discussion about something that’s currently, actively irritating me and making my responses more… acidic… than they should be.

For sure. But there will be a lot of indirect debate on social media, because Trump can’t keep his burger-hole shut, and Klobuchar’s free to murder him (metaphorically) on public platforms. Even if he only posts to TruthSocial, everything he says gets parroted on X and Facebook, and that’s still where the most eyeballs are.

And old school public media picks this stuff up and repeats it - that’s mostly what they’ve been reduced to -but it still reaches a lot of eyes and ears.

And: Trump refusing another debate, she could just hammer on his cowardice, over and over. That’d be a win.

Klobuchar is tough. If nothing else, I’d love to see that fight. Only slightly less than I’d love to see an AOC v Trump fight; that’d be like watching a skinny junkie enter the MMA ring against Holly Holm. It’d be hilarious. But AOC is too young, and Trump will be either dead or in a home by the time she’s old enough to run. I just hope Bernie is still active enough by then to support her. I don’t know that she could get elected - she’s too polarizing - but it would be a marvelous spectacle.

Anyway, I prefer Yang’s politics, and I’d be thrilled to see Buttigieg in the White House, but I stand by Klobuchar as the best bet.

I have a Pixel C that none of the Linux distros support. So I’m running one of the OSS Android distros, but it’s still fucking Android.

I’d love to find as nice a combo - great build, small size (10" screen), detachable yet integrated keyboard - that runs Linux. Sounds a lot like what you’re looking for.

I think there are 11” Dell XPSes. I’ve owned a couple of those, and they’re pretty good, and they have great Linux support if that’s your thing.

🙁 🤝

Lemmy really, really needs emoji responses that don’t require and entirely new comment.

I’m not (familiar with Python).

Years ago, I wrote and maintained one of the core libraries for Ruby. That experience put me off scripting languages for any serious, persistent work for good. I use them for one-offs, and therefore, I stick to languages that are ubiquitous: bash, awk, sed. Lua isn’t everywhere. Neither is Python, or Ruby, or Perl. But bash, awk, and sed are.

Except that, in BB, they’re often stripped down so much they’re barely functional.

Look, somehow this has become about OpenWRT. That was just a latest example; my post was about BusyBox, and Lua isn’t part of BusyBox. I just want developers to consider their deployment environment and maybe generate and include more capable, POSIX BB instead of just choosing the smallest and most useless.

Agreed, and agreed.

Why not Klobuchar? She’s got some national recognition from the 2019/20 cycle, politics are acceptable to moderates, progressive (enough), and she’d eat Trump for lunch in debates and on social media. Plus, she’s from the Midwest, and might pick up some folks for regional loyalty, and could play against the “slick New Yorker” which might still work.

The bases are going to vote party lines. I think undecideds and wavering moderates are the pick-up points, and I think Klobuchar could do that.

I like Yang’s politics, but he’s got a popularity problem, and Buttigieg - Trump would just harp on his sexual orientation, and I’m not confident enough that America’s ready yet to vote for a gay president. Hell, we can’t even get a woman into office.

IMO Klobuchar’s the safest bet against Trump.

Why?

Once again, we agree.

Why always with the old white men, when we have prominent politicians like Yang, Buttigieg, Klobuchar? And as for Bernie, if you want a firebrand who’s going to alienate moderates, why not AOC? Well, she’s too young to run, but she’s not the only truly liberal option. Warren is old enough, progressive enough, and a woman. But, no, Bernie Bros gotta Bro.

Yeah, it’d have to be a Lemmy design change, and then all of the many clients would have to implement it… momentum is a powerful force in the software world, and difficult and dangerous to overcome. Look at the fiasco of Python 3; that was a cock-up of epic proportions. Lemmy’s got enough users and clients now that changes have to be made extremely carefully.

Yeah, I need to figure that part out. I’m getting familiar with uci at the moment, but I need to dig into what package management is available. There’s enough space to install bash -plenty if ash wasn’t there - but probably not enough to compile bash on the device.

Anyway, my original post wasn’t about OpenWRT. I’ll get what I need to do done, one way it another. It’s just that I keep (rarely, but mor than once) encountering these ultra-pared down BusyBoxen in places where it’s not necessary to have ultra-minimalism.

Several people have responded already as if I’m complaining about OpenWRT; one even suggested I “learn Lua, dummy,” because Lua is available in OpenWRT.

I’m not complaining about OpenWRT. I’m asking developers to think twice about micro-BB builds in their products. Does it really need to be that small?

which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”

I wager you’d be right, but most people are wrong.

I’m saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees’s creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it’s clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.

I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.

New to me.

I don’t care if it’s easy; suggesting Lua as solution is dissembling. I complained about poor tooling that doesn’t follow defacto standards when the device it’s running on could easily handle having a more common, older, standard bash than choosing some castrated shell.

If it were a forced choice, because of hardware limitations, of having Lua or bash, I could get it. Lua is more capable. But in this case, it’s not a choice of either/or; the device could easily handle both.

BusyBox is, as I understand, configurable for how “complete” it is. That’s why I say it’s lazy to pick some default minimal compile when it could be more accessible, and less of a pain in the ass for users.