Review: The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod

Series:	Fall Revolution #3
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	1998
Printing:	August 2000
ISBN:	0-8125-6858-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	305

The Cassini Division is the third book in the Fall Revolution series and a fairly direct sequel (albeit with different protagonists) to The Stone Canal. This is not a good place to start the series. It's impossible to talk about the plot of this book without discussing the future history of this series, which arguably includes some spoilers for The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. I don't think the direction of history matters that much in enjoying the previous books, but read the first two books of the series before this review if you want to avoid all spoilers. When the Outwarders uploaded themselves and went fast, they did a lot of strange things: an interstellar probe contrary to all known laws of physics, the disassembly of Ganymede, and the Malley Mile, which plays a significant role in The Stone Canal. They also crashed the Earth. This was not entirely their fault. There were a lot of politics, religious fundamentalism, and plagues in play as well. But the storm of viruses broadcast from their transformed Jupiter shut down essentially all computing equipment on Earth, which set off much of the chaos. The results were catastrophic, and also politically transformative. Now, the Solar Union is a nearly unified anarchosocialist society, with only scattered enclaves of non-cooperators left outside that structure. Ellen May Ngewthu is a leader of the Cassini Division, the bulwark that stands between humans and the Outwarders. The Division ruthlessly destroys any remnant or probe that dares rise out of Jupiter's atmosphere, ensuring that the Outwarders, whatever they have become after untold generations of fast evolution, stay isolated to the one planet they have absorbed. The Division is very good at what they do. But there is a potential gap in that line of defense: there are fast folk in storage at the other end of the Malley Mile, on New Mars, and who knows what the deranged capitalists there will do or what forces they might unleash. The one person who knows a path through the Malley Mile isn't talking, so Ellen goes in search of the next best thing: the non-cooperator scientist Isambard Kingdom Malley. I am now thoroughly annoyed at how politics are handled in this series, and much less confused by the frequency with which MacLeod won Prometheus Awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society. Some of this is my own fault for having too high of hopes for political SF, but nothing in this series so far has convinced me that MacLeod is seriously engaging with political systems. Instead, the world-building to date makes the classic libertarian mistake of thinking societies will happily abandon stability and predictability in favor of their strange definition of freedom. The Solar Union is based on what Ellen calls the true knowledge, which is worth quoting in full so that you know what kind of politics we're talking about:

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil. This is the true knowledge. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things. Things we could use.

This is certainly something that some people will believe, particularly cynical college students who love political theory, feeling smarter than other people, and calling their pet theories things like "the true knowledge." It is not even remotely believable as the governing philosophy of a solar confederation. The point of government for the average person in human society is to create and enforce predictable mutual rules that one can use as a basis for planning and habits, allowing you to not think about politics all the time. People who adore thinking about politics have great difficulty understanding how important it is to everyone else to have ignorable government. Constantly testing your power against other coalitions is a sport, not a governing philosophy. Given the implication that this testing is through violence or the threat of violence, it beggars belief that any large number of people would tolerate that type of instability for an extended period of time. Ellen is fully committed to the true knowledge. MacLeod likely is not; I don't think this represents the philosophy of the author. But the primary political conflict in this novel famous for being political science fiction is between the above variation of anarchy and an anarchocapitalist society, neither of which are believable as stable political systems for large numbers of people. This is a bit like seeking out a series because you were told it was about a great clash of European monarchies and discovering it was about a fight between Liberland and Sealand. It becomes hard to take the rest of the book seriously. I do realize that one point of political science fiction is to play with strange political ideas, similar to how science fiction plays with often-implausible science ideas. But those ideas need some contact with human nature. If you're going to tell me that the key to clawing society back from a world-wide catastrophic descent into chaos is to discard literally every social system used to create predictability and order, you had better be describing aliens, because that's not how humans work. The rest of the book is better. I am untangling a lot of backstory for the above synopsis, which in the book comes in dribs and drabs, but piecing that together is good fun. The plot is far more straightforward than the previous two books in the series: there is a clear enemy, a clear goal, and Ellen goes from point A to point B in a comprehensible way with enough twists to keep it interesting. The core moral conflict of the book is that Ellen is an anti-AI fanatic to the point that she considers anyone other than non-uploaded humans to be an existential threat. MacLeod gives the reader both reasons to believe Ellen is right and reasons to believe she's wrong, which maintains an interesting moral tension. One thing that MacLeod is very good at is what Bob Shaw called "wee thinky bits." I think my favorite in this book is the computer technology used by the Cassini Division, who have spent a century in close combat with inimical AI capable of infecting any digital computer system with tailored viruses. As a result, their computers are mechanical non-Von-Neumann machines, but mechanical with all the technology of a highly-advanced 24th century civilization with nanometer-scale manufacturing technology. It's a great mental image and a lot of fun to think about. This is the only science fiction novel that I can think of that has a hard-takeoff singularity that nonetheless is successfully resisted and fought to a stand-still by unmodified humanity. Most writers who were interested in the singularity idea treated it as either a near-total transformation leaving only remnants or as something that had to be stopped before it started. MacLeod realizes that there's no reason to believe a post-singularity form of life would be either uniform in intent or free from its own baffling sudden collapses and reversals, which can be exploited by humans. It makes for a much better story. The sociology of this book is difficult to swallow, but the characterization is significantly better than the previous books of the series and the plot is much tighter. I was too annoyed by the political science to fully enjoy it, but that may be partly the fault of my expectations coming in. If you like chewy, idea-filled science fiction with a lot of unexplained world-building that you have to puzzle out as you go, you may enjoy this, although unfortunately I think you need to read at least The Stone Canal first. The ending was a bit unsatisfying, but even that includes some neat science fiction ideas. Followed by The Sky Road, although I understand it is not a straightforward sequel. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #32
Publisher:	HarperTrophy
Copyright:	2004
Printing:	2005
ISBN:	0-06-058662-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	407

A Hat Full of Sky is the 32nd Discworld novel and the second Tiffany Aching young adult novel. You should not start here, but you could start with The Wee Free Men. As with that book, some parts of the story carry more weight if you are already familiar with Granny Weatherwax. Tiffany is a witch, but she needs to be trained. This is normally done by apprenticeship, and in Tiffany's case it seemed wise to give her exposure to more types of witching. Thus, Tiffany, complete with new boots and a going-away present from the still-somewhat-annoying Roland, is off on an apprenticeship to the sensible Miss Level. (The new boots feel wrong and get swapped out for her concealed old boots at the first opportunity.) Unbeknownst to Tiffany, her precocious experiments with leaving her body as a convenient substitute for a mirror have attracted something very bad, something none of the witches are expecting. The Nac Mac Feegle know a hiver as soon as they feel it, but they have a new kelda now, and she's not sure she wants them racing off after their old kelda. Terry Pratchett is very good at a lot of things, but I don't think villains are one of his strengths. He manages an occasional memorable one (the Auditors, for example, at least before the whole chocolate thing), but I find most of them a bit boring. The hiver is one of the boring ones. It serves mostly as a concretized metaphor about the temptations of magical power, but those temptations felt so unlike the tendencies of Tiffany's personality that I didn't think the metaphor worked in the story. The interesting heart of this book to me is the conflict between Tiffany's impatience with nonsense and Miss Level's arguably excessive willingness to help everyone regardless of how demanding they get. There's something deeper in here about female socialization and how that interacts with Pratchett's conception of witches that got me thinking, although I don't think Pratchett landed the point with full force. Miss Level is clearly a good witch to her village and seems comfortable with how she lives her life, so perhaps they're not taking advantage of her, but she thoroughly slots herself into the helper role. If Tiffany attempted the same role, people would be taking advantage of her, because the role doesn't fit her. And yet, there's a lesson here she needs to learn about seeing other people as people, even if it wouldn't be healthy for her to move all the way to Miss Level's mindset. Tiffany is a precocious kid who is used to being underestimated, and who has reacted by becoming independent and somewhat judgmental. She's also had a taste of real magical power, which creates a risk of her getting too far into her own head. Miss Level is a fount of empathy and understanding for the normal people around her, which Tiffany resists and needed to learn. I think Granny Weatherwax is too much like Tiffany to teach her that. She also has no patience for fools, but she's older and wiser and knows Tiffany needs a push in that direction. Miss Level isn't a destination, but more of a counterbalance. That emotional journey, a conclusion that again focuses on the role of witches in questions of life and death, and Tiffany's fascinatingly spiky mutual respect with Granny Weatherwax were the best parts of this book for me. The middle section with the hiver was rather tedious and forgettable, and the Nac Mac Feegle were entertaining but not more than that. It felt like the story went in a few different directions and only some of them worked, in part because the villain intended to tie those pieces together was more of a force of nature than a piece of Tiffany's emotional puzzle. If the hiver had resonated with the darker parts of Tiffany's natural personality, the plot would have worked better. Pratchett was gesturing in that direction, but he never convinced me it was consistent with what we'd already seen of her. Like a lot of the Discworld novels, the good moments in A Hat Full of Sky are astonishing, but the plot is somewhat forgettable. It's still solidly entertaining, though, and if you enjoyed The Wee Free Men, I think this is slightly better. Followed by Going Postal in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is Wintersmith. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Far Reaches, edited by John Joseph Adams

Publisher:	Amazon Original Stories
Copyright:	June 2023
ISBN:	1-6625-1572-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1622-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1503-0
ISBN:	1-6625-1567-7
ISBN:	1-6625-1678-9
ISBN:	1-6625-1533-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	219

Amazon has been releasing anthologies of original short SFF with various guest editors, free for Amazon Prime members. I previously tried Black Stars (edited by Nisi Shawl and Latoya Peterson) and Forward (edited by Blake Crouch). Neither were that good, but the second was much worse than the first. Amazon recently released a new collection, this time edited by long-standing SFF anthology editor John Joseph Adams and featuring a new story by Ann Leckie, which sounded promising enough to give them another chance. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. As with the previous anthologies, each story is available separately for purchase or Amazon Prime "borrowing" with separate ISBNs. The sidebar cover is for the first in the sequence. Unlike the previous collections, which were longer novelettes or novellas, my guess is all of these are in the novelette range. (I did not do a word count.) If you're considering this anthology, read the Okorafor story ("Just Out of Jupiter's Reach"), consider "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey, and avoid the rest. "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey: Humans have invented a new form of physics called "slow light," which can duplicate any object that is scanned. The energy expense is extremely high, so the result is not a post-scarcity paradise. What the technology does offer, however, is a possible route to interstellar colonization: duplicate a team of volunteers and a ship full of bootstrapping equipment, and send copies to a bunch of promising-looking exoplanets. One of them might succeed. The premise is interesting. The twists Corey adds on top are even better. What can be duplicated once can be duplicated again, perhaps with more information. This is a lovely science fiction idea story that unfortunately bogs down because the authors couldn't think of anywhere better to go with it than relationship drama. I found the focus annoying, but the ideas are still very neat. (7) "Void" by Veronica Roth: A maintenance worker on a slower-than-light passenger ship making the run between Sol and Centauri unexpectedly is called to handle a dead body. A passenger has been murdered, two days outside the Sol system. Ace is in no way qualified to investigate the murder, nor is it her job, but she's watched a lot of crime dramas and she has met the victim before. The temptation to start poking around is impossible to resist. It's been a long time since I've read a story built around the differing experiences of time for people who stay on planets and people who spend most of their time traveling at relativistic speeds. It's a bit of a retro idea from an earlier era of science fiction, but it's still a good story hook for a murder mystery. None of the characters are that memorable and Roth never got me fully invested in the story, but this was still a pleasant way to pass the time. (6) "Falling Bodies" by Rebecca Roanhorse: Ira is the adopted son of a Genteel senator. He was a social experiment in civilizing the humans: rescue a human orphan and give him the best of Genteel society to see if he could behave himself appropriately. The answer was no, which is how Ira finds himself on Long Reach Station with a parole officer and a schooling opportunity, hopefully far enough from his previous mistakes for a second chance. Everyone else seems to like Rebecca Roanhorse's writing better than I do, and this is no exception. Beneath the veneer of a coming-of-age story with a twist of political intrigue, this is brutal, depressing, and awful, with an ending that needs a lot of content warnings. I'm sorry that I read it. (3) "The Long Game" by Ann Leckie: The Imperial Radch trilogy are some of my favorite science fiction novels of all time, but I am finding Leckie's other work a bit hit and miss. I have yet to read a novel of hers that I didn't like, but the short fiction I've read leans more heavily into exploring weird and alien perspectives, which is not my favorite part of her work. This story is firmly in that category: the first-person protagonist is a small tentacled alien creature, a bit like a swamp-dwelling octopus. I think I see what Leckie is doing here: balancing cynicism and optimism, exploring how lifespans influence thinking and planning, and making some subtle points about colonialism. But as a reading experience, I didn't enjoy it. I never liked any of the characters, and the conclusion of the story is the unsettling sort of main-character optimism that seems rather less optimistic to the reader. (4) "Just Out of Jupiter's Reach" by Nnedi Okorafor: K rm n scientists have found a way to grow living ships that can achieve a symbiosis with a human pilot, but the requirements for that symbiosis are very strict and hard to predict. The result was a planet-wide search using genetic testing to find the rare and possibly nonexistent matches. They found seven people. The deal was simple: spend ten years in space, alone, in her ship. No contact with any other human except at the midpoint, when the seven ships were allowed to meet up for a week. Two million euros a year, for as long as she followed the rules, and the opportunity to be part of a great experiment, providing data that will hopefully lead to humans becoming a spacefaring species. The core of this story is told during the seven days in the middle of the mission, and thus centers on people unfamiliar with human contact trying to navigate social relationships after five years in symbiotic ships that reshape themselves to their whims and personalities. The ships themselves link so that the others can tour, which offers both a good opportunity for interesting description and a concretized metaphor about meeting other people. I adore symbiotic spaceships, so this story had me at the premise. The surface plot is very psychological, and I didn't entirely click with it, but the sense of wonder vibes beneath that surface were wonderful. It also feels fresh and new: I've seen most of the ideas before, but not presented or written this way, or approached from quite this angle. Definitely the best story of the anthology. (8) "Slow Time Between the Stars" by John Scalzi: This, on the other hand, was a complete waste of time, redeemed only by being the shortest "story" in the collection. "Story" is generous, since there's only one character and a very dry, linear plot that exists only to make a philosophical point. "Speculative essay" may be closer. The protagonist is the artificial intelligence responsible for Earth's greatest interstellar probe. It is packed with a repository of all of human knowledge and the raw material to create life. Its mission is to find an exoplanet capable of sustaining that life, and then recreate it and support it. The plot, such as it is, follows the AI's decision to abandon that mission and cut off contact with Earth, for reasons that it eventually explains. Every possible beat of this story hit me wrong. The sense of wonder attaches to the most prosaic things and skips over the moments that could have provoked real wonder. The AI is both unbelievable and irritating, with all of the smug self-confidence of an Internet reply guy. The prose is overwrought in all the wrong places ("the finger of God, offering the spark to animate the dirt of another world" would totally be this AI's profile quote under their forum avatar). The only thing I liked about the story is the ethical point that it slowly meanders into, which I think I might agree with and at least find plausible. But it's delivered by the sort of character I would actively leave rooms to avoid, in a style that's about as engrossing as a tax form. Avoid. (2) Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Last Watch, by J.S. Dewes

Series:	Divide #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-23634-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	476

The Last Watch is the first book of a far-future science fiction duology. It was J.S. Dewes's first novel. The station of the SCS Argus is the literal edge of the universe: the Divide, beyond which there is nothing. Not simply an absence of stars, but a nothing from a deeper level of physics. The Argus is there to guard against a return of the Viators, the technologically superior alien race that nearly conquered humanity hundreds of years prior and has already returned once, apparently traveling along the Divide. Humanity believes the Viators have been wiped out, but they're not taking chances. It is not a sought-after assignment. The Sentinels are the dregs of the military: convicts, troublemakers, and misfits, banished to the literal edge of nowhere. Joining them at the start of this book is the merchant prince, cocky asshole, and exiled sabateur Cavalon Mercer. He doesn't know what to expect from either military service or service on the edge of the universe. He certainly did not expect the Argus to be commanded by Adequin Rake, a literal war hero and a far more effective leader than this post would seem to warrant. There are reasons why Rake is out on the edge of the universe, ones that she's not eager to talk about. They quickly become an afterthought when the Argus discovers that the Divide is approaching their position. The universe is collapsing, and the only people who know about it are people the System Collective would prefer to forget exist. Yes, the edge of the universe, not the edge of the galaxy. Yes, despite having two FTL mechanisms, this book has a scale problem that it never reconciles. And yes, the physics do not really make sense, although this is not the sort of book that tries to explain the science. The characters are too busy trying to survive to develop new foundational theories of physics. I was looking for more good military SF after enjoying Artifact Space so much (and still eagerly awaiting the sequel), so I picked this up. It has some of the same elements: the military as a place where you can make a fresh start with found family elements, the equalizing effects of military assignments, and the merits of good leadership. They're a bit disguised here, since this is a crew of often-hostile misfits under a lot of stress with a partly checked-out captain, but they do surface towards the end of the book. The strength of this book is the mystery of the contracting universe, which poses both an immediate threat to the ship and a longer-term potential threat to, well, everything. The first part of the book builds tension with the immediate threat, but the story comes into its own when the crew starts piecing together the connections between the Viators and the Divide while jury-rigging technology and making risky choices between a lot of bad options. This is the first half of a duology, so the mysteries are not resolved here, but they do reach a satisfying and tantalizing intermediate conclusion. The writing is servicable and adequate, but it's a bit clunky in places. Dewes doesn't quite have the balance right between setting the emotional stakes and not letting the characters indulge in rumination. Rake is a good captain who is worn down and partly checked out, Mercer is scared and hiding it with arrogance and will do well when given the right sort of attention, and all of this is reasonably obvious early on and didn't need as many of the book's pages as it gets. I could have done without the romantic subplot, which I thought was an unnecessary distraction from the plot and turned into a lot of tedious angst, but I suspect I was not the target audience. (Writers, please remember that people can still care about each other and be highly motivated by fear for each other without being romantic partners.) I would not call this a great book. The characters are not going to surprise you that much, and it's a bit long for the amount of plot that it delivers. If you are the sort of person who nit-picks the physics of SF novels and gets annoyed at writers who don't understand how big the universe is, you will have to take a deep breath and hold on to your suspension of disbelief. But Dewes does a good job with ratcheting up the tension and conveying an atmosphere of mysterious things happening at the edge of nowhere, while still keeping it in the genre of mysterious technology and mind-boggingly huge physical phenomena rather than space horror. If you've been looking for that sort of book, this will do. I was hooked and will definitely read the sequel. Followed by The Exiled Fleet. Rating: 7 out of 10

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.

Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)

Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.

View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).

This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.

Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.

My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.

Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.

Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.

This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.

Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.

Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.

A selfie in memory of Abraham.

We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.

Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)

This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.

Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.

Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal

Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.

I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.

Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA

I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.

From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.

I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.

Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda

Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.

Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

Two years ago, I wrote Managing an External Display on Linux Shouldn t Be This Hard. Happily, since I wrote that post, most of those issues have been resolved. But then you throw HiDPI into the mix and it all goes wonky. If you re running X11, basically the story is that you can change the scale factor, but it only takes effect on newly-launched applications (which means a logout/in because some of your applications you can t really re-launch). That is a problem if, like me, you sometimes connect an external display that is HiDPI, sometimes not, or your internal display is HiDPI but others aren t. Wayland is far better, supporting on-the-fly resizes quite nicely. I ve had two devices with HiDPI displays: a Surface Go 2, and a work-issued Thinkpad. The Surface Go 2 is my ultraportable Linux tablet. I use it sparingly at home, and rarely with an external display. I just put Gnome on it, in part because Gnome had better on-screen keyboard support at the time, and left it at that. On the work-issued Thinkpad, I really wanted to run KDE thanks to its tiling support (I wound up using bismuth with it). KDE was buggy with Wayland at the time, so I just stuck with X11 and ran my HiDPI displays at lower resolutions and lived with the fuzziness. But now that I have a Framework laptop with a HiDPI screen, I wanted to get this right. I tried both Gnome and KDE. Here are my observations with both: Gnome I used PaperWM with Gnome. PaperWM is a tiling manager with a unique horizontal ribbon approach. It grew on me; I think I would be equally at home, or maybe even prefer it, to my usual xmonad-style approach. Editing the active window border color required editing ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/paperwm@hedning:matrix.org/stylesheet.css and inserting background-color and border-color items in the paperwm-selection section. Gnome continues to have an absolutely terrible picture for configuring things. It has no less than four places to make changes (Settings, Tweaks, Extensions, and dconf-editor). In many cases, configuration for a given thing is split between Settings and Tweaks, and sometimes even with Extensions, and then there are sometimes options that are only visible in dconf. That is, where the Gnome people have even allowed something to be configurable. Gnome installs a power manager by default. It offers three options: performance, balanced, and saver. There is no explanation of the difference between them. None. What is it setting when I change the pref? A maximum frequency? A scaling governor? A balance between performance and efficiency cores? Not only that, but there s no way to tell it to just use performance when plugged in and balanced or saver when on battery. In an issue about adding that, a Gnome dev wrote We re not going to add a preference just because you want one . KDE, on the other hand, aside from not mucking with your system s power settings in this way, has a nice panel with on AC and on battery and you can very easily tweak various settings accordingly. The hostile attitude from the Gnome developers in that thread was a real turnoff. While Gnome has excellent support for Wayland, it doesn t (directly) support fractional scaling. That is, you can set it to 100%, 200%, and so forth, but no 150%. Well, unless you manage to discover that you can run gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']" first. (Oh wait, does that make a FIFTH settings tool? Why yes it does.) Despite its name, that allows you to select fractional scaling under Wayland. For X11 apps, they will be blurry, a problem that is optional under KDE (more on that below). Gnome won t show the battery life time remaining on the task bar. Yikes. An extension might work in some cases. Not only that, but the Gnome battery icon frequently failed to indicate AC charging when AC was connected, a problem that didn t exist on KDE. Both Gnome and KDE support night light (warmer color temperatures at night), but Gnome s often didn t change when it should have, or changed on one display but not the other. The appindicator extension is pretty much required, as otherwise a number of applications (eg, Nextcloud) don t have their icon display anywhere. It does, however, generate a significant amount of log spam. There may be a fix for this. Unlike KDE, which has a nice inobtrusive popup asking what to do, Gnome silently automounts USB sticks when inserted. This is often wrong; for instance, if I m about to dd a Debian installer to it, I definitely don t want it mounted. I learned this the hard way. It is particularly annoying because in a GUI, there is no reason to mount a drive before the user tries to access it anyhow. It looks like there is a dconf setting, but then to actually mount a drive you have to open up Files (because OF COURSE Gnome doesn t have a nice removable-drives icon like KDE does) and it s a bunch of annoying clicks, and I didn t want to use the GUI file manager anyway. Same for unmounting; two clicks in KDE thanks to the task bar icon, but in Gnome you have to open up the file manager, unmount the drive, close the file manager again, etc. The ssh agent on Gnome doesn t start up for a Wayland session, though this is easily enough worked around. The reason I completely soured on Gnome is that after using it for awhile, I noticed my laptop fans spinning up. One core would be constantly busy. It was busy with a kworker events task, something to do with sound events. Logging out would resolve it. I believe it to be a Gnome shell issue. I could find no resolution to this, and am unwilling to tolerate the decreased battery life this implies. The Gnome summary: it looks nice out of the box, but you quickly realize that this is something of a paper-thin illusion when you try to actually use it regularly. KDE The KDE experience on Wayland was a little bit opposite of Gnome. While with Gnome, things start out looking great but you realize there are some serious issues (especially battery-eating), with KDE things start out looking a tad rough but you realize you can trivially fix them and wind up with a very solid system. Compared to Gnome, KDE never had a battery-draining problem. It will show me estimated battery time remaining if I want it to. It will do whatever I want it to when I insert a USB drive. It doesn t muck with my CPU power settings, and lets me easily define on AC vs on battery settings for things like suspend when idle. KDE supports fractional scaling, to any arbitrary setting (even with the gsettings thing above, Gnome still only supports it in 25% increments). Then the question is what to do with X11-only applications. KDE offers two choices. The first is Scaled by the system , which is also the only option for Gnome. With that setting, the X11 apps effectively run natively at 100% and then are scaled up within Wayland, giving them a blurry appearance on HiDPI displays. The advantage is that the scaling happens within Wayland, so the size of the app will always be correct even when the Wayland scaling factor changes. The other option is Apply scaling themselves , which uses native X11 scaling. This lets most X11 apps display crisp and sharp, but then if the system scaling changes, due to limitations of X11, you ll have to restart the X apps to get them to be the correct size. I appreciate the choice, and use Apply scaling by themselves because only a few of my apps aren t Wayland-aware. I did encounter a few bugs in KDE under Wayland: sddm, the display manager, would be slow to stop and cause a long delay on shutdown or reboot. This seems to be a known issue with sddm and Wayland, and is easily worked around by adding a systemd TimeoutStopSec. Konsole, the KDE terminal emulator, has weird display artifacts when using fractional scaling under Wayland. I applied some patches and rebuilt Konsole and then all was fine. The Bismuth tiling extension has some pretty weird behavior under Wayland, but a 1-character patch fixes it. On Debian, KDE mysteriously installed Pulseaudio instead of Debian s new default Pipewire, but that was easily fixed as well (and Pulseaudio also works fine). Conclusions I m sticking with KDE. Given that I couldn t figure out how to stop Gnome from deciding to eat enough battery to make my fan come on, the decision wasn t hard. But even if it weren t for that, I d have gone with KDE. Once a couple of things were patched, the experience is solid, fast, and flawless. Emacs (my main X11-only application) looks great with the self-scaling in KDE. Gimp, which I use occasionally, was terrible with the blurry scaling in Gnome. Update: Corrected the gsettings command

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1096 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.5 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 552 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.4. Conrad prepared this a few days ago; it takes me the usual day or so to run reverse-dependency check against the by-now almost 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. And this time, CRAN thought it had found two issues when I submitted and it took two more days til we were all clear about those two being false positives (as can, and does, happen). So today it reached CRAN. The set of changes follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.4.0 (2023-09-06)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.4 (Cortisol Retox)
  • Workarounds for bugs in Apple accelerate framework
  • Fix incorrect calculation of rcond for band matrices in solve()
  • Remove expensive and seldom used optimisations, leading to faster compilation times

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1092 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.3 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 549 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.3. We skipped 12.6.2 at CRAN (as discussed in the previous release notes) as it only affected Armadillo-internal random-number generation (RNG). As we default to supplying the RNGs from R, this did not affect RcppArmadillo. The bug fixes in 12.6.3 are for csv reading which too will most likely be done by R tools for R users, but given two minor bugfix releases an update was in order. I ran the full reverse-depenency check against the now more than 1000 packages overnight: no issues. CRAN processed the package fully automatically as it has no issues, and nothing popped up in reverse-dependency checking. The set of changes for the last two RcppArmadillo releases follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.3.0 (2023-08-28)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.3 (Cortisol Retox)
  • Fix for corner-case in loading CSV files with headers
  • For consistent file handling, all .load() functions now open text files in binary mode

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.2.0 (2023-08-08)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.2 (Cortisol Retox)
  • use thread-safe Mersenne Twister as the default RNG on all platforms
  • use unique RNG seed for each thread within multi-threaded execution (such as OpenMP)
  • explicitly document arma_rng::set_seed() and arma_rng::set_seed_random()
• None of the changes above affect R use as RcppArmadillo connects the RNGs used by R to Armadillo

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Em 2023 o tradicional Debian Day est sendo celebrado de forma especial, afinal no dia 16 de agostoo Debian completou 30 anos! Para comemorar este marco especial na vida do Debian, a comunidade Debian Brasil organizou uma semana de palestras online de 14 a 18 de agosto. O evento foi chamado de Debian 30 anos. Foram realizadas 2 palestras por noite, das 19h s 22h, transmitidas pelo canal Debian Brasil no YouTube totalizando 10 palestras. As grava es j est o dispon veis tamb m no canal Debian Brasil no Peertube. Nas 10 atividades tivemos as participa es de 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contribuidores(as). A audi ncia ao vivo variou bastante, e o pico foi na palestra sobre preseed com o Eriberto Mota quando tivemos 47 pessoas assistindo. Obrigado a todos(as) participantes pela contribui o que voc s deram para o sucesso do nosso evento.

• Antonio Terceiro
• Aquila Macedo
• Charles Melara
• Daniel Lenharo de Souza
• David Polverari
• Eriberto Mota
• Giovani Ferreira
• Jefferson Maier
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
• Sergio Durigan Junior
• Thais Araujo
• Thiago Andrade

Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade:
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old! To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian's life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years. Two talks were held per night, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, streamed on the Debian Brasil channel on YouTube totaling 10 talks. The recordings are also available on the Debian Brazil channel on Peertube. We had the participation of 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contributors in 10 activities. The live audience varied a lot, and the peak was on the preseed talk with Eriberto Mota when we had 47 people watching. Thank you to all participants for the contribution you made to the success of our event.

• Antonio Terceiro
• Aquila Macedo
• Charles Melara
• Daniel Lenharo de Souza
• David Polverari
• Eriberto Mota
• Giovani Ferreira
• Jefferson Maier
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
• Sergio Durigan Junior
• Thais Araujo
• Thiago Andrade

Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade:
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

TL;DR: Color is a visual perception. Human eyes can detect a broader range of colors than any devices in the graphics chain. Since each device can generate, capture or reproduce a specific subset of colors and tones, color management controls color conversion and calibration across devices to ensure a more accurate and consistent color representation. We can expose a GPU-accelerated display color management pipeline to support this process and enhance results, and this is what we are doing on Linux to improve color management on Gamescope/SteamDeck. Even with the challenges of being external developers, we have been working on mapping AMD GPU color capabilities to the Linux kernel color management interface, which is a combination of DRM and AMD driver-specific color properties. This more extensive color management pipeline includes pre-defined Transfer Functions, 1-Dimensional LookUp Tables (1D LUTs), and 3D LUTs before and after the plane composition/blending.

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The study of color is well-established and has been explored for many years. Color science and research findings have also guided technology innovations. As a result, color in Computer Graphics is a very complex topic that I m putting a lot of effort into becoming familiar with. I always find myself rereading all the materials I have collected about color space and operations since I started this journey (about one year ago). I also understand how hard it is to find consensus on some color subjects, as exemplified by all explanations around the 2015 online viral phenomenon of The Black and Blue Dress. Have you heard about it? What is the color of the dress for you? So, taking into account my skills with colors and building consensus, this blog post only focuses on GPU hardware capabilities to support color management :-D If you want to learn more about color concepts and color on Linux, you can find useful links at the end of this blog post.

Linux Kernel, show me the colors ;D DRM color management interface only exposes a small set of post-blending color properties. Proposals to enhance the DRM color API from different vendors have landed the subsystem mailing list over the last few years. On one hand, we got some suggestions to extend DRM post-blending/CRTC color API: DRM CRTC 3D LUT for R-Car (2020 version); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for Intel (draft - 2020); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for AMD by Igalia (v2 - 2023); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for R-Car (v2 - 2023). On the other hand, some proposals to extend DRM pre-blending/plane API: DRM plane colors for Intel (v2 - 2021); DRM plane API for AMD (v3 - 2021); DRM plane 3D LUT for AMD - 2021. Finally, Simon Ser sent the latest proposal in May 2023: Plane color pipeline KMS uAPI, from discussions in the 2023 Display/HDR Hackfest, and it is still under evaluation by the Linux Graphics community. All previous proposals seek a generic solution for expanding the API, but many seem to have stalled due to the uncertainty of matching well the hardware capabilities of all vendors. Meanwhile, the use of AMD color capabilities on Linux remained limited by the DRM interface, as the DCN 3.0 family color caps and mapping diagram below shows the Linux/DRM color interface without driver-specific color properties [*]: Bearing in mind that we need to know the variety of color pipelines in the subsystem to be clear about a generic solution, we decided to approach the issue from a different perspective and worked on enabling a set of Driver-Specific Color Properties for AMD Display Drivers. As a result, I recently sent another round of the AMD driver-specific color mgmt API. For those who have been following the AMD driver-specific proposal since the beginning (see [RFC][V1]), the main new features of the latest version [v2] are the addition of pre-blending Color Transformation Matrix (plane CTM) and the differentiation of Pre-defined Transfer Functions (TF) supported by color blocks. For those who just got here, I will recap this work in two blog posts. This one describes the current status of the AMD display driver in the Linux kernel/DRM subsystem and what changes with the driver-specific properties. In the next post, we go deeper to describe the features of each color block and provide a better picture of what is available in terms of color management for Linux.

The Linux kernel color management API and AMD hardware color capabilities Before discussing colors in the Linux kernel with AMD hardware, consider accessing the Linux kernel documentation (version 6.5.0-rc5). In the AMD Display documentation, you will find my previous work documenting AMD hardware color capabilities and the Color Management Properties. It describes how AMD Display Manager (DM) intermediates requests between the AMD Display Core component (DC) and the Linux/DRM kernel interface for color management features. It also describes the relevant function to call the AMD color module in building curves for content space transformations. A subsection also describes hardware color capabilities and how they evolve between versions. This subsection, DC Color Capabilities between DCN generations, is a good starting point to understand what we have been doing on the kernel side to provide a broader color management API with AMD driver-specific properties.

Why do we need more kernel color properties on Linux? Blending is the process of combining multiple planes (framebuffers abstraction) according to their mode settings. Before blending, we can manage the colors of various planes separately; after blending, we have combined those planes in only one output per CRTC. Color conversions after blending would be enough in a single-plane scenario or when dealing with planes in the same color space on the kernel side. Still, it cannot help to handle the blending of multiple planes with different color spaces and luminance levels. With plane color management properties, userspace can get a more accurate representation of colors to deal with the diversity of color profiles of devices in the graphics chain, bring a wide color gamut (WCG), convert High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) content to Standard-Dynamic-Range (SDR) content (and vice-versa). With a GPU-accelerated display color management pipeline, we can use hardware blocks for color conversions and color mapping and support advanced color management. The current DRM color management API enables us to perform some color conversions after blending, but there is no interface to calibrate input space by planes. Note that here I m not considering some workarounds in the AMD display manager mapping of DRM CRTC de-gamma and DRM CRTC CTM property to pre-blending DC de-gamma and gamut remap block, respectively. So, in more detail, it only exposes three post-blending features:

• DRM CRTC de-gamma: used to convert the framebuffer s colors to linear gamma;
• DRM CRTC CTM: used for color space conversion;
• DRM CRTC gamma: used to convert colors to the gamma space of the connected screen.

AMD driver-specific color management interface We can compare the Linux color management API with and without the driver-specific color properties. From now, we denote driver-specific properties with the AMD prefix and generic properties with the DRM prefix. For visual comparison, I bring the DCN 3.0 family color caps and mapping diagram closer and present it here again: Mixing AMD driver-specific color properties with DRM generic color properties, we have a broader Linux color management system with the following features exposed by properties in the plane and CRTC interface, as summarized by this updated diagram: The blocks highlighted by red lines are the new properties in the driver-specific interface developed by me (Igalia) and Joshua (Valve). The red dashed lines are new links between API and AMD driver components implemented by us to connect the Linux/DRM interface to AMD hardware blocks, mapping components accordingly. In short, we have the following color management properties exposed by the DRM/AMD display driver:

• Pre-blending - AMD Display Pipe and Plane (DPP):
  • AMD plane de-gamma: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to linearize the input space of a plane;
  • AMD plane CTM: 3x4 matrix; used to convert plane color space;
  • AMD plane shaper: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to delinearize and/or normalize colors before applying 3D LUT;
  • AMD plane 3D LUT: 17x17x17 size with 12 bit-depth; three dimensional lookup table used for advanced color mapping;
  • AMD plane blend/out gamma: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to linearize back the color space after 3D LUT for blending.
• Post-blending - AMD Multiple Pipe/Plane Combined (MPC):
  • DRM CRTC de-gamma: 1D LUT (can t be set together with plane de-gamma);
  • DRM CRTC CTM: 3x3 matrix (remapped to post-blending matrix);
  • DRM CRTC gamma: 1D LUT + AMD CRTC gamma TF; added to take advantage of driver pre-defined transfer functions;

Note: You can find more about AMD display blocks in the Display Core Next (DCN) - Linux kernel documentation, provided by Rodrigo Siqueira (Linux/AMD display developer) in a 2021-documentation series. In the next post, I ll revisit this topic, explaining display and color blocks in detail.

How did we get a large set of color features from AMD display hardware? So, looking at AMD hardware color capabilities in the first diagram, we can see no post-blending (MPC) de-gamma block in any hardware families. We can also see that the AMD display driver maps CRTC/post-blending CTM to pre-blending (DPP) gamut_remap, but there is post-blending (MPC) gamut_remap (DRM CTM) from newer hardware versions that include SteamDeck hardware. You can find more details about hardware versions in the Linux kernel documentation/AMDGPU Product Information. I needed to rework these two mappings mentioned above to provide pre-blending/plane de-gamma and CTM for SteamDeck. I changed the DC mapping to detach stream gamut remap matrixes from the DPP gamut remap block. That means mapping AMD plane CTM directly to DPP/pre-blending gamut remap block and DRM CRTC CTM to MPC/post-blending gamut remap block. In this sense, I also limited plane CTM properties to those hardware versions with MPC/post-blending gamut_remap capabilities since older versions cannot support this feature without clashes with DRM CRTC CTM. Unfortunately, I couldn t prevent conflict between AMD plane de-gamma and DRM plane de-gamma since post-blending de-gamma isn t available in any AMD hardware versions until now. The fact is that a post-blending de-gamma makes little sense in the AMD color pipeline, where plane blending works better in a linear space, and there are enough color blocks to linearize content before blending. To deal with this conflict, the driver now rejects atomic commits if users try to set both AMD plane de-gamma and DRM CRTC de-gamma simultaneously. Finally, we had no other clashes when enabling other AMD driver-specific color properties for our use case, Gamescope/SteamDeck. Our main work for the remaining properties was understanding the data flow of each property, the hardware capabilities and limitations, and how to shape the data for programming the registers - AMD color block capabilities (and limitations) are the topics of the next blog post. Besides that, we fixed some driver bugs along the way since it was the first Linux use case for most of the new color properties, and some behaviors are only exposed when exercising the engine. Take a look at the Gamescope/Steam Deck Color Pipeline[**], and see how Gamescope uses the new API to manage color space conversions and calibration (please click on the image for a better view): In the next blog post, I ll describe the implementation and technical details of each pre- and post-blending color block/property on the AMD display driver. * Thank Harry Wentland for helping with diagrams, color concepts and AMD capabilities. ** Thank Joshua Ashton for providing and explaining Gamescope/Steam Deck color pipeline. *** Thanks to the Linux Graphics community - explicitly Harry, Joshua, Pekka, Simon, Sebastian, Siqueira, Alex H. and Ville - to all the learning during this Linux DRM/AMD color journey. Also, Carlos and Tomas for organizing the 2023 Display/HDR Hackfest where we have a great and immersive opportunity to discuss Color & HDR on Linux.

Useful Links

1. Cinematic Color - 2012 SIGGRAPH course notes by Jeremy Selan: an introduction to color science, concepts and pipelines.
2. Color management and HDR documentation for FOSS graphics by Pekka Paalanen: documentation and useful links on applying color concepts to the Linux graphics stack.
3. HDR in Linux by Jeremy Cline: a blog post exploring color concepts for HDR support on Linux.
4. Methods for conversion of high dynamic range content to standard dynamic range content and vice-versa by ITU-R: guideline for conversions between HDR and SDR contents.
5. Using Lookup Tables to Accelerate Color Transformations by Jeremy Selan: Nvidia blog post about Lookup Tables on color management.
6. The Importance of Being Linear by Larry Gritz and Eugene d Eon: Nvidia blog post about gamma and color conversions.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1092 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 545 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.1. Conrad release 12.6.0 when CRAN went on summer break. I rolled it up ran the full reverse-depenency check against the now more than 1000 packages. And usage from one those revealed a corner-case bug (of not always flattening memory for sparse matrices to zero values) so 12.6.1 followed. This is what was uploaded today. And as I prepared it earlier in the week as CRAN reopened, Conrad released a new 12.6.2. However, its changes are only concerned with settings for Armadillo-internal use of its random number generators (RNGs). And as RcppArmadillo connects Armadillo to the RNGs provided by R, the upgrade does not affect R users at all. However it is available in the github repo, in the Rcpp drap repo and at r-universe. The set of changes for this RcppArmadillo release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.1.0 (2023-07-26)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.1 (Cortisol Retox)
  • faster multiplication of dense vectors by sparse matrices (and vice versa)
  • faster eigs_sym() and eigs_gen()
  • faster conv() and conv2() when using OpenMP
  • added diags() and spdiags() for generating band matrices from set of vectors

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a [diffstat report relative to previous release]. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I wrote about how I m exploring the role of AI in human connection and intimacy. The first part of that journey has been all about learning the software and tools for approaching large language models. The biggest thing I wish I had known going in was not to focus on the traditional cloud providers. I was struggling until I found runpod.io. I kind of assumed that if you were willing to pay for it and had the money, you could go to Amazon on or google or whatever and get the compute resources you needed. Not so much. Google completely rejected my request to have the maximum number of GPUs I could run raised above a limit of 0. Go talk to your sales representative. And of course no sales representative was willing to waste their time on me. But I did eventually find some of the smaller AI-specific clouds. I intentionally wanted to run software myself. Everyone has various fine-tuning and training APIs as well as APIs for inference. I thought I d gain a much better understanding if I wrote my own code. That definitely ended up being true. I started by understanding PyTorch and the role of optimizers, gradient descent and what a model is. Then I focused on Transformers and that ecosystem, including Accelerate, tokenizers, generation and training. I m really impressed with the Hugging Face ecosystem. A lot of academic software is very purpose built and is hard to reuse and customize. But the hub strikes an amazing balance between providing abstractions for common interfaces like consuming a model or datasets without getting in the way of hacking on models or evolving the models. I had a great time, and after a number of false starts, succeeded in customizing Llama2 to explore some of the questions on my mind. I ll talk about what I accomplished and learned in the next post.

comments

About a week back Jio launched a laptop called JioBook that will be manufactured in China

The most interesting thing is that the whole thing will be produced in Hunan, China. Then 3 days later India mandates a licensing requirement for Apple, Dell and other laptop/tablet manufacturers. And all of these in the guise of Make in India . It is similar how India has exempted Adani and the Tatas from buying as much solar cells as are needed and then sell the same in India. Reliance will be basically monopolizing the laptop business. And if people think that projects like Raspberry Pi, Arduino etc. will be exempted they have another think coming.

History of License Raj After India became free, in the 1980s the Congress wanted to open its markets to the world just like China did. But at that time, the BJP, though small via Jan Sangh made the argument that we are not ready for the world. The indian businessman needs a bit more time. And hence a compromise was made. The compromise was simple. Indian Industry and people who wanted to get anything from the west, needed a license. This was very much in line how the Russian economy was evolving. All the three nations, India, China and Russia were on similar paths. China broke away where it opened up limited markets for competition and gave state support to its firms. Russia and Japan on the other hand, kept their markets relatively closed. The same thing happened in India, what happened in Russia and elsewhere. The businessman got what he wanted, he just corrupted the system. Reliance, the conglomerate today abused the same system as much as it could. Its defence was to be seen as the small guy. I wouldn t go into that as that itself would be a big story in itself. Whatever was sold in India was sold with huge commissions and just like Russia scarcity became the order of the day. Monopolies flourished and competition was nowhere. These remained till 1991 when Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh was forced to liberalize and open up the markets. Even at that time, the RSS through its Swadeshi Jagran Manch was sharing the end of the world prophecies for the Indian businessman.

2014 Current Regime In 2010, in U.K. the Conservative party came in power under the leadership of David Cameron who was influenced by the policies of Margaret Thatcher who arguably ditched manufacturing in the UK. David Cameron and his party did the same 2010 onwards but for public services under the name austerity. India has been doing the same. The inequality has gone up while people s purchasing power has gone drastically down. CMIE figures are much more drastic and education is a joke.

Add to that since 2016 funding for scientists have gone to the dogs and now they are even playing with doctor s careers. I do not have to remind people that a woman scientist took almost a quarter century to find a drug delivery system that others said was impossible. And she did it using public finance. Science is hard. I have already shared in a previous blog post how it took the Chinese 20 years to reach where they are and somehow we think we will be able to both China and Japan. Of the 160 odd countries that are on planet earth, only a handful of countries have both the means and the knowledge to use and expand on that. While I was not part of Taiwan Debconf, later I came to know that even Taiwan in many ways is similar to Japan in the sense that a majority of its population is stuck in low-paid jobs (apart from those employed in TSMC) which is similar to Keiretsu or Chabeol from either Japan or South Korea. In all these cases, only a small percentage of the economy is going forward while the rest is stagnating or even going backwards. Similar is the case in India as well Unlike the Americans who chose the path to have more competition, we have chosen the path to have more monopolies. So even though, I very much liked Louis es project sooner or later finding the devices itself would be hard. While the recent notification is for laptops, what stops them from doing the same with mobiles or even desktop systems. As it is, both smartphones as well as desktop systems has been contracting since last year as food inflation has gone up. Add to that availability of products has been made scarce (whether by design or not, unknown.) The end result, the latest processor launched overseas becomes the new thing here 3-4 years later. And that was before this notification. This will only decrease competition and make Ambanis rich at cost of everyone else. So much for east of doing business . Also the backlash has been pretty much been tepid. So what I shared will probably happen again sooner or later. The only interesting thing is that it s based on Android, probably in part due to the issues people seeing in both Windows 10, 11 and whatnot. Till later. Update :- The print tried a decluttering but instead cluttered the topic. While what he shared all was true, and certainly it is a step backwards but he didn t need to show how most Indians had to go to RBI for the same. I remember my Mamaji doing the same and sharing afterwards that all he had was $100 for a day which while being a big sum was paltry if you were staying in a hotel and were there for company business. He survived on bananas and whatver cheap veg. he could find then. This is almost 35-40 odd years ago. As shared the Govt. has been doing missteps for quite sometime now. The print does try to take a balanced take so it doesn t run counter of the Government but even it knows that this is a bad take. The whole thing about security is just laughable, did they wake up after 9 years. And now in its own wisdom it apparently has shifted the ban instead from now to 3 months afterwards. Of course, most people on the right just applauding without understanding the complexities and implications of the same. Vendors like Samsung and Apple who have made assembly operations would do a double-think and shift to Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico anywhere. Global money follows global trends. And such missteps do not help

Implications in A.I. products One of the things that has not been thought about how companies that are making A.I. products in India or even MNC s will suffer. Most of them right now are in stealth mode but are made for Intel or AMD or ARM depending upon how it works for them. There is nothing to tell if the companies made their plea and was it heard or unheard. If the Government doesn t revert it then sooner or later they would either have to go abroad or cash out/sell to somebody else. Some people on the right also know this but for whatever reason have chosen to remain silent. Till later

This post describes how to deploy cilium (and hubble) using docker on a Linux system with k3d or kind to test it as CNI and Service Mesh. I wrote some scripts to do a local installation and evaluate cilium to use it at work (in fact we are using cilium on an EKS cluster now), but I thought it would be a good idea to share my original scripts in this blog just in case they are useful to somebody, at least for playing a little with the technology.

LinksAs there is no point on explaining here all the concepts related to cilium I m providing some links for the reader interested on reading about it:

• What is CNI?
• What is Cilium?
• What is eBPF?
• What is Hubble?
• Why use Cilium with Kubernetes?

All the scripts and configuration files discussed in this post are available on my cilium-docker git repository.

InstallationFor each platform we are going to deploy two clusters on the same docker network; I ve chosen this model because it allows the containers to see the addresses managed by metallb from both clusters (the idea is to use those addresses for load balancers and treat them as if they were public). The installation(s) use cilium as CNI, metallb for BGP (I tested the cilium options, but I wasn t able to configure them right) and nginx as the ingress controller (again, I tried to use cilium but something didn t work either). To be able to use the previous components some default options have been disabled on k3d and kind and, in the case of k3d, a lot of k3s options (traefik, servicelb, kubeproxy, network-policy, ) have also been disabled to avoid conflicts. To use the scripts we need to install cilium, docker, helm, hubble, k3d, kind, kubectl and tmpl in our system. After cloning the repository, the sbin/tools.sh script can be used to do that on a linux-amd64 system:

$ git clone https://gitea.mixinet.net/blogops/cilium-docker.git
$ cd cilium-docker
$ ./sbin/tools.sh apps

Once we have the tools, to install everything on k3d (for kind replace k3d by kind) we can use the sbin/cilium-install.sh script as follows:

$ # Deploy first k3d cluster with cilium & cluster-mesh
$ ./sbin/cilium-install.sh k3d 1 full
[...]
$ # Deploy second k3d cluster with cilium & cluster-mesh
$ ./sbin/cilium-install.sh k3d 2 full
[...]
$ # The 2nd cluster-mesh installation connects the clusters

If we run the command cilium status after the installation we should get an output similar to the one seen on the following screenshot:

The installation script uses the following templates:

• tmpl/k3d-config.yaml: configuration to deploy the k3d cluster.
• tmpl/kind-config.yaml: configuration to deploy the kind cluster.
• tmpl/metallb-crds.yaml and tmpl/ippols.yaml: configurations for the metallb deployment.
• tmpl/cilium.yaml: values to deploy the cilium using the helm chart.

Once we have finished our tests we can remove the installation using the sbin/cilium-remove.sh script.

Some notes about the configuration

• As noted on the documentation, the cilium deployment needs to mount the bpffs on /sys/fs/bpf and cgroupv2 on /run/cilium/cgroupv2; that is done automatically on kind, but fails on k3d because the image does not include bash (see this issue).To fix it we mount a script on all the k3d containers that is executed each time they are started (the script is mounted as /bin/k3d-entrypoint-cilium.sh because the /bin/k3d-entrypoint.sh script executes the scripts that follow the pattern /bin/k3d-entrypoint-*.sh before launching the k3s daemon). The source code of the script is available here.
• When testing the multi-cluster deployment with k3d we have found issues with open files, looks like they are related to inotify (see this page on the kind documentation); adding the following to the /etc/sysctl.conf file fixed the issue:

  # fix inotify issues with docker & k3d
  fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
  fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 512

• Although the deployment theoretically supports it, we are not using cilium as the cluster ingress yet (it did not work, so it is no longer enabled) and we are also ignoring the gateway-api for now.
• The documentation uses the cilium cli to do all the installations, but I noticed that following that route the current version does not work right with hubble (it messes up the TLS support, there are some notes about the problems on this cilium issue), so we are deploying with helm right now.The problem with the helm approach is that there is no official documentation on how to install the cluster mesh with it (there is a request for documentation here), so we are using the cilium cli for now and it looks that it does not break the hubble configuration.

TestsTo test cilium we have used some scripts & additional config files that are available on the test sub directory of the repository:

• cilium-connectivity.sh: a script that runs the cilium connectivity test for one cluster or in multi cluster mode (for mesh testing).If we export the variable HUBBLE_PF=true the script executes the command cilium hubble port-forward before launching the tests.
• http-sw.sh: Simple tests for cilium policies from the cilium demo; the script deploys the Star Wars demo application and allows us to add the L3/L4 policy or the L3/L4/L7 policy, test the connectivity and view the policies.
• ingress-basic.sh: This test is for checking the ingress controller, it is prepared to work against cilium and nginx, but as explained before the use of cilium as an ingress controller is not working as expected, so the idea is to call it with nginx always as the first argument for now.
• mesh-test.sh: Tool to deploy a global service on two clusters, change the service affinity to local or remote, enable or disable if the service is shared and test how the tools respond.

Running the testsThe cilium-connectivity.sh executes the standard cilium tests:

$ ./test/cilium-connectivity.sh k3d 12
   Monitor aggregation detected, will skip some flow validation
steps
  [k3d-cilium1] Creating namespace cilium-test for connectivity
check...
  [k3d-cilium2] Creating namespace cilium-test for connectivity
check...
[...]
  All 33 tests (248 actions) successful, 2 tests skipped,
0 scenarios skipped.

To test how the cilium policies work use the http-sw.sh script:

kubectx k3d-cilium2 # (just in case)
# Create test namespace and services
./test/http-sw.sh create
# Test without policies (exaust-port fails by design)
./test/http-sw.sh test
# Create and view L3/L4 CiliumNetworkPolicy
./test/http-sw.sh policy-l34
# Test policy (no access from xwing, exaust-port fails)
./test/http-sw.sh test
# Create and view L7 CiliumNetworkPolicy
./test/http-sw.sh policy-l7
# Test policy (no access from xwing, exaust-port returns 403)
./test/http-sw.sh test
# Delete http-sw test
./test/http-sw.sh delete

And to see how the service mesh works use the mesh-test.sh script:

# Create services on both clusters and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d create
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Disable service sharing from cluster 1 and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-shared-false
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Restore sharing, set local affinity and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-shared-default
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-affinity-local
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Delete deployment from cluster 1 and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d delete-deployment
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Delete test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d delete

Last month I blogged about how the mainstream media is focusing on the wrong parts of the Artificial Intelligence/ChatGPT story. One of the comments left on the post was:

I encourage you to dig a little deeper. If LLM s were just probability
machines, no one would be raising any flags.
Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark and many others are not simpletons. It is the fact that
the architecture and specific training (deep NN, back prop / gradient descend)
produces a system with emergent properties, beyond just a probability machine,
when the system size reaches some thresholds, that has them spooked.
They do understand mathematics and stats and probabilities, i assure you. It is
just that you may have only read the layman s articles and not the scientific
ones

I confess: I haven t made much progress in this regard. I gave Vicky Boykis' Embeddings a go, and started to get a handle on the math, but honestly had a hard time following it. I m open to suggestions from anyone with a few good recommendations for scientific papers accessible to non-math professionals, particularly ones that explain the emergent properties and what that means. Meanwhile, regardless of the scientific truths or falsehoods around chat GPT, the mainstream media continues to miserably fail in helping the rest of us understand the implications of this technology. Most recently, I listend to This American Life s First Contact (part of their Greetings People of Earth show). They interviewed several Microsft AI researchers who first experimented with ChatGPT 4 prior to it s big release. The focus of the researchers was: can we demonstrate chat GPT s general intelligence ability by presenting it with logic problems it could not possibly have encountered before? And the answer: YES! The two examples were:

1. Stacking: the researcher asked chat GPT how to stack a number of odd objects in a stable way (a book, a dozen eggs, a nail, etc) and chat GPT gave both the correct answer and a reasonable explanation of why.
2. Hidden state: the researcher described two people in a room with a cat. One person put the cat in a basket and left. The other moved the cat to a box ad left. And, remarkably, chat GPT could explain that when they returned, the first person would think the cat is in the basket and the second person would know it s in the box.

I thought this was pretty cool. So I fired up chat GPT (and even ponied up for chat GPT version 4). I asked it my own stacking question and, hm, chat GPT thought a plate should be placed on top of a can of soda instead of beneath it. So, well, mostly right but I m pretty sure any reasonable human would put the can of soda on the plate not the other way around (chat GPT 3.5 wanted the can of soda to be balanced on the tip of the nail). I then asked it my own simple version of the cat problem and it got it right. Very good. But when I asked it a much more complicated and weird version of the cat problem (involving beetles in a mansion with a movie theater and changing movies and a butler with a big mustache) it got the answer flat out wrong. Did anyone at This American Life try this? Really? It seems like a basic responsibility of journalism to fact check the experts. Maybe the scientists would have had a convincing response? Or maybe scientists are just like everyone else and can get caught up in the excitement and make mistakes? I am amazed and awed by what chat GPT can do - it truly is remarkable. And, I think that a lot of human intelligence is synthesizing what we ve seen and simply regurgitating it in a different context - a task that chat GPT is way better at doing than we are. But the overriding message of most mainstream media stories is that chat GPT is somehow going beyond word synthesis and probability and magically tapping into a form of logic. If the scientific papers are demonstrating this remarkable feat, I think the media needs to do a way better job reporting it.

As a follow up to Wayland [1]: A difficult problem with Linux desktop systems (which includes phones and tablets) is restricting application access so that applications can t mess with each other s data or configuration but also allowing them to share data as needed. This has been mostly solved for Android but that involved giving up all legacy Linux apps. I think that we need to get phones capable of running a full desktop environment and having Android level security on phone apps and regular desktop apps. My interest in this is phones running Debian and derivatives such as PureOS. But everything I describe in this post should work equally well for all full featured Linux distributions for phones such as Arch, Gentoo, etc and phone based derivatives of those such as Manjaro. It may be slightly less applicable to distributions such as Alpine Linux and it s phone derivative PostmarketOS, I would appreciate comments from contributors to PostmarketOS or Alpine Linux about this. I ve investigated some of the ways of solving these problems. Many of the ways of doing this involves namespaces. The LWN articles about namespaces are a good background to some of these technologies [2]. The LCA keynote lecture Containers aka crazy user space fun by Jess Frazelle has a good summary of some of the technology [3]. One part that I found particularly interesting was the bit about recognising the container access needed at compile time. This can also be part of recognising bad application design at compile time, it s quite common for security systems to flag bad security design in programs. Firejail To sandbox applications you need to have some method of restricting what they do, this means some combination of namespaces and similar features. Here s an article on sandboxing with firejail [4]. Firejail uses namespaces, seccomp-bpf, and capabilities to restrict programs. It allows bind mounts if run as root and if not run as root it can restrict file access by name and access to networking, system calls, and other features. It has a convenient learning mode that generates policy for you, so if you have a certain restricted set of tasks that an application is to perform you can run it once and then force it to do only the same operations in future. I recommend that everyone who is still reading at this point try out firejail. Here s an example of what you can do:

# create a profile
firejail --build=xterm.profile xterm
# now this run can only do what the previous run did
firejail --profile=xterm.profile xterm

Note that firejail is SETUID root so can potentially reduce system security and it has had security issues in the past. In spite of that it can be good for allowing a trusted user to run programs with less access to the system. Also it is a good way to start learning about such things. I don t think it s a good solution for what I want to do. But I won t rule out the possibility of using it at some future time for special situations. Bubblewrap I tried out firejail with the browser Epiphany (Debian package epiphany-browser) on my Librem5, but that didn t work as Epiphany uses /usr/bin/bwrap (bubblewrap) for it s internal sandboxing (here is an informative blog post about the history of bubblewrap AKA xdg-app-helper which was developed as part of flatpak [5]). The Epiphany bubblewrap sandbox is similar to the situation with Chrome/Chromium which have internal sandboxing that s incompatible with firejail. The firejail man page notes that it s not compatible with Snap, Flatpack, and similar technologies. One issue this raises is that we can t have a namespace based sandboxing system applied to all desktop apps with no extra configuration as some desktop apps won t work with it. Bubblewrap requires setting kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 to run as non-root (IE provide the normal and expected functionality) which potentially reduces system security. Here is an example of a past kernel bug that was exploitable by creating a user namespace with CAP_SYS_ADMIN [6]. But it s the default in recent Debian kernels which means that the issues have been reviewed and determined to be a reasonable trade-off and also means that many programs will use the feature and break if it s disabled. Here is an example of how to use Bubblewrap on Debian, after installing the bubblewrap run the following command. Note that the new-session option (to prevent injecting characters in the keyboard buffer with TIOCSTI) makes the session mostly unusable for a shell.

bwrap --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --die-with-parent bash

Here is an example of using Bubblewrap to sandbox the game Warzone2100 running with Wayland/Vulkan graphics and Pulseaudio sound.

bwrap --bind $HOME/.local/share/warzone2100 $HOME/.local/share/warzone2100 --bind /run/user/$UID/pulse /run/user/$UID/pulse --bind /run/user/$UID/wayland-0 /run/user/$UID/wayland-0 --bind /run/user/$UID/wayland-0.lock /run/user/$UID/wayland-0.lock --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri --ro-bind $HOME/.pulse $HOME/.pulse --ro-bind $XAUTHORITY $XAUTHORITY --ro-bind /sys /sys --new-session --die-with-parent warzone2100

Here is an example of using Bubblewrap to sandbox the Debian bug reporting tool reportbug

bwrap --bind /tmp /tmp --ro-bind /etc /etc --ro-bind /usr /usr --ro-bind /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg --symlink usr/sbin /sbin --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --symlink /usr/lib32 /lib32 --symlink /usr/libx32 /libx32 --proc /proc --dev /dev --die-with-parent --unshare-ipc --unshare-pid reportbug

Here is an example shell script to wrap the build process for Debian packages. This needs to run with unshare-user and specifying the UID as 0 because fakeroot doesn t work in the container, I haven t worked out why but doing it through the container is a better method anyway. This script shares read-write the parent of the current directory as the Debian build process creates packages and metadata files in the parent directory. This will prevent the automatic signing scripts which is a feature not a bug, so after building packages you have to sign the .changes file with debsign. One thing I just learned is that the Debian build system Sbuild can use chroots for building packages for similar benefits [7]. Some people believe that sbuild is the correct way of doing it regardless of the chroot issue. I think it s too heavy-weight for most of my Debian package building, but even if I had been convinced I d still share the information about how to use bwrap as Debian is about giving users choice.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
BUILDDIR=$(realpath $(pwd)/..)
exec bwrap --bind /tmp /tmp --bind $BUILDDIR $BUILDDIR --ro-bind /etc /etc --ro-bind /usr /usr --ro-bind /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --die-with-parent --unshare-user --unshare-ipc --unshare-net --unshare-pid --new-session --uid 0 --gid 0 $@

Here is an informative blog post about using Bubblewrap with Seccomp (BPF) [8]. In a future post I ll write about how to get this sort of thing going but I ll just leave the URL here for people who want to do it on their own. The source for the flatpak-run program is the only example I could find of using Seccomp with Bubblewrap [9]. A lot of that code is worth copying for application sandboxing, maybe the entire program. Unshare The unshare command from the util-linux package has a large portion of the Bubblewrap functionality. The things that it doesn t do like creating a new session can be done by other utilities. Here is an example of creating a container with unshare and then using cgroups with it [10]. systemd --user Recent distributions have systemd support for running a user session, the Arch Linux Wiki has a good description of how this works [11]. The units for a user are .service files stored in /usr/lib/systemd/user/ (distribution provided), ~/.local/share/systemd/user/ (user installed applications in debian a link to ~/.config/systemd/user/), ~/.config/systemd/user/ (for manual user config), and /etc/systemd/user/ (local sysadmin provided) Here are some example commands for manipulating this:

# show units running for the current user
systemctl --user
# show status of one unit
systemctl --user status kmail.service
# add an environment variable to the list for all user units
systemctl --user import-environment XAUTHORITY
# start a user unit
systemctl --user start kmail.service
# analyse security for all units for the current user
systemd-analyze --user security
# analyse security for one unit
systemd-analyze --user security kmail.service

Here is a test kmail.service file I wrote to see what could be done for kmail, I don t think that kmail is the app most needing to be restricted it is in more need of being protected from other apps but it still makes a good test case. This service file took it from the default risk score of 9.8 (UNSAFE) to 6.3 (MEDIUM) even though I was getting the error code=exited, status=218/CAPABILITIES when I tried anything that used capabilities (apparently due to systemd having some issue talking to the kernel).

[Unit]
Description=kmail
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kmail
# can not limit capabilities (code=exited, status=218/CAPABILITIES)
#CapabilityBoundingSet=~CAP_SYS_TIME CAP_SYS_PACCT CAP_KILL CAP_WAKE_ALARM CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_FOWNER CAP_IPC_OWNER CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE CAP_IPC_LOCK CAP_SYS_MODULE CAP_SYS_TTY_CONFIG CAP_SYS_BOOT CAP_SYS_CHROOT CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND CAP_LEASE CAP_MKNOD CAP_CHOWN CAP_FSETID CAP_SETFCAP CAP_SETGID CAP_SETUID CAP_SETPCAP CAP_SYS_RAWIO CAP_SYS_PTRACE CAP_SYS_NICE CAP_SYS_RESOURCE CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_NET_BROADCAST CAP_NET_RAW CAP_SYS_ADMIN CAP_SYSLOG
# also 218 for ProtectKernelModules PrivateDevices ProtectKernelLogs ProtectClock
# MemoryDenyWriteExecute stops it displaying message content (bad)
# needs @resources and @mount to startup
# needs @privileged to display message content
SystemCallFilter=~@cpu-emulation @debug @raw-io @reboot @swap @obsolete
SystemCallArchitectures=native
UMask=077
NoNewPrivileges=true
ProtectControlGroups=true
PrivateMounts=false
RestrictNamespaces=~user pid net uts mnt cgroup ipc
RestrictSUIDSGID=true
ProtectHostname=true
LockPersonality=true
ProtectKernelTunables=true
RestrictAddressFamilies=~AF_PACKET
RestrictRealtime=true
ProtectSystem=strict
ProtectProc=invisible
PrivateUsers=true
[Install]

When I tried to use the TemporaryFileSystem=%h directive (to make the home directory a tmpfs the most basic step in restricting what a regular user application can do) I got the error (code=exited, status=226/NAMESPACE) . So I don t think the systemd user setup competes with bubblewrap for restricting user processes. But if anyone else can start where I left off and go further then that will be interesting. Systemd-run The following shell script runs firefox as a dynamic user via systemd-run, running this asks for the root password and any mechanism for allowing that sort of thing opens potential security holes. So at this time while it s an interesting feature I don t think it is suitable for running regular applications on a phone or Linux desktop.

#!/bin/bash
# systemd-run Firefox with DynamicUser and home directory.
#
# Run as a non-root user.
# Or, run as root and change $USER below.
SANDBOX_MINIMAL=(
    --property=DynamicUser=1
    --property=StateDirectory=openstreetmap
    # --property=RootDirectory=/debian_sid
)
SANDBOX_X11=(
    # Sharing Xorg always defeats security, regardless of any sandboxing tech,
    # but the config is almost ready for Wayland, and there's Xephyr.
#    --property=LoadCredential=.ICEauthority:/home/$USER/.ICEauthority
    --property=LoadCredential=.Xauthority:/home/$USER/.Xauthority
    --property=Environment=DISPLAY=:0
)
SANDBOX_FIREFOX=(
    # hardware-accelerated rendering
    --property=BindPaths=/dev/dri
    # webcam
    # --property=SupplementaryGroups=video
)
systemd-run  \
    "$ SANDBOX_MINIMAL[@] "  "$ SANDBOX_X11[@] " "$ SANDBOX_FIREFOX[@] " \
    bash -c '
        export XAUTHORITY="$CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY"/.Xauthority
        export ICEAUTHORITY="$CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY"/.ICEauthority
        export HOME="$STATE_DIRECTORY"/home
        firefox --no-remote about:blank
    '

Qubes OS Here is an interesting demo video of QubesOS [12] which shows how it uses multiple VMs to separate different uses. Here is an informative LCA presentation about Qubes which shows how it asks the user about communication between VMs and access to hardware [13]. I recommend that everyone who hasn t seen Qubes in operation watch the first video and everyone who isn t familiar with the computer science behind it watch the second video. Qubes appears to be a free software equivalent to NetTop as far as I can tell without ever being able to use NetTop. I don t think Qubes is a good match for my needs in general use and it definitely isn t a good option for phones (VMs use excessive CPU on phones). But it s methods for controlling access have some ideas that are worth copying. File Access XDG Desktop Portal One core issue for running sandboxed applications is to allow them to access files permitted by the user but no other files. There are two main parts to this problem, the easier one is to have each application have it s own private configuration directory which can be addressed by bind mounts, MAC systems, running each application under a different UID or GID, and many other ways. The hard part of file access is to allow the application to access random files that the user wishes. For example I want my email program, IM program, and web browser to be able to save files and also to be able to send arbitrary files via email, IM, and upload to web sites. But I don t want one of those programs to be able to access all the files from the others if it s compromised. So only giving programs access to arbitrary files when the user chooses such a file makes sense. There is a package xdg-desktop-portal which provides a dbus interface for opening files etc for a sandboxed application [14]. This portal has backends for KDE, GNOME, and Wayland among others which allow the user to choose which file or files the application may access. Chrome/Chromium is one well known program that uses the xdg-desktop-portal and does it s own sandboxing. To use xdg-desktop-portal an application must be modified to use that interface instead of opening files directly, so getting this going with all Internet facing applications will take some work. But the documentation notes that the portal API gives a consistent user interface for operations such as opening files so it can provide benefits even without a sandboxed environment. This technology was developed for Flatpak and is now also used for Snap. It also has a range of APIs for accessing other services [15]. Flatpak Flatpack is a system for distributing containerised versions of applications with some effort made to improve security. Their development of bubblewrap and xdg-desktop-portal is really good work. However the idea of having software packaged with all libraries it needs isn t a good one, here s a blog post covering some of the issues [16]. The web site flatkill.org has been registered to complain about some Flatpak problems [17]. They have some good points about the approach that Flatpak project developers have taken towards some issues. They also make some points about the people who package software not keeping up to date with security fixes and not determining a good security policy for their pak. But this doesn t preclude usefully using parts of the technology for real security benefits. If parts of Flatpak like Bubblewrap and xdg-portal are used with good security policies on programs that are well packaged for a distribution then these issues would be solved. The Flatpak app author s documentation about package requirements [18] has an overview of security features that is quite reasonable. If most paks follow that then it probably isn t too bad. I reviewed the manifests of a few of the recent paks and they seemed to have good settings. In the amount of time I was prepared to spend investigating this I couldn t find evidence to support the Flatkill claim about Flatpaks granting obviously inappropriate permissions. But the fact that the people who run Flathub decided to put a graph of installs over time on the main page for each pak while making the security settings only available by clicking the Manifest github link, clicking on a JSON or YAML file, and then searching for the right section in that shows where their priorities lie. The finish-args section of the Flatpak manifest (the section that describes the access to the system) seems reasonably capable and not difficult for users to specify as well as being in common use. It seems like it will be easy enough to take some code from Flatpak for converting the finish-args into Bubblewrap parameters and then use the manifest files from Flathub as a starting point for writing application security policy for Debian packages. Snap Snap is developed by Canonical and seems like their version of Flatpak with some Docker features for managing versions, the Getting Started document is worth reading [19]. They have Connections between different snaps and the system where a snap registers a plug that connects to a socket which can be exposed by the system (EG the camera socket) or another snap. The local admin can connect and disconnect them. The connections design reminds me of the Android security model with permitting access to various devices. The KDE Neon extension [20] has been written to add Snap support to KDE. Snap seems quite usable if you have an ecosystem of programs using it which Canonical has developed. But it has all the overheads of loopback mounts etc that you don t want on a mobile device and has the security issues of libraries included in snaps not being updated. A quick inspection of an Ubuntu 22.04 system I run (latest stable release) has Firefox 114.0.2-1 installed which includes libgcrypt.so.20.2.5 which is apparently libgcrypt 1.8.5 and there are CVEs relating to libgcrypt versions before 1.9.4 and 1.8.x versions before 1.8.8 which were published in 2021 and updated in 2022. Further investigation showed that libgcrypt came from the gnome-3-38-2004 snap (good that it doesn t require all shared objects to be in the same snap, but that it has old versions in dependencies). The gnome-3-38-2004 snap is the latest version so anyone using the Snap of Firefox seems to have no choice but to have what appears to be insecure libraries. The strict mode means that the Snap in question has no system access other than through interfaces [21]. SE Linux and Apparmor The Librem5 has Apparmor running by default. I looked into writing Apparmor policy to prevent Epiphany from accessing all files under the home directory, but that would be a lot of work. Also at least one person has given up on maintaining an Epiphany profile for Apparmor because it changes often and it s sandbox doesn t work well with Apparmor [22]. This was not a surprise to me at all, SE Linux policy has the same issues as Apparmor in this regard. The Ubuntu Security Team Application Confinement document [23] is worth reading. They have some good plans for using AppArmor as part of solving some of these problems. I plan to use SE Linux for that. Slightly Related Things One thing for the future is some sort of secure boot technology, the LCA lecture Becoming a tyrant: Implementing secure boot in embedded devices [24] has some ideas for the future. The Betrusted project seems really interesting, see Bunnie s lecture about how to create a phone size security device with custom OS [25]. The Betrusted project web page is worth reading too [26]. It would be ironic to have a phone as your main PC that is the same size as your security device, but that seems to be the logical solution to several computing problems. Whonix is a Linux distribution that has one VM for doing Tor stuff and another VM for all other programs which is only allowed to have network access via the Tor VM [27]. Xpra does for X programs what screen/tmux do for text mode programs [28]. It allows isolating X programs from each other in ways that are difficult to impossible with a regular X session. In an ideal situation we could probably get the benefits we need with just using Wayland, but if there are legacy apps that only have X support this could help. Conclusion I think that currently the best option for confining desktop apps is Bubblewrap on Wayland. Maybe with a modified version of Flatpak-run to run it and with app modifications to use the xdg-portal interfaces as much as possible. That should be efficient enough in storage space, storage IO performance, memory use, and CPU use to run on phones while giving some significant benefits. Things to investigate are how much code from Flatpak to use, how to most efficiently do the configuration (maybe the Flatpak way because it s known and seems effective), how to test this (and have regression tests), and what default settings to use. Also BPF is a big thing to investigate.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/25/wayland/
• [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mzbIOtcIaQ
• [4] https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/sandbox.html
• [5] https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-history/
• [6] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-0185
• [7] https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yf95crkq
• [9] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/blob/main/common/flatpak-run.c
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/26gwmrw3
• [11] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd/User
• [12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPAvoFsvSbg
• [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3chZTdBgRSE
• [14] https://snapcraft.io/docs/xdg-desktop-portals
• [15] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/
• [16] https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/
• [17] https://flatkill.org/
• [18] https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/requirements
• [19] https://snapcraft.io/docs/getting-started
• [20] https://snapcraft.io/docs/kde-neon-extension
• [21] https://snapcraft.io/docs/choosing-a-security-model
• [22] https://github.com/krathalan/apparmor-profiles/blob/master/README.md
• [23] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Specifications/ApplicationConfinement
• [24] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS2sk3P1_Cc
• [25] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pIr3Q7gqNI&t=2559s
• [26] https://betrusted.io/
• [27] https://www.whonix.org/
• [28] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpra

Review: Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Series:	Semiosis #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	February 2018
ISBN:	0-7653-9137-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	333

Semiosis is a first-contact science fiction novel and the first half of a duology. It was Sue Burke's first novel. In the 2060s, with the Earth plagued by environmental issues, a group of utopians decided to found a colony on another planet. Their goal is to live in harmony with an unspoiled nature. They wrote a suitably high-minded founding document, the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax, and set out in cold sleep on an interstellar voyage. 158 years later, they awoke in orbit around a planet with a highly-developed ecology, which they named Pax. Two pods and several colonists were lost on landing, but the rest remained determined to follow through with their plan. Not that they had many alternatives. Pax does not have cities or technological mammalian life, just as they hoped. It does, however, have intelligent life. This novel struggled to win me over for reasons that aren't the fault of Burke's writing. The first is that it is divided into seven parts, each telling the story of a different generation. Intellectually, I like this technique for telling an anthropological story that follows a human society over time. But emotionally, I am a character reader first and foremost, and I struggle with books where I can't follow the same character throughout. It makes the novel feel more like a fix-up of short stories, and I'm not much of a short story reader. Second, this is one of those stories where a human colony loses access to its technology and falls back to a primitive lifestyle. This is a concept I find viscerally unpleasant and very difficult to read about. I don't mind reading stories that start at the lower technological level and rediscover lost technology, but the process of going backwards, losing knowledge, surrounded by breaking technology that can never be repaired, is disturbing at a level that throws me out of the story. It doesn't help that the original colonists chose to embrace that reversion. Some of this wasn't intentional some vital equipment was destroyed when they landed but a lot of it was the plan from the start. They are the type of fanatics who embrace a one-way trip and cannibalizing the equipment used to make it in order to show their devotion to the cause. I spent the first part of the book thinking the founding colonists were unbelievably foolish, but then they started enforcing an even more restrictive way of life on their children and that tipped me over into considering them immoral. This was the sort of political movement that purged all religion and political philosophy other than their one true way so that they could raise "uncorrupted" children. Burke does recognize how deeply abusive this is. The second part of the book, which focuses on the children of the initial colonists, was both my favorite section and had my favorite protagonist, precisely because someone put words to the criticisms that I'd been thinking since the start of the book. The book started off on a bad foot with me, but if it had kept up the momentum of political revolution and rethinking provided by the second part, it might have won me over. That leads to the third problem, though, which is the first contact part of the story. (If you've heard anything about this series, you probably know what the alien intelligence is, and even if not you can probably guess, but I'll avoid spoilers anyway.) This is another case where the idea is great, but I often don't get along with it as a reader. I'm a starships and AIs and space habitats sort of SF reader by preference and tend to struggle with biological SF, even though I think it's great more of it is being written. In this case, mind-altering chemicals enter the picture early in the story, and while this makes perfect sense given the world-building, this is another one of my visceral dislikes. A closely related problem is that the primary alien character is, by human standards, a narcissistic asshole. This is for very good story and world-building reasons. I bought the explanation that Burke offers, I like the way this shows how there's no reason to believe humans have a superior form of intelligence, and I think Burke's speculations on the nature of that alien intelligence are fascinating. There are a lot of good reasons to think that alien morality would be wildly different from human morality. But, well, I'm still a human reading this book and I detested the alien, which is kind of a problem given how significant of a character it is. That's a lot baggage for a story to overcome. It says something about how well-thought-out the world-building is that it kept my attention anyway. Burke uses the generational structure very effectively. Events, preferences, or even whims early in the novel turn into rituals or traditions. Early characters take on outsized roles in history. The humans stick with the rather absurd constitution of Pax, but do so in a way that feels true to how humans reinterpret and stretch and layer meaning on top of wholly inadequate documents written in complete ignorance of the challenges that later generations will encounter. I would have been happier without the misery and sickness and messy physicality of this abusive colonization project, but watching generations of humans patch together a mostly functioning society was intellectually satisfying. The alien interactions were also solid, with the caveat that it's probably impossible to avoid a lot of anthropomorphizing. If I were going to sum up the theme of the novel in a sentence, it's that even humans who think they want to live in harmony with nature are carrying more arrogance about what that harmony would look like than they realize. In most respects the human colonists stumbled across the best-case scenario for them on this world, and it was still harder than anything they had imagined. Unfortunately, I thought the tail end of the book had the weakest plot. It fell back on a story that could have happened in a lot of first-contact novels, rather than the highly original negotiation over ecological niches that happened in the first half of the book. Out of eight viewpoint characters in this book, I only liked one of them (Sylvia). Tatiana and Lucille were okay, and I might have warmed to them if they'd had more time in the spotlight, but I felt like they kept making bad decisions. That's the main reason why I can't really recommend it; I read for characters, I didn't really like the characters, and it's hard for a book to recover from that. It made the story feel chilly and distant, more of an intellectual exercise than the sort of engrossing emotional experience I prefer. But, that said, this is solid SF speculation. If your preferred balance of ideas and characters is tilted more towards ideas than mine, and particularly if you like interesting aliens and don't mind the loss of technology setting, this may well be to your liking. Even with all of my complaints, I'm curious enough about the world that I am tempted to read the sequel, since its plot appears to involve more of the kind of SF elements I like. Followed by Interference. Content warning: Rape, and a whole lot of illness and death. Rating: 6 out of 10