:downbear:
The latest encroachments like TPMs and locked bootloaders affect everyone, nerd programmer or not. Just because they don't understand why beyond "device won't do the thing I want it to" in a lot of cases, like my mother's 1 year old roku box getting dropped support for netflix, and being about as useful to her as a brick after that point. She doesn't need to know the words, or be into nerd shit like HDMI encryption to experience that.
Or my grandfather whose chromebook was dropped from updates because it was too old after only 3 years.
No one is worried about devices being made more simple to use. They're all "real" computers that can be simple, they can be complex, they can be anywhere in between that you want so long as they aren't intentionally locked down.
It does what you need until google, microsoft, or apple decides your device is "too old" and then oops too bad you better chuck it in the trash and buy a new one
As alternative options are more and more restricted they will only tighten the thumbscrews, because they can.
Do wish you wouldn't put words in my mouth and talk down to me about "gamer oppression" and treats.
That's a separate problem. But there's never going to be a time when your average layman decides to flash a new operating system onto their computer because the current one stopped being supported. Operating systems themselves should be maintained much longer by the people who make then, which isn't going to happen for anything popular right now with capitalism. The simplicity isn't the problem. iOS is a thousands times better for 99% of people than Windows or Linux or macOS. It has way more sophisticated features than the old barely-updated ones like Windows. It actually has application sandboxing which makes it actually secure unlike Windows. But weird tech nerds would complain that you can't write a program that deletes all your documents the second you run it.
weird tech nerds would complain that you can’t write a program that deletes all your documents the second you run it
or that you can't run your own apps without it getting approved by Apple, or use any browser that isn't a safari reskin, etc. sandboxing is good but most of the Security(tm) features are just to enforce apple's walled garden to keep you buying more iphones
yeah but Android literally lets you install apps from wherever and also has sandboxing. iOS isn't dumb because it's simple, it's dumb because of capitalists. Everything else about it is really great. I love using my phone because I don't have to think about where programs are installed or any other junk like that.
This is why I don't care about things like GNOME desktop. It's a garden and it's walled, but there's a fence gate through which you can leave if you want. Go use another desktop. Not so on an iphone and most androids anymore, because they want your data, to show you ads and sponsored apps (on android), and to force you to pay monthly for "features" like call blocking and tethering. Imagine telling someone who is being harassed "no you can't block your stalker's number unless you pay $5.99 a month for our call screening service". Absolute ghoul shit.
You can have application sandboxing and stop the 99% of users from deleting all their documents unintentionally, while still allowing weird nerds to do so if they want to. Make me tap the version number in settings 57 times and then write "I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING I'M A WEIRD NERD WHO WANTS A BROKEN PHONE" in a text message to your mother on a full moon while holding the phone at exactly a 123.4 degree angle if you must.
okay but that's basically useless. It doesn't actually help anyone other than weird nerds who think of themselves as special. And it provides a way for someone to trick grandma into breaking the sandbox. And for iOS at least, there is nothing else to really access. It's not like you're going to access the data structures or storage of the OS, because doing so isn't documented or supported in any way and doesn't need to be. The APIs apps use is the operating system. The only thing I think iOS would really benefit from is downloading apps from outside the App Store.
"Basically useless" I will be the judge of that, considering I own the phone.
"Who think of themselves as special" because doing anything that isn't apple-approved with my phone is hubris?
It's exactly like I'm going to access everything, why wouldn't I? It's heavily customized BSD under all of it.
Downloading apps from outside the app store is a solid reason. Not having to pay $4 for a dedicated shovelware app to perform some basic function that computers do easily is a good reason. Lowering the bar to entry for writing your own apps is another.
You didn't write iOS, why is it your right to determine whether you get to access their internal data structures and APIs? You don't own the code that was written to make it work, just the physical hardware. You're basically asking developers to go out of their way to provide more documentation for things that 99.9% of people don't use. You don't just get "automatic" access to more stuff unless it gets "locked down". Maybe that feature was simply never there to begin with.
People (including me) wanted Apple to enable the FM/AM radio that one of the chips in their phones had. It turned out that they didn't even have that hardware physically connected to power, nor did it have an antenna. It just happened to exist on the device they were using for other stuff.
ya got me i had a windows 98 pc in my adolescence and was basically forced to learn how a computer works, and maybe thats not for everyone, but when people dont know what a filesystem is that makes me personally upset and thats whats important
Why do people obsess over file systems? They're not actually very useful. There is no law of nature that says "An operating system must have a built-in file system!" The Windows and Linux file systems are garbage. They're simultaneously used for the operating system itself, program data, and documents and pictures. That's nonsensical. Data should be stored in a data structure that makes sense. You can barely even do file search on Windows and Linux, but every phone app has pretty sophisticated features for instantly searching file metadata in pictures and so on. To even have a photo library on any system you have to build an SQL database of the photos, otherwise it's far too slow to search through them. File systems are really not that useful. And they only complicate the kernel and operating system features. The only reason Linux has such a prominent file system is because that was all the hotness back then with turning everything into a file (which turns out is not actually that useful compared to just having useful APIs like iOS and Android have).
Because they might as well not even be file systems. They're just data structures that the OS developers control for storing data. You can run Linux with an almost empty tmpfs root file system, and barely touch the file system at all. There's nothing fundamental about file systems other than being the most prominent way to allocate and track persistent storage space.
It sounds like SQLite still requires a couple dynamically sizeable files for storing the database, so it probably isn't possible. You'd have to have a key-value store that can allocate blocks for the different files it needs.
It seems really bizarre to me, because you'd think a large tech company would have found a performance reason for throwing out the file system and disk partitions and using the device directly for storage, but it doesn't seem like that's happened yet. Probably wouldn't even be that hard for a team at a big company to implement a basic file system stripped of all the hierarchical/metadata stuff and use that.
I guess it really comes down to the fact that every application needs something like the program heap to store variable sized objects, and the file system is the closest thing to that currently.
Key-value stores, relational databases, logs, anything you can think of. It just depends on what you're storing. There just aren't a lot of data structures implemented because file systems work well enough. I think it would be cool if there was a block storage alternative to file systems that was more like virtual memory.
For example: Pangolin: A Fault-Tolerant Persistent Memory Programming Library: https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc19/presentation/zhang-lu
Only designed for embedded devices though.
File systems are especially annoying because they have all sorts of metadata that makes them less reliable. Does a file have the correct permissions? Is it writable? Is another program using it? Is it fragmented?
An iOS or Android app has no use for file permissions or ownership or creation date or even sub-directories, in its own sandbox directory, so that's just extra overhead and extra code (in the file system driver) that provides no benefit, but can still potentially cause problems.
I don't know if I've ever seen a single Windows application that correctly handles every error case when using the file system. You'll get all sorts of unfriendly errors, crashes, and freezes because of stupid things like file permissions or some obscure file system "feature". And that doesn't even get to file path string encoding, maximum files in a directory, max file size, etc. that also have to be considered when writing robust software. And every thing that isn't considered is another thing that will end up hurting the end user. And all of these things vary slightly between operating systems, and developers don't typically use a custom file system on top of the OS file system, so it means there isn't a consistent programming environment, and even more error cases have to be considered (and these types of things do produce real errors that affect users). How often do SQL databases and key-value stores produce errors? (probably only as often as the file system they're implemented on top of do)
People definitely forget that there were plenty of privacy-invading shit in the beige-box days ('member BonziBuddy?) and that it took decades before even half of web traffic was using HTTPS.
A while back I remembered bonzi buddy out of the blue and started searching. Somehow I came upon an ebay listing for a bonzi buddy plush toy that was going for like 700$ and people were bidding on it.
"They care that the object that lets them relax with funny videos after work keeps breaking" - think you kinda accidentially hit the nail on the head of why this line of thought pisses me off. Historically, large amounts of culture were produced + recreated by the people who participated within it. While the printing press and, in this case, its more modern counterparts offer liberationary potential, they also entrap us. Smartphones, other than their cameras, are designed exclusively for consumption, and therefore make consumption the only form of relaxation for most people. What does it mean for society that most of those videos are picked by an algorithm designed by a private company to maximise profit? What does it mean that piracy is made much harder, so private interests can make media disappear overnight? What does it mean that you require the approval of a business to share a program you made with someone else? If someone only uses the big social media sites, as app-centered mobile devices strongly encourage, then most of their social activity is now entirely devoted to capital. I'm not saying that everybody should use the command line - I'm saying that these devices are engineered to reproduce a caste of tech elites, and keep the masses in their MrBeast feed bags, far more than they're engineered for human utility. I've become entirely unhinged while writing this, but hopefully I got some kind of point across.
“Art belongs to the people. It must leave its deepest roots in the very thick of the working masses. It should be understood for the masses and loved by them. It must unite the feelings, thoughts and the will of the masses and raise them. It should awaken artists in them and develop them.” - Vladimir Lenin
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:downbear: The latest encroachments like TPMs and locked bootloaders affect everyone, nerd programmer or not. Just because they don't understand why beyond "device won't do the thing I want it to" in a lot of cases, like my mother's 1 year old roku box getting dropped support for netflix, and being about as useful to her as a brick after that point. She doesn't need to know the words, or be into nerd shit like HDMI encryption to experience that.
Or my grandfather whose chromebook was dropped from updates because it was too old after only 3 years.
No one is worried about devices being made more simple to use. They're all "real" computers that can be simple, they can be complex, they can be anywhere in between that you want so long as they aren't intentionally locked down.
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It does what you need until google, microsoft, or apple decides your device is "too old" and then oops too bad you better chuck it in the trash and buy a new one
As alternative options are more and more restricted they will only tighten the thumbscrews, because they can.
Do wish you wouldn't put words in my mouth and talk down to me about "gamer oppression" and treats.
That's a separate problem. But there's never going to be a time when your average layman decides to flash a new operating system onto their computer because the current one stopped being supported. Operating systems themselves should be maintained much longer by the people who make then, which isn't going to happen for anything popular right now with capitalism. The simplicity isn't the problem. iOS is a thousands times better for 99% of people than Windows or Linux or macOS. It has way more sophisticated features than the old barely-updated ones like Windows. It actually has application sandboxing which makes it actually secure unlike Windows. But weird tech nerds would complain that you can't write a program that deletes all your documents the second you run it.
or that you can't run your own apps without it getting approved by Apple, or use any browser that isn't a safari reskin, etc. sandboxing is good but most of the Security(tm) features are just to enforce apple's walled garden to keep you buying more iphones
yeah but Android literally lets you install apps from wherever and also has sandboxing. iOS isn't dumb because it's simple, it's dumb because of capitalists. Everything else about it is really great. I love using my phone because I don't have to think about where programs are installed or any other junk like that.
This is why I don't care about things like GNOME desktop. It's a garden and it's walled, but there's a fence gate through which you can leave if you want. Go use another desktop. Not so on an iphone and most androids anymore, because they want your data, to show you ads and sponsored apps (on android), and to force you to pay monthly for "features" like call blocking and tethering. Imagine telling someone who is being harassed "no you can't block your stalker's number unless you pay $5.99 a month for our call screening service". Absolute ghoul shit.
You can have application sandboxing and stop the 99% of users from deleting all their documents unintentionally, while still allowing weird nerds to do so if they want to. Make me tap the version number in settings 57 times and then write "I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING I'M A WEIRD NERD WHO WANTS A BROKEN PHONE" in a text message to your mother on a full moon while holding the phone at exactly a 123.4 degree angle if you must.
okay but that's basically useless. It doesn't actually help anyone other than weird nerds who think of themselves as special. And it provides a way for someone to trick grandma into breaking the sandbox. And for iOS at least, there is nothing else to really access. It's not like you're going to access the data structures or storage of the OS, because doing so isn't documented or supported in any way and doesn't need to be. The APIs apps use is the operating system. The only thing I think iOS would really benefit from is downloading apps from outside the App Store.
"Basically useless" I will be the judge of that, considering I own the phone. "Who think of themselves as special" because doing anything that isn't apple-approved with my phone is hubris?
It's exactly like I'm going to access everything, why wouldn't I? It's heavily customized BSD under all of it. Downloading apps from outside the app store is a solid reason. Not having to pay $4 for a dedicated shovelware app to perform some basic function that computers do easily is a good reason. Lowering the bar to entry for writing your own apps is another.
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You didn't write iOS, why is it your right to determine whether you get to access their internal data structures and APIs? You don't own the code that was written to make it work, just the physical hardware. You're basically asking developers to go out of their way to provide more documentation for things that 99.9% of people don't use. You don't just get "automatic" access to more stuff unless it gets "locked down". Maybe that feature was simply never there to begin with.
People (including me) wanted Apple to enable the FM/AM radio that one of the chips in their phones had. It turned out that they didn't even have that hardware physically connected to power, nor did it have an antenna. It just happened to exist on the device they were using for other stuff.
it's middle class (lol) privilege to not want to have a device literally designed to extract as much personal data for capitalist profit?
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that's not even what I said
I don't wanna go outside, that's where all the people who hate me are.
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ya got me i had a windows 98 pc in my adolescence and was basically forced to learn how a computer works, and maybe thats not for everyone, but when people dont know what a filesystem is that makes me personally upset and thats whats important
Why do people obsess over file systems? They're not actually very useful. There is no law of nature that says "An operating system must have a built-in file system!" The Windows and Linux file systems are garbage. They're simultaneously used for the operating system itself, program data, and documents and pictures. That's nonsensical. Data should be stored in a data structure that makes sense. You can barely even do file search on Windows and Linux, but every phone app has pretty sophisticated features for instantly searching file metadata in pictures and so on. To even have a photo library on any system you have to build an SQL database of the photos, otherwise it's far too slow to search through them. File systems are really not that useful. And they only complicate the kernel and operating system features. The only reason Linux has such a prominent file system is because that was all the hotness back then with turning everything into a file (which turns out is not actually that useful compared to just having useful APIs like iOS and Android have).
Android and iOS still have file systems, the user just isn't allowed to look at them
even on mac they make it obnoxiously hard to browse outside of a short list of curated user folders.
Because they might as well not even be file systems. They're just data structures that the OS developers control for storing data. You can run Linux with an almost empty tmpfs root file system, and barely touch the file system at all. There's nothing fundamental about file systems other than being the most prominent way to allocate and track persistent storage space.
Has anybody tried making a partition that’s really just a sqlite3 binary blob?
It sounds like SQLite still requires a couple dynamically sizeable files for storing the database, so it probably isn't possible. You'd have to have a key-value store that can allocate blocks for the different files it needs.
It seems really bizarre to me, because you'd think a large tech company would have found a performance reason for throwing out the file system and disk partitions and using the device directly for storage, but it doesn't seem like that's happened yet. Probably wouldn't even be that hard for a team at a big company to implement a basic file system stripped of all the hierarchical/metadata stuff and use that.
I guess it really comes down to the fact that every application needs something like the program heap to store variable sized objects, and the file system is the closest thing to that currently.
and what is the alternative to having a file system?
Key-value stores, relational databases, logs, anything you can think of. It just depends on what you're storing. There just aren't a lot of data structures implemented because file systems work well enough. I think it would be cool if there was a block storage alternative to file systems that was more like virtual memory.
For example: Pangolin: A Fault-Tolerant Persistent Memory Programming Library: https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc19/presentation/zhang-lu
Only designed for embedded devices though.
File systems are especially annoying because they have all sorts of metadata that makes them less reliable. Does a file have the correct permissions? Is it writable? Is another program using it? Is it fragmented?
An iOS or Android app has no use for file permissions or ownership or creation date or even sub-directories, in its own sandbox directory, so that's just extra overhead and extra code (in the file system driver) that provides no benefit, but can still potentially cause problems.
I don't know if I've ever seen a single Windows application that correctly handles every error case when using the file system. You'll get all sorts of unfriendly errors, crashes, and freezes because of stupid things like file permissions or some obscure file system "feature". And that doesn't even get to file path string encoding, maximum files in a directory, max file size, etc. that also have to be considered when writing robust software. And every thing that isn't considered is another thing that will end up hurting the end user. And all of these things vary slightly between operating systems, and developers don't typically use a custom file system on top of the OS file system, so it means there isn't a consistent programming environment, and even more error cases have to be considered (and these types of things do produce real errors that affect users). How often do SQL databases and key-value stores produce errors? (probably only as often as the file system they're implemented on top of do)
i upvoted for a minute, but changed my mind and have removed it
i hope that makes you feel bad
edit: in fact, communism is when everyone is using arch linux
vegan btw
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People definitely forget that there were plenty of privacy-invading shit in the beige-box days ('member BonziBuddy?) and that it took decades before even half of web traffic was using HTTPS.
A while back I remembered bonzi buddy out of the blue and started searching. Somehow I came upon an ebay listing for a bonzi buddy plush toy that was going for like 700$ and people were bidding on it.
"They care that the object that lets them relax with funny videos after work keeps breaking" - think you kinda accidentially hit the nail on the head of why this line of thought pisses me off. Historically, large amounts of culture were produced + recreated by the people who participated within it. While the printing press and, in this case, its more modern counterparts offer liberationary potential, they also entrap us. Smartphones, other than their cameras, are designed exclusively for consumption, and therefore make consumption the only form of relaxation for most people. What does it mean for society that most of those videos are picked by an algorithm designed by a private company to maximise profit? What does it mean that piracy is made much harder, so private interests can make media disappear overnight? What does it mean that you require the approval of a business to share a program you made with someone else? If someone only uses the big social media sites, as app-centered mobile devices strongly encourage, then most of their social activity is now entirely devoted to capital. I'm not saying that everybody should use the command line - I'm saying that these devices are engineered to reproduce a caste of tech elites, and keep the masses in their MrBeast feed bags, far more than they're engineered for human utility. I've become entirely unhinged while writing this, but hopefully I got some kind of point across.
“Art belongs to the people. It must leave its deepest roots in the very thick of the working masses. It should be understood for the masses and loved by them. It must unite the feelings, thoughts and the will of the masses and raise them. It should awaken artists in them and develop them.” - Vladimir Lenin
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shit take, have a mushroom
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