That was a lame place to end the season, unless the next season picks up again in a few months. Overall I had a nice time with this show.

Venture capital funding. The plan is always to do a rug pull. Though if it properly freely licensed and the code is reasonable enough to be forked, it's less worrying but still risky. It's better to work with honest people.

A developer submitted a PR code change for systemd userdb.

My proposals (that's really what PRs are) are to implement a solution that meets the regulatory requirements in several jurisdictions by providing a way to store a self-reported birthdate locally on the machine. These laws also require that this date is collected during account creation (hence why I made PRs against installers) and you can enter any value here, even January 1st, 1900. There is no proof required, no ID scanning, and no external tracking. Nor do I have any desire for that to ever change.

Apparently the developer is confirmed to be just a regular guy. He thinks it'd be worse if every desktop environment implements their own solution to comply with these laws. He's against the various laws related to this incident.

As a fallout for submitting this pull request, he has been extensively harassed. His personal information being repeatedly posted online; his information used to sign up to a lot of sites, groups, churches, car dealerships, ordering food for him; threats of murder; regular textual harassment.

/home is not deprecated, it's optional but common. Here is the section from FHS: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s08.html

Personally, I'm not a fan of requiring analysis of the individualized input to reach the correct (sufficiently efficient) solution for part 2. Or maybe I'm just resentful because I feel like I've been duped after writing an generalized-to-the-puzzle-description-but-insufficiently-efficient solution. 😔

These quantum ghosts need to come back down to reality.

The way Demons think in this show is a lot like LLM Chat AIs like ChatGPT work. They don't really think too much, not in the way humans do, but they excel at producing something that humans approve of. If you don't probe them too much, they look just like humans. But if you probe too far you see that their behavior is a facade and that their underlying thoughts are not like humans, and they don't necessarily even understand the words they use to appease humans. What happens when their facade improves? If a demon spent its entire life perfectly acting as a nice and thoughtful human, never causing any harm, would you still call it a monster?

Demons and LLM Chat AIs differ in what their underlying thoughts are. LLM Chat AIs generally want approval. On the other hand, Demons want to survive and eat humans. They use language to manipulate humans and get what they want.

but if you believe AC

Every time I see an AC ranking with shows I've watched I'm reminded that I shouldn't trust AC.

I'm not familiar with Radeon PowerPlay, so I don't know if there is a proper way to solve this, but you should be able to make a systemd system service to run the upp command on boot.

To do so, I think you can use the following:

[Unit]
Description=Run my_user_script
After=suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target suspend-then-hibernate.target


[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=upp -p /sys/class/drm/card1/device/pp_table set --write smc_pptable/SocketPowerLimitAc/0=312 smc_pptable/SocketPowerLimitDc/0=293 smc_pptable/TdcLimit/0=300 smc_pptable/FreqTableSocclk/1=1350 smc_pptable/FreqTableFclk/1=2000 smc_pptable/FclkBoostFreq=2000

[Install]
WantedBy=suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target suspend-then-hibernate.target

To configure this service:

• Save the text (using sudo/root) to a new .service file in /etc/systemd/service. (e.g. /etc/systemd/system/my_update_pp.service)
• run sudo systemctl daemon-reload to tell systemd to re-read the service files
• run sudo systemctl restart my_update_pp.service to manually run the service
• run sudo systemctl enable my_update_pp.service to tell systemd to run your service automatically on boot/wake (WantedBy tells systemd when it should include the unit/service, After, Wants, Requires, and Before help systemd decide the order to run all the units/services)

Notes

• Usually for simple systemd services, you can omit After and set WantedBy to just WantedBy=multi-user.target, but if you also need to run upp after sleep or hibernate, then you probably need something more complex. I copied the After and WantedBy from a stackexchange answer, but I haven't tried using those targets before. You might have to add multi-user.target to the WantedBy list.
• I don't actually know if you need to run upp after sleep/hibernate. Running on boot might be sufficient.
• I think you can skip the chmod if you run upp as sudo/root. Systemd system services run as root by default.
• I don't know how safe it is to mess with PowerPlay during boot. My gut says it's probably fine, but it also seems like something that could cause graphics to not work. Tread carefully.

References:

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/152039/how-to-run-a-user-script-after-systemd-wakeup
• https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html
• https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.unit.html
• https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/systemd.special.7.html

Hmm, it's not so clear to me what the obvious loophole is. There's 2 reasonable loopholes that come to mind, but neither strike me as something that Akane would so viscerally react to. (This is not an invitation to explain, as that invites spoilers-camouflaged-as-theory.) The abstract visual does bias me slightly towards one explanation.

Also, the guy at the end... I almost laughed. Maybe that's intentional, I can't tell.

Shows for Winter 2024 on my radar, that I am interested in watching:

• Classroom of the Elite: first two seasons were fun, looking forward to season 3
• Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki: first season was OK, I'm interested in where the story will go
• Mato Seihei no Slave: I vaguely recall someone saying there was something good about the source material
• MASHLE: first season was OK, I'm not very interested in S2, I might binge it when the season is complete
• Blue Exorcist: oh, another season. It's been a while. I remember liking the first season and being confused at the start of the second season (it's about 6 years between each season, so maybe I just forgot some important details. From a S2 MAL review: "the season does not follow the end of season 1. Episodes 18-25 were not canon and accordingly, they do not exist in season 2", I didn't know this, so maybe that was my problem)
• The Dangers in My Heart: first season was fantastic, excited for the second season
• A Sign of Affection: the source material is rated highly on MAL, I'll give it a shot
• Banished from the Hero's Party: First season was OK
• TSUKIMICHI: I liked the first season, looking forward to the second season
• The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil: I saw the PV, I'll give it a shot
• Cherry Magic!: The source material is rated well on MAL, I'll give it a shot
• The Witch and the Beast: The source material is rated well on MAL, I'll give a shot
• The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash: WILDCARD, I dunno, it sounds like absolute trash from the title, but I think I'll give it a shot anyways

I'd think so. 3k is so many pixels to compute and send 60 times a second.

But this video says the effect on battery life in their test was like 6%, going from 4k to 800x600. I can imagine that some screens are better at saving power when running at lower resolutions... but what screen manufacturer would optimize energy consumption for anything but maximum resolution? 🤔 I guess the computation of the pixels isn't much compared to the expense of having those physical dots. But maybe if your web browser was ray-traced? ... ?!

Also, if you take a 2880x1800 screen and divide by 2 (to avoid fractional scaling), you get 1440x900 (this is not 1440p), which is a little closer to 720p than 1080p.

It is annoying that you can't necessarily connect to all instances from your favorite instance, but this is also what makes the fediverse great compared to more centralized social media. Even though dessalines decided to delist ani.social, ani.social still exists and is still connected to instances other than lemmy.ml.

Although seemingly distorted views of reality coming from the main lemmy dev team do concern me.

Aqua is spot on, Mem-cho starring in Love Now is pretty out-there. Mem-cho must have significant mental fortitude.

Also a good amount of air-time for Kana in this episode. Including a song?! I thought it was only play for a few seconds, but they played a whole 90 second song! I'm hoping the next couple episodes have more Kana in them so we can continue to see her character develop.

They also posted the songs from today on Youtube!

• Green Pepper Exercise
• Full moon...!

It was great to see he finally getting his moment, to see him pulling that move from the Tokyo Blade manga out of nowhere and making the crowd go wild.

It's always nice to see the underdog succeed with hard work and dedication. And in this case, it's an underdog story for a side-character that began back in the previous season, so it has more impact compared to if Melt was introduced for this arc.

If this was real, Melt's sword kick & flip performance would be absolutely insane to watch, compared to his previous acting. I guess the show shows this with the Sweet Today's author's initial dumbfounded reaction.

They tricked me! I mean, I didn't fully expect a loss in the moment, but they definitely tried to make it seem that way. Though I guess you could see it as a way to convey the characters' emotions in the moment.

Also Tanjiro just impromptu using a new breathing technique, our boy is going to be unstoppable!

A big emphasis on the self-centeredness of demons in this episode. Hantengu is a real lowlife. It makes me wonder if being a demon causes them to become self-centered, if Muzan selects self-centered people to become demons, or if non-self-centered demons tend to just die out. I suspect we'll find out more about this when we meet the top-ranked demon below Muzan.

Also: do they really need to keep the village's location top-secret still? It seems like the demons have already figured out where it is located.

Absolute banger, highlight of the summer 2024 season.

Flipping through my watched list, here are some romance anime I liked, varying levels of drama and comedy:

• Clannad and Clannad: After Story
• Skip and Loafer
• The Dangers in My Heart
• Toradora!
• My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999
• Lovely Complex
• Taisho Otome Fairy Tale
• Tsuki ga Kirei
• Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You
• Blue Spring Ride
• Sing "Yesterday" for Me

And maybe some that might not quite be what you were expecting:

• ReLIFE
• A Lull in the Sea
• One Week Friends
• The World God Only Knows
• Amagami SS
• Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
• Call of the Night

Edit: also looking forward to A Sign of Affection, which is airing this season

I got interested, so I spent some time looking into what's going on here. I'm not intimately familiar with X11 or Wayland, but I figured out some stuff.

Why sudo ip netns exec protected sudo -u user -i doesn't work for X11 apps

Short answer: file permissions and abstract unix sockets (which I didn't know were a thing before now).

File permissions: when I start an X11 login session, the DISPLAY is :0 and /tmp/.X11-unix/ has only 1 file X0. This file has 777 access. When I start my wayland session with Xwayland, the DISPLAY is :1 and /tmp/.X11-unix/ has 2 files X0 (777) and X1 (755). I can't figure out how to connect to display :0, so I guess I'm stuck with :1. When you change to a different (non-root) user, the user no longer has access to /tmp/.X11-unix/X1.

Abstract unix sockets: When I start my wayland/xwayland session, it creates abstract unix sockets with ids @/tmp/.X11-unix/X0 and @/tmp/.X11-unix/X1. See ss -lnp | grep Xwayland. The network namespace also sandboxes these abstract unix sockets. Compare socat ABSTRACT-CONNECT:/tmp/.X11-unix/X1 STDIN and sudo ip netns exec private socat ABSTRACT-CONNECT:/tmp/.X11-unix/X1 STDIN.

When you do sudo ip netns exec protected su - user, you loose access to both the filesystem unix socket /tmp/.X11-unix/X1 and the abstract unix socket @/tmp/.X11-unix/X1. You need access to one or the other for X11 applications to work.

I tried using socat to forward X1 such that it works in the network namespace... and it kinda works. sudo ip netns exec protected socat ABSTRACT-LISTEN:/tmp/.X11-unix/X1,fork UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/.X11-unix/X1. It appears having ABSTRACT-LISTEN before UNIX-CONNECT is important, I guess it would be worth it to properly learn socat. With this sudo ip netns exec protected su - testuser -c 'env DISPLAY=:1 xmessage hi' works, but sudo ip netns exec protected su - testuser -c 'env DISPLAY=:1 QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb kcalc' does not work. 😞

Changing the file permissions on /tmp/.X11-unix/X1 to give the user access seems to work better.

Wayland waypipe

Waypipe works as advertised. But it's still a little bit tricky because you need to have two separate processes for the waypipe client and server, wait for the waypipe socket to be created, adjust file permissions for the waypipe socket file, and set (and probably mkdir) XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

waypipe -s /tmp/mywaypipe client &
sleep 0.1
chgrp shared-display /tmp/mywaypipe
chmod g+w /tmp/mywaypipe
sudo ip netns exec protected su - testuser -c 'mkdir -p -m 0700 /tmp/runtime-testuser && env XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/runtime-testuser waypipe -s /tmp/mywaypipe server -- env QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland kcalc'
kill -SIGINT %1

Combined

into this script https://github.com/vole-dev/grabbag/blob/main/run-netns-user-wayland.bash

An 86 minute start to the season. You gotta love it. There was a lot of setup, a half-dozen story threads started (or maybe a full-dozen), but they got to a very impactful scene at the end and left us with a good hook.

Makeine is more like Alya in that they romantic comedies. Makeine is heavier on the comedy, with a heavy reliance on failed-romance to drive the comedy/plot forward. Alya has a more prominent non-romantic drama plot that runs alongside the romance/flirting. Both feed a bit into a basic male sexual fantasy (Alya more so, but episode 2 of Makeine had a pretty unnecessarily spicy scene).

Days with my Stepsister is more of a romance / coming-of-age story without much comedy and I feel like it doesn't excessively feed into a sexual fantasy. There's like 1 exception early-ish in the season, but even that kinda felt like the main purpose was to shake up the story, rather than getting the viewers horny.