Spyke

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Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

I actually considered a non-governmental, community regulated currency as a pretty good idea.

Problem is, crypto is too ecologically expensive and wasteful to fit the bill.

While there were some interesting ones, that actually used the processing power for something useful, most are not. So for now, I'll just go with governmental currencies.

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It's time to mentally prepare yourselves for this

All we need is a single universal Space-Time map that will tell the time (in any and all formats) at any point in space, taking into consideration, all the events caused by all the forces that cause existence, from the start of this universe. Then it can take the place of both, maps and clocks.

Just make sure it is memory safe. Oh and properly escape all queries. And also ...

That should last us until we start exploring the space outside the universe.

linux

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New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?

"I have no idea what I’m doing here" <- Happens in the beginning. How about you start by trying to know what exactly you are doing? Let me give you a fasttrack...

  1. The first command you get in the instructions is curl. It is generally used to download stuff from a networked server.

    1.1. To understand the -fsSLo in the command, I strongly advise you to check out the manual of curl using man curl in a terminal.

  2. The second command in the instructions is echo "something" | sudo tee some/file

    2.1 Here you see 3 commands echo , sudo and tee. 2.1.1 Again, you can use man command-name to check the manual pages for these commands 2.2 There is a | symbol over here. It is called the "pipe symbol", which is what you can use to search for it. It is usually difficult to search for the symbol itself and I haven't found a man page for it, but open man bash and look for "Pipelines" and you'll know what it is about. Use Link, Link and Link to help yourself understand this.

  3. The commands in "Install the package" use the apt program. This is a Package Manager. Its job is to read package information that package developers have made and try to not let the system become unusable.

    • e.g. If you have a program called Xorg from 5 years ago, and a program called mesa from 5 years ago and Xorg depends upon mesa to work. Here, if you replace your mesa with a new, recent mesa yourself, there is a good chance Xorg will not work. The Package Manager prevents that from happening.
  4. The gist of what the instructions are making you do is, telling the Package Manager that there is another place from where you want it to look for packages.

To understand man pages better, check out this link.

Don't think too badly of people dissing you in the comments. They are tired and fed up of help vampires. Hopefully, you can try not to become one.

  • Try and build your own process of understanding the commands you see on the internet before entering them into the terminal.
  • The comments telling you to just follow the instructions, are coming from the perspective that you don't have the patience and determination to understand them yourself, which, a lot of people don't. I will leave it upto you to determine which one you decide to be. It is, however, a bad idea to follow instructions on any website, just because it "seems legit". You can't really say you "trust" the site until you have the ability to find out for yourself whether you want to trust it.

Check this out

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Debian security amirite?

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https://upvote.au/comment/818245

Nah, I'd say the chap was pretty unsloppy.
Just that we were lucky that someone found it.

It's a good thing that xz is a type of program that people may want to profile.

But this is an eye opener for people saying that Linux is "secure" (not more secure, but just secure .) because the code has many eyes on it. --> jump to digression.

This confirms my suspicion that we may be affected by the bystander effect, so we actually have less eyes than required for this.


digression:

  • of course I don't mean that this makes Linux less secure than Windows. The point that it makes it more secure than Windows/MacOS or other closed source systems is already apparent.
    • Just that, we can't consider Linux to be secure (without comparing it to something less secure) as many ppl would, when evangelising Linux.

My point being, tell the whole truth. The newbie that's taking your advice will thank you for that later on.

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Chuckles, I'm in Danger

One of my previous employers once told me (abridged)

It's not like old times when we could slowly work to get a perfect result.
Nowadays, we need perfect results, fast.

They were asking me to do technical content writing for their website.
I quickly realised that it's actually the threshold for calling something "perfect", that has lowered over time.

Clearly, I was not fit for that work, because instead of just plagiarising and paraphrasing stuff from other websites, I insisted on reading up on material from multiple sources, understanding it well and then writing it down myself. That makes it pretty slow.

That was a year before ChatGPT, or I would just have used that thingy.

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Touch a file in Linux

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It is to use along with split. e.g.

  1. You take a single large file, say 16GB
  2. Use split to break it into multiple files of 4GB
  3. Now you can transfer it to a FAT32 Removable Flash Drive and transfer it to whatever other computer that doesn't have Ethernet.
  4. Here, you can use cat to combine all files into the original file. (preferably accompanied by a checksum)