Search Results: "casi"

1 September 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Reasons Not to Worry

Review: Reasons Not to Worry, by Brigid Delaney

Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	2022
Printing:	October 2023
ISBN:	0-06-331484-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	295

Reasons Not to Worry is a self-help non-fiction book about stoicism, focusing specifically on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Brigid Delaney is a long-time Guardian columnist who has written on a huge variety of topics, including (somewhat relevantly to this book) her personal experiences trying weird fads. Stoicism is having a moment among the sort of men who give people life advice in podcast form. Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has made a career out of being the face of stoicism in everyone's podcast feed (and, of course, hosting his own). He is far from alone. If you pay attention to anyone in the male self-help space right now (Cal Newport, in my case), you have probably heard something vague about the "wisdom of the stoics." Given that the core of stoicism is easily interpreted as a strategy for overcoming your emotions with logic, this isn't surprising. Philosophies that lean heavily on college dorm room logic, discount emotion, and argue that society is full of obvious flaws that can be analyzed and debunked by one dude with some blog software and a free afternoon have been very popular in tech circles for the past ten to fifteen years, and have spread to some extent into popular culture. Intriguingly, though, stoicism is a system of virtue ethics, which means it is historically in opposition to consequentialist philosophies like utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy behind effective altruism and other related Silicon Valley fads. I am pretty exhausted with the whole genre of men talking to each other about how to live a better life Cal Newport by himself more than satisfies the amount of that I want to absorb but I was still mildly curious about stoicism. My education didn't provide me with a satisfying grounding in major historical philosophical movements, so I occasionally look around for good introductions. Stoicism also has some reputation as an anxiety-reduction technique, and I could use more of those. When I saw a Discord recommendation for Reasons Not to Worry that specifically mentioned its lack of bro perspective, I figured I'd give it a shot. Reasons Not to Worry is indeed not a bro book, although I would have preferred fewer appearances of the author's friend Andrew, whose opinions on stoicism I could not possibly care less about. What it is, though, is a shallow and credulous book that falls squarely in the middle of the lightweight self-help genre. Delaney is here to explain why stoicism is awesome and to convince you that a school of Greek and Roman philosophers knew exactly how you should think about your life today. If this sounds quasi-religious, well, I'll get to that. Delaney does provide a solid introduction to stoicism that I think is a bit more approachable than reading the relevant Wikipedia article. In her presentation, the core of stoicism is the practice of four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The modern definition of "stoic" as someone who is impassive in the presence of pleasure or pain is somewhat misleading, but Delaney does emphasize a goal of ataraxia, or tranquility of mind. By making that the goal rather than joy or pleasure, stoicism tries to avoid the trap of the hedonic treadmill in favor of a more achievable persistent contentment. As an aside, some quick Internet research makes me doubt Delaney's summary here. Other material about stoicism I found focuses on apatheia and associates ataraxia with Epicureanism instead. But I won't start quibbling with Delaney's definitions; I'm not qualified and this review is already too long. The key to ataraxia, in Delaney's summary of stoicism, is to focus only on those parts of life we can control. She summarizes those as our character, how we treat others, and our actions and reactions. Everything else wealth, the esteem of our colleagues, good health, good fortune is at least partly outside of our control, and therefore we should enjoy it when we have it but try to be indifferent to whether it will last. Attempting to control things that are outside of our control is doomed to failure and will disturb our tranquility. Essentially all of this book is elaborations and variations on this theme, specialized to some specific area of life like social media, anxiety, or grief and written in the style of a breezy memoir. If you're familiar with modern psychological treatment frameworks like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, this summary of stoicism may sound familiar. (Apparently this is not an accident; the predecessor to CBT used stoicism as a philosophical basis.) Stoicism, like those treatment approaches, tries to refocus your attention on the things that you can improve and de-emphasizes the things outside of your control. This is a lot of the appeal, at least to me (and I think to Delaney as well). Hearing that definition, you may have some questions. Why those virtues specifically? They sound good, but all virtues sound good almost by definition. Is there any measure of your success in following those virtues outside your subjective feeling of ataraxia? Does the focus on only things you can control lead to ignoring problems only mostly outside of your control, where your actions would matter but only to a small degree? Doesn't this whole philosophy sound a little self-centered? What do non-stoic virtue ethics look like, and why do they differ from stoicism? What is the consequentialist critique of stoicism? This is where the shortcomings of this book become clear: Delaney is not very interested in questions like this. There are sections on some of those topics, particularly the relationship between stoicism and social justice, but her treatment is highly unsatisfying. She raises the question, talks about her doubts about stoicism's applicability, and then says that, after further thought, she decided stoicism is entirely consistent with social justice and the stoics were right after all. There is a little bit more explanation than that, but not much. Stoicism can apparently never be wrong; it can only be incompletely understood. Self-help books often fall short here, and I suspect this may be what the audience wants. Part of the appeal of the self-help genre is artificial certainty. Becoming a better manager, starting a business, becoming more productive, or working out an entire life philosophy are not problems amenable to a highly approachable and undemanding book. We all know that at some level, but the seductive allure of the self-help genre is the promise of simplifying complex problems down to a few approachable bullet points. Here is a life philosophy in a neatly packaged form, and if you just think deeply about its core principles, you will find they can be applied to any situation and any doubts you were harboring will turn out to be incorrect. I am all too familiar with this pattern because it's also how fundamentalist Christianity works. The second time Delaney talked about her doubts about the applicability of stoicism and then claimed a few pages later that those doubts disappeared with additional thought and discussion, my radar went off. This book was sounding less like a thoughtful examination of one specific philosophy out of many and more like the soothing adoption of religious certainty by a convert. I was therefore entirely unsurprised when Delaney all but says outright in the epilogue that she's adopted stoicism as her religion and approaches it with the same dedicated practice that she used to bring to Catholicism. I think this is where a lot of self-help books end up, although most of them don't admit it. There's nothing wrong with this, to be clear. It sounds like she was looking for a non-theistic religion, found one that she liked, and is excited to tell other people about it. But it's a profound mismatch with what I was looking for in an introduction to stoicism. I wanted context, history, and a frank discussion of the problems with adopting philosophy to everyday issues. I also wanted some acknowledgment that it is highly unlikely that a few men who lived 2000 years ago in a wildly different social context, and with drastically limited information about cultures other than their own, figured out a foolproof recipe for how to approach life. The subsequent two millennia of philosophical debates prove that stoicism didn't end the argument, and that a lot of other philosophers thought that stoicism got a few things wrong. You would never know that from this book. What I wanted is outside the scope of this sort of undemanding self-help book, though, and this is the problem that I keep having with philosophy. The books I happen across are either nigh-incomprehensibly dense and academic, or they're simplified into catechism. This was the latter. That's probably more the fault of my reading selection than it is the fault of the book, but it was still annoying. What I will say for this book, and what I suspect may be the most useful property of self-help books in general, is that it prompts you to think about basic stoic principles without getting in the way of your thoughts. It's like background music for the brain: nothing Delaney wrote was very thorny or engaging, but she kept quietly and persistently repeating the basic stoic formula and turning my thoughts back to it. Some of those thoughts may have been useful? As a source of prompts for me to ponder, Reasons Not to Worry was therefore somewhat successful. The concept of not trying to control things outside of my control is simple but valid, and it probably didn't hurt me to spend a week thinking about it. "It kind of works as an undemanding meditation aid" is not a good enough reason for me to recommend this book, but maybe that's what someone else is looking for. Rating: 5 out of 10

30 August 2024

Sahil Dhiman: Debconf24 Busan

DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occasion when one happens. This year again, I worked in fundraising team, working to raise funds from International sponsors. We did manage to raise good enough funding, albeit less than budgeted. Though, the local Korean team was able to connect and gather many Governmental sponsors, which was quite surprising for me. I wasn t seriously considering attending DebConf until I discussed this with Nilesh. More or less, his efforts helped push me through the whole process. Thanks, Nilesh, for this. In March, I got my passport and started preparing documents for South Korean visa. It did require quite a lot of paper work but seeing South Korea s s fresh passport visa rejection rate, I had doubts about visa acceptance. The visa finally got approved, which could be attributed to great documentation and help from DebConf visa team. This was also my first trip outside India, and this being to DebConf made many things easy. Most stuff were documented on DebConf website and wiki. Asking some query got immediate responses from someone in the DebConf channels. We then booked a direct flight from Delhi, reaching Seoul in the morning. With good directions from Sourab TK who had reached Seoul a few hours earlier, we quickly got Korean Won, local SIM and T Money card (transportation card) and headed towards Seoul by AREX, airport metro. We spent the next two days exploring Seoul, which is huge. It probably has the highest number of skyscrapers I have ever seen. The city has a good mix of modern and ancient culture. We explored various places in Seoul including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Statue of King Sejong, Bukchon Hanok village, N Seoul Tower and various food markets which were amazing.

A Street in Seoul

Next, we headed to Busan for DebConf using KTX (Korean high speed rail). (Fun fact, slogan for City of Busan is Busan is Good .) South Korea has a good network of frequently running high speed trains. We had pre-booked our tickets because, despite the frequency, trains were sold out most of the time. KTX ride was quite smooth, despite travelling at 300 Kmph at times through Korean countryside and long mountain tunnels. View from Dorm Room

PKNU Entrance

The venue for DebConf was Pukyong National University (PKNU), Daeyeon Campus. PKNU had two campuses in the Busan and some folks ended up in wrong campus too. With good help and guidance from the front desk, we got our dormitory rooms assigned. Dorms here were quite different, ie:

Rooms had heated floors. It seems to snow in Busan.
Each area was had card based access. There was a separate card for laundry too.
Rooms had announcement systems right inside the room, though we couldn t decipher any announcement as all of them were in Korean.
Each room was provided with a dedicated access point and own SSID inside the room.

View from Dorm Room

Settling in was easy. We started meeting familiar folks after almost a year. The long conversations started again. Everyone was excited for DebConf. Like everytime, the first day was full of action (and chaos). Meet and greet, volunteers check in, video team running around and fixing stuff and things working (or not). There were some interesting talks and sponsors stalls. After day one, things more or less settled down. I again volunteered for video team stuff and helped in camera operations and talk directions, which is always fun. As the tradition applies, saw few talks live on stream too sitting in the dorm room during the conf, which is always fun, when too tired to get ready and go out.

From Talk Director's chair

DebConf takes care of food needs for vegan/vegetarianism folks well, of which I m one. I got to try different food items, which was quite an experience. Tried using chopsticks again which didn t work, which I later figured that handling metal ones were more difficult. We had late night ramens and wooden chopsticks worked perfectly. One of the days, we even went out to an Indian restaurant to have some desi aloo paratha, paneer dishes, samosas and chai (milk tea). I wasn t particularly craving desi food but wasn t able to get something according to my taste so went there.

As usual Bits from DPL talk was packed

For day trip, I went to Ulsan. San means mountains in Korean. Ulsan is a port city with many industries including Hyundai car factory, petrochemical industry, paint industry, ship building etc. We saw bamboo forest, Ulsan tower (quite a view towards Ulsan port), whale village, Ulsan Onggi Museum and the sea (which was beautiful).

The beautiful sea

View from Ulsan Bridge Observatory

Amongst the sponsors, I was most interested in our network sponsors, folks who were National research and education networks (NREN) here. We had two network sponsors, KOREN and KREONET, thanks to efforts by local team. Initially it was discussed that they ll provide 20G uplink each, so 40G in total, which was whopping but by the time the closing talk happened, we got to know we had 200G uplink to the Internet. This was a massive update to last year when we had 1G main and 100M backup link. 200G wasn t what is required, but it was massive capacity and IIRC from the talk, we peaked at around 500M in usage, but it s always fun to have astronomical amount of bandwidth for bragging rights ;)

Various mascots in attendance

Video and Network stats. Screengrab from closing ceremony

Now let s talk about things I found interesting about South Korea in general:

Convenience stores were everywhere, one could see same brand stores less than a kilometer apart. We had even had two of them (GS25(s)), a road cross away too. These places were well stocked with almost everything, even alcohol.
There were wide footpaths and pedestrian friendly policies.
Public transport and intra modal transfer is convenient and easy to figure. Each metro station connects to multiple nearby buildings through underground walkways, and one never had to go out in the sun (in hot and humid weather). Also, Seoul and Busan metro networks were massive. The Same T money card worked for buses (almost hop on, tap and hop off at your destination), metros and even cabs.
South Korea pays special attention to maintaining their historical and cultural buildings. These venues had informational brochures in Korea, English, Japanese and Chinese.
We got a constant stream of Public safety alerts on our phones. Some phones even read them aloud for heatwaves and rains warnings, all in Korean.
Trash was segregated at source everywhere.
Public, high speed Wi-Fi was omnipresent in malls, public transport, airport etc. In metro, each coach had access points from all three telecom providers (SK Telecom, KT and LG U+) which also had almost similar voice and data plans.
Police personals were quite helpful despite the language issue.
Not many folks here are comfortable in English, but one can always make use of various mobile translation apps.
Cards are accepted everywhere and there are too many of these cards ;)
Food situation was a bit difficult for me as a vegetarian. We always have vegan/veg food in DebConf but outside, this whole concept doesn t seem to exist here.
I couldn t find any public speedtest servers inside Korea. All my fast.com/speedtest.net servers were located either Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and even in the United States. On the very last day, I got a speedtest servers in Seoul, inside SK Telecom.

Grand Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul

Starfield Library, Seoul

If one has to get the whole DebConf experience, it s better to attend DebCamp as well because that s when you can sit and interact with everyone better. As DebConf starts, everyone gets busy in various talks and events and things take a pace. DebConf days literally fly. This year, attending DebConf in person was a different experience. Attending DebConf without any organizational work/stress so was better, and I was able to understand working of different Debian team and workflows better while also identified a few where I would like to join and help. A general conclusion was that almost all Debian teams needs more folks to help out. So if someone want to join, they can probably reach out to the team, and would be able to onboard new folks. Though this would require some patience. Kudos to the Korean team who were able to pull off this event under this tight timeline and thanks for all the hospitality.

DebConf24 Group Photo. Click to enlarge.
Credits - Aigars Mahinovs

This whole experience expanded my world view. There s so much to see and explore and understand. Looking forward to DebConf25 in Brest, France. PS - Shoutout to abbyck (aka hamCK)!

22 August 2024

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 2024 em Natal/RN - Brasil

por Allythy O Debian Day um evento anual que celebra o anivers rio do Debian, uma das distribui es GNU/Linux mais importante do Software Livre, criada em 16 de Agosto de 1993, por Ian Murdock. No ltimo s bado (17/08/2024) no Sebrae-RN comemoramos os 31 anos Debian em Natal, no Rio Grande do Norte. A celebra o, foi organizada pela PotiLivre(Comunidade Potiguar de Software Livre), destacou os 31 anos de hist ria do Debian. O evento contou com algumas palestras e muitas discuss es sobre Software Livre. Tivemos 70 inscri es, 40 estiverem presentes. O Debian Day em Natal foi uma ocasi o para celebrar a trajet ria do Debian e refor ar a import ncia do Software Livre. Palestrantes Agradecemos imensamente a Isaque Barbosa Martins, Eduardo de Souza Paix o, Fernando Guisso,que palestraram nessa edi o! Obrigado por compartilhar tanto conhecimento com a comunidade. Esperamos ver voc s novamente em futuros encontros! foto da palestra conhecendo projeto Debian

foto da palestra conhecendo projeto Debian

09:00 - 09:40 - Conhecendo projeto Debian - Allytthy e Clara Nobre
09:40 - 10:20 - Proxmox e Homelab: Como Transformei um Mini PC em um Servidor de Respeito) - Fernando Guisso
10:20 - 10:40 Intervalo
10:40 - 11:20 - Analisando a aplica o de algoritmos criptogr ficos em pacotes de redes - Isaque Barbosa Martins
11:20 - 12:00 - Introdu o a escala o de privil gio em sistemas GNU/Linux - Eduardo de Souza Paix o

Link dos slides do Debian Day Participantes Um grande obrigado tamb m a todos os participantes, n s fazemos isso por voc s! Esperamos que tenham aprendido, se divertido e feito novas conex es entre a comunidade Participantes do Debian Day Natal-RN

Essa edi o do Debina Day Natal foi organizada por: Allythy, Clara Nobre, Gabriel Damazio e Marcel Ribeiro.

8 August 2024

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: A Selection of DebConf24 Talks

DebConf24 is now over! I'm very happy I was able to attend this year. If you haven't had time to look at the schedule yet, here is a selection of talks I liked.

What happens if I delete setup.py?: a live demo of upgrading to PEP-518 Python packaging

A great talk by Weezel showcasing how easy it is to migrate to PEP-518 for existing Python projects. This is the kind of thing I've been doing a lot when packaging upstream projects that still use setup.py. I encourage you to send this kind of patch upstream, as it makes everyone's life much easier.

Debian on Chromebooks: What's New and What's Next?

A talk by Alper Nebi Yasak, who has done great work on running Debian and the Debian Installer on Chromebooks. With Chromebooks being very popular machines in schools, it's nice to see people working on a path to liberate them.

Sequoia PGP, sq, gpg-from-sq, v6 OpenPGP, and Debian

I had the chance to see Justus' talk on Sequoia an OpenPGP implementation in Rust at DebConf22 in Kosovo. Back then, the conclusion was that sq wasn't ready for production yet. Well it seems it now is! This in-depth talk goes through the history of the project and its goals. There is also a very good section on the current OpenPGP/LibrePGP schism.

Chameleon - the easy way to try out Sequoia - OpenPGP written in Rust

A very short talk by Holger on Chameleon, a tool to make migration to Sequoia easier. TL;DW: apt install gpg-from-sq

Protecting OpenPGP keyservers from certificate flooding

Although I used to enjoy signing people's OpenPGP keys, I completely gave up on this practice around 2019 when dkg's key was flooded with bogus certifications and have been refusing to do so since. In this talk, Gunnar talks about his PhD work on fixing this issue and making sure we can eventually restore this important function on keyservers.

Bits from the DPL

Bits from the DPL! A DebConf classic.

Linux live patching in Debian

Having to reboot servers after kernel upgrades is a hassle, especially with machines that have encrypted disk drives. Although kernel live patching in Debian is still a work in progress, it is encouraging to see people trying to fix this issue.

"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends

A fun talk by Samuel Henrique on little changes and tricks one can make to their setup to make life easier.

Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward

Another in-depth talk by Alper, this time on the Debian Installer and his ideas to try to make it better. I learned a lot about the d-i internals!

Lightning Talks

Lighting talks are always fun to watch! This year, the following talks happened:

Customizing your Linux icons
A Free Speech tracker by SFLC.IN
Desktop computing is irrelevant
An introduction to wcurl
Aliasing in dpkg
A DebConf art space
Tiny Tapeout, Fomu, PiCI
Data processing and visualisation in the shell

Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era?

As an economist, I've been interested in Copyright and business models in the Free Software ecosystem for a while. In this talk, Hatta-san and Bruce Perens discuss the idea of alternative licences that are not DFSG-free, like Post-Open.

7 July 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Welcome to Boy.Net

Review: Welcome to Boy.Net, by Lyda Morehouse

Series:	Earth's Shadow #1
Publisher:	Wizard's Tower Press
Copyright:	April 2024
ISBN:	1-913892-71-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	355

Welcome to Boy.Net is a science fiction novel with cyberpunk vibes, the first of a possible series. Earth is a largely abandoned wasteland. Humanity has survived in the rest of the solar system and spread from Earth's moon to the outer planets. Mars is the power in the inner system, obsessed with all things Earth and effectively run by the Earth Nations' Peacekeeping Force, the ENForcers. An ENForcer soldier is raised in a creche from an early age, implanted with cybernetic wetware and nanite enhancements, and extensively trained to be an elite fighting unit. As befits a proper military, every ENForcer is, of course, male. The ENForcers thought Lucia Del Toro was a good, obedient soldier. They also thought she was a man. They were wrong about those and many other things. After her role in an atrocity that named her the Scourge of New Shanghai, she went AWOL and stole her command ship. Now she and her partner/girlfriend Hawk, a computer hacker from Luna, make a living with bounty hunting jobs in the outer system. The ENForcers rarely cross the asteroid belt; the United Miners see to that. The appearance of an F-class ENForcer battle cruiser in Jupiter orbit is a very unpleasant surprise. Lucia and Hawk hope it has nothing to do with them. That hope is dashed when ENForcers turn up in the middle of their next job: a bounty to retrieve an AI eye. I first found Lyda Morehouse via her AngeLINK cyberpunk series, the last of which was published in 2011. Since then, she's been writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy as Tate Hallaway. This return to science fiction is an adventure with trickster hackers, throwback anime-based cowboy bars, tense confrontations with fascist thugs, and unexpected mutual aid, but its core is a cyberpunk look at the people who are unwilling or unable to follow the rules of social conformity. Gender conformity, specifically. Once you understand what this book is about, Welcome to Boy.Net is a great title, but I'm not sure it serves its purpose as a marketing tool. This is not the book that I would have expected from that title in isolation, and I'm a bit worried that people who would like it might pass it by. Inside the story, Boy.Net is the slang term for the cybernetic network that links all ENForcers. If this were the derogatory term used by people outside the ENForcers, I could see it, but it's what the ENForcers themselves call it. That left me with a few suspension of disbelief problems, since the sort of macho assholes who are this obsessed with male gender conformance usually consider "boys" to be derogatory and wouldn't call their military cybernetic network something that sounds that belittling, even as a joke. It would be named after some sort of Orwellian reference to freedom, or something related to violence, dominance, brutality, or some other "traditional male" virtue. But although this term didn't work for me as world-building, it's a beautiful touch thematically. What Morehouse is doing here is the sort of concretized metaphor that science fiction is so good at: an element of world-building that is both an analogy for something the reader is familiar with and is also a concrete piece of world background that follows believable rules and can be manipulated by the characters. Boy.Net is trying to reconnect to Lucia against her will. If it succeeds, it will treat the body modifications she's made as damage and try to reverse all of them, attempting to convert her back to the model of an ENForcer. But it is also a sharp metaphor for how gender roles are enforced in our world: a child assigned male is connected to a pervasive network of gender expectations and is programmed, shaped, and monitored to match the social role of a boy. Even if they reject those expectations, the gender role keeps trying to reconnect and convert them back. I really enjoyed Morehouse's handling of the gender dynamics. It's an important part of the plot, but it's not the only thing going on or the only thing the characters think about. Lucia is occasionally caught by surprise by well-described gender euphoria, but mostly gender is something other people keep trying to impose on her because they're obsessed with forcing social conformity. The rest of the book is a fun romp with a few memorable characters and a couple of great moments with unexpected allies. Hawk and Lucia have an imperfect but low drama relationship that features a great combination of insight and the occasional misunderstanding. It's the kind of believable human relationship that I don't see very much in science fiction, written with the comfortable assurance of an author with over a dozen books under her belt. Some of the supporting characters are also excellent, including a non-binary deaf hacker that I wish had been a bit more central to the story. This is not the greatest science fiction novel I've read, but it was entertaining throughout and kept me turning the pages. Recommended if you want some solar-system cyberpunk in your life. Welcome to Boy.Net reaches a conclusion of sorts, but there's an obvious hook for a sequel and a lot of room left for more stories. I hope enough people buy this book so that I can read it. Rating: 7 out of 10

3 July 2024

Sahil Dhiman: RTI to NPL Regarding Their NTP Infrastructure

I became interested in Network Time Protocol (NTP) last year after learning how fundamental this protocol is to the functioning of the global Internet. NTP helps synchronize clocks on devices over the Internet, which is essential for secure browsing, timestamping, keeping everyone in sync or just checking what time it is. Computers usually have a hardware real-time clock (RTC) but that deviates over time, so an occasional sync over NTP is required to keep the time accurate. Many network and IoT devices don t have hardware RTC so have even more reliance on NTP. Accurate time keeping starts with reference clocks like atomic clocks, GPS etc. Multiple government standard agencies host these reference clocks, which are regarded as Stratum 0. Stratum 1 servers are known as primary servers, and directly connect to Stratum 0 clocks for time. Stratum 1 servers then distribute time to Stratum 2 and further down the hierarchy. Computers typically connects to one or more Stratum 1/2/3 servers to get their time. Someone has to host these public Stratum 1,2,3 NTP servers. That s what NTP pool, a global effort by volunteers does. They provide NTP servers for the public to use. As of today, there are 4700+ servers in the pool which are free to use for anyone. Now let s come to the reason for writing this post. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in April 2022 released a set of cybersecurity directions which set the alarm bells ringing. Internet Society (and almost everyone else) wrote about it. And then there was this specific section about NTP:

All service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and Government organisations shall connect to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) Server of National Informatics Centre (NIC) or National Physical Laboratory (NPL) or with NTP servers traceable to these NTP servers, for synchronisation of all their ICT systems clocks. Entities having ICT infrastructure spanning multiple geographies may also use accurate and standard time source other than NPL and NIC, however it is to be ensured that their time source shall not deviate from NPL and NIC.

CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the official timekeeper for India and hosts the only public Stratum 1 clock in India, according to NTP pool website. So I was naturally curious to know what kind of infrastructure they re running for NTP. India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act which, like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States, gives citizens rights to request information from governmental entities, to which they have to respond in under 30 days. So last year, I filed two sets of RTI (one after the first reply came) inquiring about NPL s public NTP server setup. The first RTI had some generic questions: RTI 1

First RTI. Click to enlarge

This gave a vague idea about the setup, so I sat down and came with some specific questions in the next RTI. RTI 2

Second RTI. Click to enlarge

Feel free to make your conclusions from it now. Bear in mind these were filled last year so things might have changed. Do let me know if you have more information about it. Update (07/07/2024): Found an article from Medianama about Indian government time servers with information sourced through RTI.

1 July 2024

Abhijith PA: A lazy local file sharing setup

At home, I have both a laptop and a *desktop PC. Most of my essential things, such as emails, repositories, password managers, contacts, and calendars are synced between the two devices. However, when I need to share some documents and I am lazy enough to go pick a flash drive, my only option is to push them to the Internet and download them on the other system, which is sitting at 20~ meters away. Typically, I do this either through email attachments or a matrix client. Occasionally, I think about setting up a network storage solution at home. But then I ask myself do I really need one. In my home network, I already have a Raspberry Pi running as my Wi-Fi router, doing DNS level ad blocking with Dnsmasq and DNS over TLS with stubby. Rpi has a 16GB memory card. I can mount RPi remote directory to both machines. I use pcmanfm as my file manager. It has the ability (like every other file managers) to mount remote storage over ssh. But one annoying thing is that whenever I open the mount directory, by default it shows the root file system of the remote device even when I explicitly mentioned the path. Then I discovered sshfs. I wrote the following script, which mount remote directory and open that in pcmanfm.

#!/bin/bash
LOCMOUNT="/home/user/Public"
sshfs raspberrypi:Public $LOCMOUNT
pcmanfm $MOUNT

I haven t enabled any encryption for the memory until now since other than some logs RPi wasn t writing anything to it. I set up fscrypt on Rpi storage now. And ta-da, a lazy person s local sharing solution. *Desktop - Well, technically it s an old laptop with a broken keyboard and trackpad, connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I don t feel keeping it on a shelf.

23 June 2024

Sahil Dhiman: How I Write Blogs - June 2024 Edition

I wrote about my blog writing methodology back April 2021. My writing method has undergone a significant shift now, so thought about writing this update. New blog topics are added to my note-taking app quite frequently now. Occasionally going through the list, I merge topics, change order to prioritize certain topics or purely drop ideas which seems not worth a write-up. Due to this, I have the liberty to work on blogs according to mood. Writing the last one was tiring, so I chose to work on an easy one, i.e. this blog now. Topic decided, everything starts on etherpad now. Etherpad has this nice font and sync feature, which helps me write from any device of choice. Actual writing usually happens in the morning, right after I wake up. For most topics, I quickly jot down pointers and keep on expanding them over the course of multiple days at a leisurely pace. Though, sometime it adds too many pieces in the puzzle and takes additional time to put everything in flow. New pointer addition keeps on happening along with writing. Nowadays, pictures too dot my blog, which I rarely use to do earlier. I have come to believe on less usage of external links. These breaks the flow of readers. If someone is sufficiently motivated to learn more about something, finding useful sources isn t. As the first draft comes into being, I run it through LanguageTool for spelling corrections (which typically are many) and fixing grammatical issues. Post that, for the first time I read the complete write-up in one go for formation of coherent storyline, moving paragraphs around for form a structure , adding explainers wherever something new or unexplained is introduced, removing elaborate sentences, making amends wherever required and moving paragraphs around for forming structure. Another round of LanguageTool follows. All set now, I try to space out my final read before publishing, which helps find additional mistakes or loopholes. When everything is set, I do hugo to generate the site and rsync everything to the web server. A final git sync closes the publication part. After a day or two, I come back to read the blog on the website. This entails another round finding and fixing trivial mistakes. After this, it s set for good. Nowadays, in addition to being on my blog, everything is syndicated on Planet FSCI and Planet Debian, which has given it more visibility. As someone who s into infrastructure and Internet as a lot, I do pay attention to logs on my server, but as a disconnected exercise to if the blog is being read or not. More hits on the blog doesn t translate to any gratification for me, at least for writers point of view. Occasionally, people do mention my blog, which does flatter me. Four years and nearly a hundred posts later, I still wonder how I kept on writing for this long.

21 June 2024

Bits from Debian: Recherche d'un th me pour Trixie, la prochaine version de Debian

Chaque dition de Debian b n ficie d'un nouveau th me brillant visible sur l' cran d'amor age, l' cran de connexion et, de la fa on la plus vidente, sur le fond d' cran. Debian pr voit de publier Trixie, sa prochaine version, durant l'ann e venir. Et, comme toujours, nous avons besoin de vous pour cr er son th me ! Vous avez l'occasion de concevoir un th me qui inspirera des milliers de personnes quand ils travaillent sur leur machine Debian. Pour disposer des d tails les plus r cents, veuillez vous r f rer la page du wiki. Nous voudrions profiter de cette occasion pour remercier Juliette Taka Belin pour avoir cr le th me Emerald pour Bookworm. La date limite pour les propositions est le 19 septembre 2024. Le th me est habituellement choisi en se basant sur ce qui para t le plus :

Debian : il est vrai que ce n'est pas le concept le mieux d fini, dans la mesure o chacun a son sentiment sur ce que repr sente Debian pour eux ;
possible int grer sans corriger le logiciel de base : autant nous aimons les th mes follement excitants, certains n cessiteraient un gros travail d'adaptation des th mes GTK+ et la correction de GDM/GNOME ;
clair et bien con u : sans tre quelque chose qui devient ennuyeux regarder au bout d'un an. Parmi les bons th mes, on peut citer Joy, Lines, Softwaves et futurePrototype.

Si vous souhaitez disposer plus d'informations, veuillez utiliser la liste de diffusion Debian Desktop.

19 June 2024

Sahil Dhiman: First Iteration of My Free Software Mirror

As I m gearing towards setting up a Free Software download mirror in India, it occurred to me that I haven t chronicled the work and motivation behind setting up the original mirror in the first place. Also, seems like it would be good to document stuff here for observing the progression, as the mirror is going multi-country now. Right now, my existing mirror i.e., mirrors.de.sahilister.net (was mirrors.sahilister.in), is hosted in Germany and serves traffic for Termux, NomadBSD, Blender, BlendOS and GIMP. For a while in between, it hosted OSMC project mirror as well. To explain what is a Free Software download mirror thing is first, I ll quote myself from work blog -

As most Free Software doesn t have commercial backing and require heavy downloads, the concept of software download mirrors helps take the traffic load off of the primary server, leading to geographical redundancy, higher availability and faster download in general.

So whenever someone wants to download a particular (mirrored) software and click download, upstream redirects the download to one of the mirror server which is geographical (or in other parameters) nearby to the user, leading to faster downloads and load sharing amongst all mirrors. Since the time I got into Linux and servers, I always wanted to help the community somehow, and mirroring seemed to be the most obvious thing. India seems to be a country which has traditionally seen less number of public download mirrors. IITB, TiFR, and some of the public institutions used to host them for popular Linux and Free Softwares, but they seem to be diminishing these days. In the last months of 2021, I started using Termux and saw that it had only a few mirrors (back then). I tried getting a high capacity, high bandwidth node in budget but it was hard in India in 2021-22. So after much deliberation, I decided to go where it s available and chose a German hosting provider with the thought of adding India node when conditions are favorable (thankfully that happened, and India node is live too now.). Termux required only 29 GB of storage, so went ahead and started mirroring it. I raised this issue in Termux s GitHub repository in January 2022. This blog post chronicles the start of the mirror. Termux has high request counts from a mirror point of view. Each Termux client, usually checks every mirror in selected group for availability before randomly selecting one for download (only other case is when client has explicitly selected a single mirror using termux-repo-change). The mirror started getting thousands of requests daily due to this but only a small percentage would actually get my mirror in selection, so download traffic was lower. Similar thing happened with OSMC too (which I started mirroring later). With this start, I started exploring various project that would be benefit from additional mirrors. Public information from Academic Computer Club in Ume s mirror and Freedif s mirror stats helped to figure out storage and bandwidth requirements for potential projects. Fun fact, Academic Computer Club in Ume (which is one of the prominent Debian, Ubuntu etc.) mirror, now has 200 Gbits/s uplink to the internet through SUNET. Later, I migrated to a different provider for better speeds and added LibreSpeed test on the mirror server. Those were fun times. Between OSMC, Termux and LibreSpeed, I was getting almost 1.2 millions hits/day on the server at its peak, crossing for the first time a TB/day traffic number. Next came Blender, which took the longest time to set up of around 9 10 months. Blender had a push-trigger requirement for rsync from upstream that took quite some back and forth. It now contributes the most amount of traffic on the mirror. On release days, mirror does more than 3 TB/day and normal days, it hovers around 2 TB/day. Gimp project is the latest addition. At one time, the mirror traffic touched 4.97 TB/day traffic number. That s when I decided on dropping LibreSpeed server to solely focus on mirroring for now, keeping the bandwidth allotment for serving downloads only. The mirror projects selection grew organically. I used to reach out many projects discussing the need of for additional mirrors. Some projects outright denied mirroring request as Germany already has a good academic mirrors boosting 20-25 Gbits/s speeds from FTP era, which seems fair. Finding the niche was essential to only add softwares, which would truly benefit from additional capacity. There were months when nothing much would happen with the mirror, rsync would continue to update the mirror while nginx would keep on serving the traffic. Nowadays, the mirror pushes around 70 TB/month. I occasionally check logs, vnstat, add new security stuff here and there and pay the bills. It now saturates the Gigabit link sometimes and goes beyond that, peaking around 1.42 Gbits/s (the hosting provider seems to be upping their game). The plan is to upgrade the link to better speeds. vnstat yearly

Yearly traffic stats (through vnstat -y )

On the way, learned quite a few things like -

IPv6 and exposing rsync module due to OSMC requirement.
Implementing user with restricted access to only trigger rsync, basically make rsync pull trigger based due to Blender.
Iterating over right client response size for LibreSpeed test project.
Mistakenly identifying torrent traffic for BlendOS as DDoS and blocking it for quite a few months. BlendOS added loads of hits for torrent traffic, making my mirror also serve as web seed. Web seeds in conjunction with normal seeds surely is a good combination for serving downloads as it combines best of both world, general availability of web seed/mirror and benefit of traditional seeds to maximize download speeds at user end.
Handling abusive traffic (a lot of it to be frank). The approach is more of a whack a mole right now, which I want to improve and automate.
Most of the traffic on non-Linux/BSD operating systems serving mirrors (like mine) is for people on Windows and Mac asking for EXEs and DMGs. Mostly because package repositories carry software distribution load for Linux/BSD OSs and partly because the number of Windows/Mac users are quite high compared to other OSs.
Load balancing through DNS and HTTP redirection (which I would implement in my India mirror now) to better maximize available resources.

GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday Access Logs

GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday's Access Logs. Click to enlarge
Generated from IPinfo.io

In hindsight, the statistics look amazing, hundreds of TBs of traffic served from the mirror, month after month. That does show that there s still an appetite for public mirrors in time of commercially donated CDNs and GitHub. The world could have done with one less mirror, but it saved some time, lessened the burden for others, while providing redundancy and traffic localization with one additional mirror. And it s fun for someone like me who s into infrastructure that powers the Internet. Now, I ll try focusing and expanding the India mirror, which in itself started pushing almost half a TB/day. Long live Free Software and public download mirrors.

18 May 2024

Russell Coker: Kogan 5120*2160 40 Monitor

I ve just got a new Kogan 5120*2160 40 curved monitor. It cost $599 including shipping etc which is much cheaper than the Dell monitor with similar specs selling for about $2500. For monitors with better than 4K resolution (by which I don t mean 5K*1440) this is the cheapest option. The nearest competitors are the 27 monitors that do 5120*2880 from Apple and some companies copying Apple s specs. While 5120*2880 is a significantly better resolution than what I got it s probably not going to help me at 27 size. I ve had a Dell 32 4K monitor since the 1st of July 2022 [1]. It is a really good monitor and I had no complaints at all about it. It was clearer than the Samsung 27 4K monitor I used before it and I m not sure how much of that is due to better display technology (the Samsung was from 2017) and how much was due to larger size. But larger size was definitely a significant factor. I briefly owned a Phillips 43 4K monitor [2] and determined that a 43 flat screen was definitely too big. At the time I thought that about 35 would have been ideal but after a couple of years using a flat 32 screen I think that 32 is about the upper limit for a flat screen. This is the first curved monitor I ve used but I m already thinking that maybe 40 is too big for a 21:9 aspect ratio even with a curved screen. Maybe if it was 4:4 or even 16:9 that would be ok. Otherwise the ideal for a curved screen for me would be something between about 36 and 38 . Also 43 is awkward to move around my desk. But this is still quite close to ideal. The first system I tested this on was a work laptop, a Dell Latitude 7400 2in1. On the Dell dock that did 4K resolution and on a HDMI cable it did 1440p which was a disappointment as that laptop has talked to many 4K monitors at native resolution on the HDMI port with the same cable. This isn t an impossible problem, as I work in the IT department I can just go through all the laptops in the store room until I find one that supports it. But the 2in1 is a very nice laptop, so I might even just keep using it in 4K resolution when WFH. The laptop in question is deemed an executive laptop so I have to wait another 2 years for the executives to get new laptops before I can get a newer 2in1. On my regular desktop I had the problem of the display going off for a few seconds every minute or so and also occasionally giving a white flicker. That was using 5120*2160 with a DisplayPort switch as described in the blog post about the Dell 32 monitor. When I ran it in 4K resolution with the DisplayPort switch from my desktop it was fine. I then used the DisplayPort cable that came with the monitor directly connecting the video card to the display and it was fine at 5120*2160 with 75Hz. The monitor has the joystick thing that seems to have become some sort of standard for controlling modern monitors. It s annoying that pressing it in powers it off. I think there should be a separate button for that. Also the UI in general made me wonder if one of the vendors of expensive monitors had paid whoever designed it to make the UI suck. The monitor had a single dead pixel in the center of the screen about 1/4 the way down from the top when I started writing this post. Now it s gone away which is a concern as I don t know which pixels might have problems next or if the number of stuck pixels will increase. Also it would be good if there was a dark mode for the WordPress editor. I use dark mode wherever possible so I didn t notice the dead pixel for several hours until I started writing this blog post. I watched a movie on Netflix and it took the entire screen area, I don t know if they are storing movies in 64:27 ratio or if the clipped the top and bottom, it was probably clipped but still looked OK. The monitor has different screen modes which make it look different, I can t see much benefit to the different modes. The standard mode is what I usually use and it s brighter and the movie mode seems OK for the one movie I ve watched so far. In other news BenQ has just announced a 3840*2560 28 monitor specifically designed for programming [3]. This is the first time I ve heard of a monitor with 3:2 ratio with modern resolution, we still aren t at the 4:3 type ratio that we were used to when 640*480 was high resolution but it s a definite step in the right direction. It s also the only time I recall ever seeing a monitor advertised as being designed for programming. In the 80s there were home computers advertised as being computers for kids to program, but at that time it was either TV sets for monitors or monitors sold with computers. It was only after the IBM PC compatible market took off that having a choice of different monitors for one computer was a thing. In recent years monitors advertised as being for office use (meaning bright and expensive) have become common as are monitors designed for gamer use (meaning high refresh rate). But BenQ seems to be the first to advertise a monitor for the purpose of programming. They have a desktop partition feature (which could be software or hardware the article doesn t make it clear) to give some of the benefits of a tiled window manager to people who use OSs that don t support such things. The BenQ monitor is a bit small for my taste, I don t know if my vision is good enough to take advantage of 3840*2560 in a 28 monitor nowadays. I think at least 32 would be better. Google seems to be really into buying good monitors for their programmers, if every Google programmer got one of those BenQ monitors then that would be enough sales to make it worth-while for them. I had hoped that we would have 6K monitors become affordable this year and 8K become less expensive than most cars. Maybe that won t happen and we will instead have a wider range of products like the ultra wide monitor I just bought and the BenQ programmer s monitor. If so I don t think that will be a bad result. Now the question is whether I can use this monitor for 2 years before finding something else that makes me want to upgrade. I can afford to spend the equivalent of a bit under $1/day on monitor upgrades.

16 May 2024

John Goerzen: Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service

I last reviewed email services in 2019. That review focused a lot of attention on privacy. At the time, I selected mailbox.org as my provider, and have been using them for these 5 years since. However, both their service and their support have gone significantly downhill since, so it is time for me to look at other options. Here I am focusing strongly on email. Some of the providers mentioned here provide other services (IM, video calls, groupware, etc.), and to the extent they do, I am ignoring them.

What Matters in 2024
I want to start off by acknowledging that what you need in email probably depends on your circumstances and the country in which you live. For me, I begin by naming that the largest threat most of us face isn t from state actors but from criminals: hackers, ransomware gangs, etc. It is important to take as many steps as possible to secure one s account against that. Privacy and security are both part of the mix. I still value privacy but I am acknowledging, as Migadu does, that Email as we know it and encryption are incompatible. Although some of these services strongly protect parts of the conversation, the reality is that most people will be emailing people using plain old email services which don t. For stronger security, something like Signal would be needed. (I wrote about Signal in 2021 also.) Interestingly, OpenPGP support seems to be something of a standard feature in the providers I reviewed by this point. All or almost all of them provide integration with browser-based encryption as well as server-side encryption if you prefer that. Although mailbox.org can automatically PGP-encrypt every message that arrives in plaintext, for general use, this is unwieldy; there isn t good tooling for searching mailboxes where every message is encrypted, etc. So I never enabled that feature at Mailbox. I still value security and privacy, but a pragmatic approach addresses the most pressing threats first.

My criteria
The basic requirements for an email service include:

Ability to use my own domains

Strong privacy policy

Ability for me to use my own IMAP and SMTP clients on both desktop and mobile

It must be extremely reliable

It must not be free

It must have excellent support for those rare occasions when it is needed

Support for basic aliases

Why do I say it must not be free? Because if someone is providing a service with the quality I m talking about here, and not charging for it, it implies something is fishy: either they are unscrupulous, are financially unstable, or the product is something else like ads. I am not aware of any provider that matches the other criteria with a free account anyhow. These providers range from about $30 to $90 per year, so cheaper than a Netflix subscription. Immediately, this rules out several options:

Proton doesn t let me use my own clients on mobile (their bridge is desktop-only)

Tuta also doesn t let me use my own clients

Posteo doesn t let me use my own domain

mxroute.com lacks a strong privacy policy, and its policy has numerous causes for concern (for instance, If you repeatedly send email to invalid/unroutable recipients, they may be published on our GitHub )

I will have a bit more to say about a couple of these providers below. There are some additional criteria that are strongly desired but not absolutely required:

Ability to set individual access passwords for every device/app

Support for two-factor authentication (2FA/TFA/TOTP) for web-based access

Support for basics in filtering: ability to filter on envelope recipient (so if I get BCC d, I can still filter), and ability to execute more than one action on filter match (eg, deliver to two folders, or deliver to a folder and forward to someone else)

IMAP and SMTP don t really support 2FA, so by setting individual passwords for every device, you can at least limit the blast radius and cut off a specific device if something is (or might be) compromised.

The candidates
I considered these providers: Startmail, Mailfence, Runbox, Fastmail, Kolab, Mailbox.org, and Migadu. I ll review each, and highlight the pricing of the plan I would most likely use. Each provider offers multiple plans; some may be more expensive and some may be cheaper than the one I reviewed. I included a link to each provider s full pricing information so you can compare for your needs. I set up trials with each of these (except Mailbox.org, with which I already had a paid account). It so happend that I had actual questions for support for each one, which gave me an opportunity to see how support responded. I did not fabricate questions, and would not have contacted support if I didn t have real ones. (This means that I asked different questions of each provider, because they were the REAL questions I had.) I ll jump to the spoiler right now: I eventually chose Migadu, with Fastmail and Mailfence as close seconds. I looked for providers myself, and also solicited recommendations in a Mastodon thread.

Mailbox.org
I begin with Mailbox, as it was my top choice in 2019 and the incumbent. Until this year, I had been quite happy with it. I had cause to reach their support less than once a year on average, and each time they replied the same day or next day. Now, however, they are failing on reliability and on support. Their spam filter has become overly aggressive. It has blocked quite a bit of legitimate mail. When contacting their support about a prior issue earlier this year, they initially took 4 days to reply, and then 6 days to reply after that. Ouch. They had me disable some spam settings. It didn t really help. I continue to lose mail. I don t know how much, because they block a lot of it before it even hits the spam folder. One of my friends texted to say mail was dropping. I raised a new ticket with mailbox, which took them 5 days to reply to. Their reply was unhelpful. As the Internet is not a static system, unforeseen events can always occur. Well yes, that s true, and I get it, false positives exist with email. But this was from an ISP s mail system with an address that had been established for years, and it was part of a larger pattern of rejecting quite a bit of legit mail. And every interaction with them recently hasn t resulted in them actually doing anything to resolve anything. It s just a paragraph or two of reply that does nothing and helps nothing. When I complained that it took 5 days to reply, they said We have not been able to reply sooner as we are currently experiencing a high volume of customer enquiries. Even though their SLA for my account is a not-great 48 business hour turnaround, they still missed it and their reason is we re busy. I finally asked what RBL had caught the blocked email, since when I checked, the sender wasn t on any RBL. Mailbox s reply: they only keep their logs for 7 days, so next time I should contact them within 7 days. Which, of course, I DID; it was them that kept delaying. Ugh! It s like they ve become a cable company. Even worse is how they have been blocking mail from GrapheneOS s discussion form. See their thread about it. In short, Graphene s mail server has a clean reputation and Mailbox has no problem with it. But because one of Graphene s IPv6 webservers has an IPv6 allocation of a size Mailbox doesn t like, they drop mail. It s ridiculous, and Mailbox was dismissive of this well-known and well-regarded Open Source project. So if the likes of GrapheneOS can t get good faith effort to deliver their mail, what chance does an individual like me have? I m sorry, but I m literally paying you to deliver email for me and provide good support. If you can t do either of those, you don t get to push that problem down onto me. Hire appropriate staff. On the technical side, they support aliases, my own clients, and have a reasonable privacy policy. Their 2FA support exists for the web interface (though weirdly not the support site), though it is somewhat weird. They do not support app passwords. A somewhat unique feature is the `@secure.mailbox.org` domain. If you try to receive mail at that address, mailbox.org will block it unless it uses TLS. Same for sending. This isn t E2EE, but it does at least require things not be in plaintext for the last hop to Mailbox. Verdict: not recommended due to poor reliability and support. Mailbox.Org summary:

Website: https://mailbox.org/en/

Reliability: iffy due to over-aggressive spam filtering

Support: Poor; takes 4-6 days for a reply and replies are unhelpful

Individual access passwords: No

2FA: Yes, but with a PIN instead of a password as the other factor

Filtering: Full SIEVE feature set and GUI editor

Spam settings: greylisting on/off, reject some/all spam, etc. But they re insufficient to address Mailbox s overzealousness, which support says I cannot workaround within the interface.

Server storage location: Germany

Plan as reviewed: standard [pricing link]

Cost per year: EUR 30 (about $33)

Mail storage included: 10GB

Limits on send/receive volume: none

Aliases: 50 on your domain name, 25 on mailbox.org

Additional mailboxes: Available; each one at the same fee as the primary mailbox

Startmail
I really wanted to like Startmail. Its vault is an interesting idea and should contribute to the security and privacy of an account. They clearly care about privacy. It falls down in filtering. They have no way to filter on envelope recipient (BCC or similar). Their support confirmed this to me and that s a showstopper. Startmail support was also as slow as Mailbox, taking 5 days to respond to me. Two showstoppers right there. Verdict: Not recommended due to slow support responsiveness and weak filtering. Startmail summary:

Website: https://www.startmail.com/

Reliability: Seems to be fine

Support: Mediocre; Took 5 days for a reply, but the reply was helpful

Individual app access passwords: Yes

2FA: Yes

Filtering: Poor; cannot filter on envelope recipient, and can t build filters with multiple actions

Spam settings: None

Server storage location: The Netherlands

Plan as reviewed: Custom domain (trial was Personal), [pricing link]

Cost per year: $70

Mail storage included: 20GB

Limits on send/receive volume: none

Aliases: unlimited, with lots of features: can set expiration, etc.

Additional mailboxes: not available

Kolab
Kolab Now is mainly positioned as a full groupware service, but they do have a email-only option which I investigated. There isn t much documentation about it compared to other providers, and also not much in the way of settings. You can turn greylisting on or off. And . that s it. It has a full suite of filtering options. They set an X-Envelope-To header which you can use with the arbitrary header match to do the right thing even for BCC situations. Filters can have multiple conditions and multiple actions. It is SIEVE-based and you can download your SIEVE definitions. If you enable 2FA, you disable IMAP and SMTP; not great. Verdict: Not an impressive enough email featureset to justify going with it. Kolab Now summary:

Website: https://kolabnow.com/

Reliability: Seems to be fine

Support: Fine responsiveness (next day)

Invidiaul app passwords: no

2FA: Yes, but if you enable it, they disable IMAP and SMTP

Filtering: Excellent

Spam settings: Only greylisting on/off

Server storage location: Switzerland; they have lots of details on their setup

Plan as reviewed: Just email [pricing link]

Cost per year: CHF 60, about $66

Mail storage included: 5GB

Limitations on send/receive volume: None

Aliases: Yes. Not sure if there are limits.

Additional mailboxes: Yes if you set up a group account. Flexible pricing based on user count is not documented anywhere I could find.

Mailfence
Mailfence is another option, somewhat similar to Startmail but without the unique vault. I had some questions about filters, and support was quite responsive, responding in a couple of hours. Some of their copy on their website is a bit misleading, but support clarified when I asked them. They do not offer encryption at rest (like most of the entries here). Mailfence s filtering system is the kind I d like to see. It allows multiple conditions and multiple actions for each rule, and has some unique actions as well (notify by SMS or XMPP). Support says that Recipients matches envelope recipients. However, one ommission is that I can t match on arbitrary headers; only the canned list of headers they provide. They have only two spam settings:

spam filter on/off

whitelist

Given some recent complaints about their spam filter being overly aggressive, I find this lack of control somewhat concerning. (However, I discount complaints about people begging for more features in free accounts; free won t provide the kind of service I m looking for with any provider.) There are generally just very few settings for email as well. Verdict: Response and helpful support, filtering has the right structure but lacks arbitrary header match. Could be a good option. Mailfence summary:

Website: https://mailfence.com/

Reliability: Seems to be fine

Support: Excellent responsiveness and helpful replies (after some initial confusion about my question of greylisting)

Individual app access passwords: No. You can set a per-service password (eg, an IMAP password), but those will be shared with all devices speaking that protocol.

2FA: Yes

Filtering: Good; only misses the ability to filter on arbitrary headers

Spam settings: Very few

Server storage location: Belgium

Plan as reviewed: Entry [pricing link]

Cost per year: $42

Mail storage included: 10GB, with a maximum of 50,000 messages

Limits on send/receive volume: none

Aliases: 50. Aliases can t be deleted once created (there may be an exeption to this for aliases on your own domain rather than mailfence.com)

Additional mailboxes: Their page on this is a bit confusing, and the pricing page lacks the information promised. It looks like you can pay the same $42/year for additional mailboxes, with a limit of up to 2 additional paid mailboxes and 2 additional free mailboxes tied to the account.

Runbox
This one came recommended in a Mastodon thread. I had some questions about it, and support response was fantastic I heard from two people that were co-founders of the company! Even within hours, on a weekend. Incredible! This kind of response was only surpassed by Migadu. I initially wrote to Runbox with questions about the incoming and outgoing message limits, which I hadn t seen elsewhere, as well as the bandwidth limit. They said the bandwidth limit is no longer enforced on paid accounts. The incoming and outgoing limits are enforced, and all email (even spam) counts towards the limit. Notably the outgoing limit is per recipient, so if you send 10 messages to your 50-recipient family group, that s the limit. However, they also indicated a willingness to reset the limit if something happens. Unfortunately, hitting the limit results in a hard bounce (SMTP 5xx) rather than a temporary failure (SMTP 4xx) so it can result in lost mail. This means I d be worried about some attack or other weirdness causing me to lose mail. Their filter is a pain point. Here are the challenges:

You can t directly match on a BCC recipient. Support advised to use a headers match, which will search for something anywhere in the headers. This works and is probably good enough since this data is in the Received: headers, but it is a little more imprecise.

They only have a contains , not an equals operator. So, for instance, a pattern searching for test@example.com would also match newtest@example.com . Support advised to put the email address in angle brackets to avoid this. That will work mostly. Angle brackets aren t always required in headers.

There is no way to have multiple actions on the filter (there is just no way to file an incoming message into two folders). This was the ultimate showstopper for me.

Support advised they are planning to upgrade the filter system in the future, but these are the limitations today. Verdict: A good option if you don t need much from the filtering system. Lots of privacy emphasis. Runbox summary:

Website: https://runbox.com/

Reliability: Seems to be fine, except returning 5xx codes if per-day limits are exceeded

Support: Excellent responsiveness and replies from founders

Individual app passwords: Yes

2FA: Yes

Filtering: Poor

Spam settings: Very few

Server storage location: Norway

Plan as reviewed: Mini [pricing link]

Cost per year: $35

Mail storage included: 10GB

Limited on send/receive volume: Receive 5000 messages/day, Send 500 recipients/day

Aliases: 100 on runbox.com; unlimited on your own domain

Additional mailboxes: $15/yr each, also with 10GB non-shared storage per mailbox

Fastmail
Fastmail came recommended to me by a friend I ve known for decades. Here s the thing about Fastmail, compared to all the services listed above: It all just works. Everything. Filtering, spam prevention, it is all there, all feature-complete, and all just does the right thing as you d hope. Their filtering system has a canned dropdown for To/Cc/Bcc , it supports multiple conditions and multiple actions, and just does the right thing. (Delivering to multiple folders is a little cumbersome but possible.) It has a particularly strong feature set around administering multiple accounts, including things like whether users can prevent admins from reading their mail. The not-so-great part of the picture is around privacy. Fastmail is based in Australia, where the government has extensive power around spying on data, even to the point of forcing companies to add wiretap capabilities. Fastmail s privacy policy states user data may be held in Australia, USA, India, and Netherlands. By default, they share data with unidentified spam companies , though you can disable this in settings. On the other hand, they do make a good effort towards privacy. I contacted support with some questions and got back a helpful response in three hours. However, one of the questions was about in which countries my particular data would be stored, and the support response said they would have to get back to me on that. It s been several days and no word back. Verdict: A featureful option that just works , with a lot of features for managing family accounts and the like, but lacking in the privacy area. Fastmail summary:

Website: https://www.fastmail.com/

Reliability: Seems to be fine

Support: Good response time on most questions; dropped the ball on one tha trequired research

Individual app access passwords: Yes

2FA: Yes

Filtering: Excellent

Spam settings: Can set filter aggressiveness, decide whether to share spam data with spam-fighting companies , configure how to handle backscatter spam, and evaluate the personal learning filter.

Server storage locations: Australia, USA, India, and The Netherlands. Legal jurisdiction is Australia.

Plan as reviewed: Individual [pricing link]

Cost per year: $60

Mail storage included: 50GB

Limits on send/receive volume: 300/hour

Aliases: Unlimited from what I can see

Additional mailboxes: No; requires a different plan for that

Migadu
Migadu was a service I d never heard of, but came recommended to me on Mastodon. I listed Migadu last because it is a class of its own compared to all the other options. Every other service is basically a webmail interface with a few extra settings tacked on. Migadu has a full-featured email admin console in addition. By that I mean you can:

View usage graphs (incoming, outgoing, storage) over time

Manage DNS (if you want Migadu to run your nameservers)

Manage multiple domains, and cross-domain relationships with mailboxes

View a limited set of logs

Configure accounts, reset their passwords if needed/authorized, etc.

Configure email address rewrite rules with wildcards and so forth

Basically, if you were the sort of person that ran your own mail servers back in the day, here is Migadu giving you most of that functionality. Effectively you have a web interface to do all the useful stuff, and they handle the boring and annoying bits. This is a really attractive model. Migadu support has been fantastic. They are quick to respond, and went above and beyond. I pointed out that their X-Envelope-To header, which is needed for filtering by BCC, wasn t being added on emails I sent myself. They replied 5 hours later indicating they had added the feature to add X-Envelope-To even for internal mails! Wow! I am impressed. With Migadu, you buy a pool of resources: storage space and incoming/outgoing traffic. What you do within that pool is up to you. You can set up users ( mailboxes ), aliases, domains, whatever you like. It all just shares the pool. You can restrict users further so that an individual user has access to only a subset of the pool resources. I was initially concerned about Migadu s daily send/receive message count limits, but in visiting with support and reading the documentation, what really comes out is that Migadu is a service with a personal touch. Hitting the incoming traffic limit will cause a SMTP temporary fail (4xx) response so you won t lose legit mail and support will work with you if it s a problem for legit uses. In other words, restrictions are soft and they are interpreted reasonably. One interesting thing about Migadu is that they do not offer accounts under their domain. That is, you MUST bring your own domain. That s pretty easy and cheap, of course. It also puts you in a position of power, because it is easy to migrate email from one provider to another if you own the domain. Filtering is done via SIEVE. There is a GUI editor which lets you accomplish most things, though it has an odd blind spot where you can t file a message into multiple folders. However, you can edit a SIEVE ruleset directly and you get the full SIEVE featureset, which is extensive (and does support filing a message into multiple folders). I note that the SIEVE :envelope match doesn t work, but Migadu adds an X-Envelope-To header which is just as good. I particularly love a company that tells you all the reasons you might not want to use them. Migadu s pro/con list is an honest drawbacks list (of course, their homepage highlights all the features!). Verdict: Fantastically powerful, excellent support, and good privacy. I chose this one. Migadu summary:

Website: https://migadu.com/

Reliability: Excellent

Support: Fantastic. Good response times and they added a feature (or fixed a bug?) a few hours after I requested it.

Individual access passwords: Yes. Create identities to support them.

2FA: Yes, on both the admin interface and the webmail interface

Filtering: Excellent, based on SIEVE. GUI editor doesn t support multiple actions when filing into a folder, but full SIEVE functionality is exposed.

Spam settings:

On the domain level, filter aggressiveness, Greylisting on/off, black and white lists

On the mailbox level, filter aggressiveness, black and whitelists, action to take with spam; compatible with filters.

Server storage location: France; legal jurisdiction Switzerland

Plan as reviewed: mini [pricing link]

Cost per year: $90

Mail storage included: 30GB ( soft quota)

Limits on send/receive volume: 1000 messgaes in/day, 100 messages out/day ( soft quotas)

Aliases: Unlimited on an unlimited number of domains

Additional mailboxes: Unlimited and free; uses pooled quotas, but individual quotas can be set

Others
Here are a few others that I didn t think worthy of getting a trial:

mxroute was recommended by several. Lots of concerning things in their policy, such as:

if you repeatedly send mail to unroutable recipients, they may publish the addresses on Github

they will terminate your account if they think you are rude or want to contest a charge

they reserve the right to cancel your service at any time for any (or no) reason.

Proton keeps coming up, and I will not consider it so long as I am locked into their client on mobile.

Skiff comes up sometimes, but they were acquired by Notion.

Disroot comes up; this discussion highlights a number of reasons why I avoid them. Their Terms of Service (ToS) is inconsistent with a general-purpose email account (I guess for targeting nonprofits and activists, that could make sense). Particularly laughable is that they claim to be friends of Open Source, but then would take down your account if you upload copyrighted material. News flash: in order for an Open Source license to be meaningful, the underlying work is copyrighted. It is perfectly legal to upload copyrighted material when you wrote it or have the license to do so!

Conclusions
There are a lot of good options for email hosting today, and in particular I appreciate the excellent personal support from companies like Migadu and Runbox. Support small businesses!

7 May 2024

Melissa Wen: Get Ready to 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest in A Coru a!

We re excited to announce the details of our upcoming 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest in the beautiful city of A Coru a, Spain! This year s hackfest will be hosted by Igalia and will take place from May 14th to 16th. It will be a gathering of minds from a diverse range of companies and open source projects, all coming together to share, learn, and collaborate outside the traditional conference format.

Who s Joining the Fun? We re excited to welcome participants from various backgrounds, including:

GPU hardware vendors;

Linux distributions;

Linux desktop environments and compositors;

Color experts, researchers and enthusiasts;

This diverse mix of backgrounds are represented by developers from several companies working on the Linux display stack: AMD, Arm, BlueSystems, Bootlin, Collabora, Google, GravityXR, Igalia, Intel, LittleCMS, Qualcomm, Raspberry Pi, RedHat, SUSE, and System76. It ll ensure a dynamic exchange of perspectives and foster collaboration across the Linux Display community. Please take a look at the list of participants for more info.

What s on the Agenda? The beauty of the hackfest is that the agenda is driven by participants! As this is a hybrid event, we decided to improve the experience for remote participants by creating a dedicated space for them to propose topics and some introductory talks in advance. From those inputs, we defined a schedule that reflects the collective interests of the group, but is still open for amendments and new proposals. Find the schedule details in the official event webpage. Expect discussions on:

KMS Color/HDR

Proposal with new DRM object type:

Brief presentation of GPU-vendor features;

Status update of plane color management pipeline per vendor on Linux;

HDR/Color Use-cases:

HDR gainmap images and how should we think about HDR;

Google/ChromeOS GFX view about HDR/per-plane color management, VKMS and lessons learned;

Post-blending Color Pipeline.

Color/HDR testing/CI

VKMS status update;

Chamelium boards, video capture.

Wayland protocols

color-management protocol status update;

color-representation and video playback.

Display control

HDR signalling status update;

backlight status update;

EDID and DDC/CI.

Strategy for video and gaming use-cases

Multi-plane support in compositors

Underlay, overlay, or mixed strategy for video and gaming use-cases;

KMS Plane UAPI to simplify the plane arrangement problem;

Shared plane arrangement algorithm desired.

HDR video and hardware overlay

Frame timing and VRR

Frame timing:

Limitations of uAPI;

Current user space solutions;

Brainstorm better uAPI;

Cursor/overlay plane updates with VRR;

KMS commit and buffer-readiness deadlines;

Power Saving vs Color/Latency

ABM (adaptive backlight management);

PSR1 latencies;

Power optimization vs color accuracy/latency requirements.

Content-Adaptive Scaling & Sharpening

Content-Adaptive Scalers on display hardware;

New drm_colorop for content adaptive scaling;

Proprietary algorithms.

Display Mux

Laptop muxes for switching of the embedded panel between the integrated GPU and the discrete GPU;

Seamless/atomic hand-off between drivers on Linux desktops.

Real time scheduling & async KMS API

Potential benefits: lower latency input feedback, better VRR handling, buffer synchronization, etc.

Issues around async uAPI usage and async-call handling.

In-person, but also geographically-distributed event This year Linux Display Next hackfest is a hybrid event, hosted onsite at the Igalia offices and available for remote attendance. In-person participants will find an environment for networking and brainstorming in our inspiring and collaborative office space. Additionally, A Coru a itself is a gem waiting to be explored, with stunning beaches, good food, and historical sites.

Semi-structured structure: how the 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest will work

Agenda: Participants proposed the topics and talks for discussing in sessions.

Interactive Sessions: Discussions, workshops, introductory talks and brainstorming sessions lasting around 1h30. There is always a starting point for discussions and new ideas will emerge in real time.

Immersive experience: We will have coffee-breaks between sessions and lunch time at the office for all in-person participants. Lunches and coffee-breaks are sponsored by Igalia. This will keep us sharing knowledge and in continuous interaction.

Spaces for all group sizes: In-person participants will find different room sizes that match various group sizes at Igalia HQ. Besides that, there will be some devices for showcasing and real-time demonstrations.

Sponsorship Igalia sponsors lunches and coffee-breaks on hackfest days, Tuesday s dinner, and the social event on Thursday afternoon for in-person participants. We can t wait to welcome hackfest attendees to A Coru a! Stay tuned for further details and outcomes of this unconventional and unique experience.

1 May 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: To Each This World

Review: To Each This World, by Julie E. Czerneda

Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	November 2022
ISBN:	0-7564-1543-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	676

To Each This World is a standalone science fiction novel. Henry m'Yama t'Nowak is the Arbiter of New Earth. This is somewhat akin to a president, but only in very specific ways. Henry's job is to deal with the Kmet. New Earth was settled by a slower-than-light colony ship from old Earth, our Earth. It is, so far as they know, the last of humanity in the universe. Origin Earth fell silent hundreds of years previous, before the colonists even landed. New Earth is now a carefully and thoughtfully managed world where humans survived, thrived, and at one point sent out six slower-than-light colony ships of its own. All were feared lost after a rushed launch due to a solar storm. As this story opens, a probe from one of those ships arrives. This is cause for rejoicing, but there are two small problems. The first is that the culture of New Earth has changed drastically since the days when they launched the Halcyon colony ships. New Earth is now part of the Duality, a new alliance with aliens painstakingly negotiated after their portal appeared in orbit. The Kmet were peaceful, eager to form an alliance and offer new technology, although they struggled with concepts such as individuality and insisted on interacting only with the Arbiter. Their technological gifts and the apparent loss of the Halcyon colony ships refocused New Earth on safety and caution. This unexpected message is a somewhat tricky political problem, a reminder of the path not taken. The other small problem is that the reaction of the Kmet to this message is... dramatic. This book has several problems, but the most serious is that it is simply too long. If you have read any other Czerneda novels, you know that she tends towards sprawling world-building, but usually there are enough twists and turns in the plot to keep the story moving while the protagonists slowly puzzle out the scientific mysteries. To Each This World is not sufficiently twisty for 676 pages. I think you could have cut half the novel without losing any major plot points. The interesting parts of this book, to me, were figuring out what's going on with the Kmet, some of the political tensions within the New Earth government, and understanding what Henry and Pilot Killian's story had to do with the apparently-unrelated but intriguing interludes following Beth Seeker in a strange place called Doublet. All that stuff is in here, but it's alongside a whole lot of Henry wrestling with lifeboat ethics in situations where he thinks he needs to lie to and manipulate people for their own good. We also get several extended tours of societies that, while vaguely interesting in a science fiction world-building way, have essentially nothing to do with the plot. We also get a whole lot of Henry's eagerly helpful AI polymorph Flip. I wanted to like this character, and I occasionally managed, but I felt like there was a constant mismatch between, in hindsight, how Czerneda meant for me to see Flip and what I thought she was signaling while I was reading. I wanted Flip to either be a fascinatingly weird companion or to be directly relevant to the plot, but instead there were hundreds of pages of unnerving creepiness mixed with obsequiousness and emotional neediness, all of which I think I read more into than Czerneda had intended. The overall experience was more exhausting than fun. The core of the plot is solid, and if you like SF novels built around world-building and scientific mysteries, there's a lot here to enjoy. I think Czerneda's Species Imperative series (starting with Survival) is a better execution of some of the same ideas, but I liked that series a lot and was willing to read another take on it. Czerneda is one of the SF writers who takes biology seriously and is willing to write very alien aliens, and that leads to a few satisfying twists. Also, Beth Seeker is a great character (I wish we'd seen more of her), and Killian, while a bit generic, is a serviceable protagonist when Czerneda needs someone to go poke things with a stick. Henry... I'm not sure what I think of Henry, and your enjoyment of this book may depend on how much you click with him. Henry is a diplomat and an extrovert. His greatest joy and talent is talking to people, navigating political situations, and negotiating. Science fiction is full of protagonists who should be this character, but they rarely are this character, probably because a lot of writers are introverts. I think Czerneda deserves real credit for making her charismatic politician sufficiently accurate that his thought processes occasionally felt alien. For me, Henry was easiest to appreciate when Killian was the viewpoint protagonist and I could look at him through someone else's eyes, but Henry's viewpoint mostly worked as well. There's a lot of competence porn enjoyment in watching him do his thing. The problem for me is that I thought several of his actions were unforgivably unethical, but no one in the book who matters seems to agree. I can see why he reached those unethical decisions, but they were profound violations of consent. He directly lies to people because he thinks telling the truth would be too risky and not get them to do what he wants them to do, and Czerneda sets up the story to imply that he might be right. This is not necessarily a bad choice in a novel, but the author has to do some work to bring me along, and Czerneda didn't do enough of that work. I kept wanting there to be some twist or sting or complication that forced Henry to come to terms with what he was doing, but it never happens. He has to pick between two moral principles that I consider rather finely balanced, if not tilted in the opposite direction that he does, and he treats one principle as inviolable and the other as mostly unimportant. The plans he makes on that basis work fine, and those on the other side of that decision are never heard from again. It left a bad taste in my mouth, particularly given how much of the book is built around Henry making tough, tricky decisions under pressure. I don't know about this book. I have a lot of mixed feelings. Parts of it I quite enjoyed. Parts of it I mostly enjoyed but wish were much less dragged out. Parts of it frustrated or bored me. It's one of those books where the more I thought about it after reading it, the more the parts I disliked annoyed me. If you like Czerneda's style of world-building and biology, and if you have more tolerance for Henry's decisions than I did, you may well like this, but read Species Imperative first. I should probably also warn that there is a lot of magical technology in this book that blatantly violates some core principles of physics. I have a high tolerance for that sort of thing, but if you don't, you're going to be grumbling. Rating: 6 out of 10

26 April 2024

Russell Coker: Humane AI Pin

I wrote a blog post The Shape of Computers [1] exploring ideas of how computers might evolve and how we can use them. One of the devices I mentioned was the Humane AI Pin, which has just been the recipient of one of the biggest roast reviews I ve ever seen [2], good work Marques Brownlee! As an aside I was once given a product to review which didn t work nearly as well as I think it should have worked so I sent an email to the developers saying sorry this product failed to work well so I can t say anything good about it and didn t publish a review. One of the first things that caught my attention in the review is the note that the AI Pin doesn t connect to your phone. I think that everything should connect to everything else as a usability feature. For security we don t want so much connecting and it s quite reasonable to turn off various connections at appropriate times for security, the Librem5 is an example of how this can be done with hardware switches to disable Wifi etc. But to just not have connectivity is bad. The next noteworthy thing is the external battery which also acts as a magnetic attachment from inside your shirt. So I guess it s using wireless charging through your shirt. A magnetically attached external battery would be a great feature for a phone, you could quickly swap a discharged battery for a fresh one and keep using it. When I tried to make the PinePhonePro my daily driver [3] I gave up and charging was one of the main reasons. One thing I learned from my experiment with the PinePhonePro is that the ratio of charge time to discharge time is sometimes more important than battery life and being able to quickly swap batteries without rebooting is a way of solving that. The reviewer of the AI Pin complains later in the video about battery life which seems to be partly due to wireless charging from the detachable battery and partly due to being physically small. It seems the phablet form factor is the smallest viable personal computer at this time. The review glosses over what could be the regarded as the 2 worst issues of the device. It does everything via the cloud (where the cloud means a computer owned by someone I probably shouldn t trust ) and it records everything. Strange that it s not getting the hate the Google Glass got. The user interface based on laser projection of menus on the palm of your hand is an interesting concept. I d rather have a Bluetooth attached tablet or something for operations that can t be conveniently done with voice. The reviewer harshly criticises the laser projection interface later in the video, maybe technology isn t yet adequate to implement this properly. The first criticism of the device in the review part of the video is of the time taken to answer questions, especially when Internet connectivity is poor. His question who designed the Washington Monument took 8 seconds to start answering it in his demonstration. I asked the Alpaca LLM the same question running on 4 cores of a E5-2696 and it took 10 seconds to start answering and then printed the words at about speaking speed. So if we had a free software based AI device for this purpose it shouldn t be difficult to get local LLM computation with less delay than the Humane device by simply providing more compute power than 4 cores of a E5-2696v3. How does a 32 core 1.05GHz Mali G72 from 2017 (as used in the Galaxy Note 9) compare to 4 cores of a 2.3GHz Intel CPU from 2015? Passmark says that Intel CPU can do 48GFlop with all 18 cores so 4 cores can presumably do about 10GFlop which seems less than the claimed 20-32GFlop of the Mali G72. It seems that with the right software even older Android phones could give adequate performance for a local LLM. The Alpaca model I m testing with takes 4.2G of RAM to run which is usable in a Note 9 with 8G of RAM or a Pixel 8 Pro with 12G. A Pixel 8 Pro could have 4.2G of RAM reserved for a LLM and still have as much RAM for other purposes as my main laptop as of a few months ago. I consider the speed of Alpaca on my workstation to be acceptable but not great. If we can get FOSS phones running a LLM at that speed then I think it would be great for a first version we can always rely on newer and faster hardware becoming available. Marques notes that the cause of some of the problems is likely due to a desire to make it a separate powerful product in the future and that if they gave it phone connectivity in the start they would have to remove that later on. I think that the real problem is that the profit motive is incompatible with good design. They want to have a product that s stand-alone and justifies the purchase price plus subscription and that means not making it a phone accessory . While I think that the best thing for the user is to allow it to talk to a phone, a PC, a car, and anything else the user wants. He compares it to the Apple Vision Pro which has the same issue of trying to be a stand-alone computer but not being properly capable of it. One of the benefits that Marques cites for the AI Pin is the ability to capture voice notes. Dictaphones have been around for over 100 years and very few people have bought them, not even in the 80s when they became cheap. While almost everyone can occasionally benefit from being able to make a note of an idea when it s not convenient to write it down there are few people who need it enough to carry a separate device, not even if that device is tiny. But a phone as a general purpose computing device with microphone can easily be adapted to such things. One possibility would be to program a phone to start a voice note when the volume up and down buttons are pressed at the same time or when some other condition is met. Another possibility is to have a phone have a hotkey function that varies by what you are doing, EG if bushwalking have the hotkey be to take a photo or if on a flight have it be taking a voice note. On the Mobile Apps page on the Debian wiki I created a section for categories of apps that I think we need [4]. In that section I added the following list:

Voice input for dictation
Voice assistant like Google/Apple
Voice output
Full operation for visually impaired people

One thing I really like about the AI Pin is that it has the potential to become a really good computing and personal assistant device for visually impaired people funded by people with full vision who want to legally control a computer while driving etc. I have some concerns about the potential uses of the AI Pin while driving (as Marques stated an aim to do), but if it replaces the use of regular phones while driving it will make things less bad. Marques concludes his video by warning against buying a product based on the promise of what it can be in future. I bought the Librem5 on exactly that promise, the difference is that I have the source and the ability to help make the promise come true. My aim is to spend thousands of dollars on test hardware and thousands of hours of development time to help make FOSS phones a product that most people can use at low price with little effort. Another interesting review of the pin is by Mrwhostheboss [5], one of his examples is of asking the pin for advice about a chair but without him knowing the pin selected a different chair in the room. He compares this to using Google s apps on a phone and seeing which item the app has selected. He also said that he doesn t want to make an order based on speech he wants to review a page of information about it. I suspect that the design of the pin had too much input from people accustomed to asking a corporate travel office to find them a flight and not enough from people who look through the details of the results of flight booking services trying to save an extra $20. Some people might say if you need to save $20 on a flight then a $24/month subscription computing service isn t for you , I reject that argument. I can afford lots of computing services because I try to get the best deal on every moderately expensive thing I pay for. Another point that Mrwhostheboss makes is regarding secret SMS, you probably wouldn t want to speak a SMS you are sending to your SO while waiting for a train. He makes it clear that changing between phone and pin while sharing resources (IE not having a separate phone number and separate data store) is a desired feature. The most insightful point Mrwhostheboss made was when he suggested that if the pin had come out before the smartphone then things might have all gone differently, but now anything that s developed has to be based around the expectations of phone use. This is something we need to keep in mind when developing FOSS software, there s lots of different ways that things could be done but we need to meet the expectations of users if we want our software to be used by many people. I previously wrote a blog post titled Considering Convergence [6] about the possible ways of using a phone as a laptop. While I still believe what I wrote there I m now considering the possibility of ease of movement of work in progress as a way of addressing some of the same issues. I ve written a blog post about Convergence vs Transferrence [7].

13 March 2024

Russell Coker: The Shape of Computers

Introduction There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type computers are as small as they need to be given the size of monitors etc that they connect to. This means that further development in the size and shape of computers will largely be determined by human factors. I think we need to consider how computers might be developed to better suit humans and how to write free software to make such computers usable without being constrained by corporate interests. Those of us who are involved in developing OSs and applications need to consider how to adjust to the changes and ideally anticipate changes. While we can t anticipate the details of future devices we can easily predict general trends such as being smaller, higher resolution, etc. Desktop/Laptop PCs When home computers first came out it was standard to have the keyboard in the main box, the Apple ][ being the most well known example. This has lost popularity due to the demand to have multiple options for a light keyboard that can be moved for convenience combined with multiple options for the box part. But it still pops up occasionally such as the Raspberry Pi 400 [1] which succeeds due to having the computer part being small and light. I think this type of computer will remain a niche product. It could be used in a add a screen to make a laptop as opposed to the add a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop model but a tablet without a keyboard is more useful than a non-server PC without a display. The PC as box with connections for keyboard, display, etc has a long future ahead of it. But the sizes will probably decrease (they should have stopped making PC cases to fit CD/DVD drives at least 10 years ago). The NUC size is a useful option and I think that DVD drives will stop being used for software soon which will allow a range of smaller form factors. The regular laptop is something that will remain useful, but the tablet with detachable keyboard devices could take a lot of that market. Full functionality for all tasks requires a keyboard because at the moment text editing with a touch screen is an unsolved problem in computer science [2]. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold [3] and related Lenovo products are very interesting. Advances in materials allow laptops to be thinner and lighter which leaves the screen size as a major limitation to portability. There is a conflict between desiring a large screen to see lots of content and wanting a small size to carry and making a device foldable is an obvious solution that has recently become possible. Making a foldable laptop drives a desire for not having a permanently attached keyboard which then makes a touch screen keyboard a requirement. So this means that user interfaces for PCs have to be adapted to work well on touch screens. The Think line seems to be continuing the history of innovation that it had when owned by IBM. There are also a range of other laptops that have two regular screens so they are essentially the same as the Thinkpad X1 Fold but with two separate screens instead of one folding one, prices are as low as $600US. I think that the typical interfaces for desktop PCs (EG MS-Windows and KDE) don t work well for small devices and touch devices and the Android interface generally isn t a good match for desktop systems. We need to invent more options for this. This is not a criticism of KDE, I use it every day and it works well. But it s designed for use cases that don t match new hardware that is on sale. As an aside it would be nice if Lenovo gave samples of their newest gear to people who make significant contributions to GUIs. Give a few Thinkpad Fold devices to KDE people, a few to GNOME people, and a few others to people involved in Wayland development and see how that promotes software development and future sales. We also need to adopt features from laptops and phones into desktop PCs. When voice recognition software was first released in the 90s it was for desktop PCs, it didn t take off largely because it wasn t very accurate (none of them recognised my voice). Now voice recognition in phones is very accurate and it s very common for desktop PCs to have a webcam or headset with a microphone so it s time for this to be re-visited. GPS support in laptops is obviously useful and can work via Wifi location, via a USB GPS device, or via wwan mobile phone hardware (even if not used for wwan networking). Another possibility is using the same software interfaces as used for GPS on laptops for a static definition of location for a desktop PC or server. The Interesting New Things Watch Like The wrist-watch [4] has been a standard format for easy access to data when on the go since it s military use at the end of the 19th century when the practical benefits beat the supposed femininity of the watch. So it seems most likely that they will continue to be in widespread use in computerised form for the forseeable future. For comparison smart phones have been in widespread use as pocket watches for about 10 years. The question is how will watch computers end up? Will we have Dick Tracy style watch phones that you speak into? Will it be the current smart watch functionality of using the watch to answer a call which goes to a bluetooth headset? Will smart watches end up taking over the functionality of the calculator watch [5] which was popular in the 80 s? With today s technology you could easily have a fully capable PC strapped to your forearm, would that be useful? Phone Like Folding phones (originally popularised as Star Trek Tricorders) seem likely to have a long future ahead of them. Engineering technology has only recently developed to the stage of allowing them to work the way people would hope them to work (a folding screen with no gaps). Phones and tablets with multiple folds are coming out now [6]. This will allow phones to take much of the market share that tablets used to have while tablets and laptops merge at the high end. I ve previously written about Convergence between phones and desktop computers [7], the increased capabilities of phones adds to the case for Convergence. Folding phones also provide new possibilities for the OS. The Oppo OnePlus Open and the Google Pixel Fold both have a UI based around using the two halves of the folding screen for separate data at some times. I think that the current user interfaces for desktop PCs don t properly take advantage of multiple monitors and the possibilities raised by folding phones only adds to the lack. My pet peeve with multiple monitor setups is when they don t make it obvious which monitor has keyboard focus so you send a CTRL-W or ALT-F4 to the wrong screen by mistake, it s a problem that also happens on a single screen but is worse with multiple screens. There are rumours of phones described as three fold (where three means the number of segments with two folds between them), it will be interesting to see how that goes. Will phones go the same way as PCs in terms of having a separation between the compute bit and the input device? It s quite possible to have a compute device in the phone form factor inside a secure pocket which talks via Bluetooth to another device with a display and speakers. Then you could change your phone between a phone-size display and a tablet sized display easily and when using your phone a thief would not be able to easily steal the compute bit (which has passwords etc). Could the watch part of the phone (strapped to your wrist and difficult to steal) be the active part and have a tablet size device as an external display? There are already announcements of smart watches with up to 1GB of RAM (same as the Samsung Galaxy S3), that s enough for a lot of phone functionality. The Rabbit R1 [8] and the Humane AI Pin [9] have some interesting possibilities for AI speech interfaces. Could that take over some of the current phone use? It seems that visually impaired people have been doing badly in the trend towards touch screen phones so an option of a voice interface phone would be a good option for them. As an aside I hope some people are working on AI stuff for FOSS devices. Laptop Like One interesting PC variant I just discovered is the Higole 2 Pro portable battery operated Windows PC with 5.5 touch screen [10]. It looks too thick to fit in the same pockets as current phones but is still very portable. The version with built in battery is $AU423 which is in the usual price range for low end laptops and tablets. I don t think this is the future of computing, but it is something that is usable today while we wait for foldable devices to take over. The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro [11] has driven interest in 3D and head mounted computers. I think this could be a useful peripheral for a laptop or phone but it won t be part of a primary computing environment. In 2011 I wrote about the possibility of using augmented reality technology for providing a desktop computing environment [12]. I wonder how a Vision Pro would work for that on a train or passenger jet. Another interesting thing that s on offer is a laptop with 7 touch screen beside the keyboard [13]. It seems that someone just looked at what parts are available cheaply in China (due to being parts of more popular devices) and what could fit together. I think a keyboard should be central to the monitor for serious typing, but there may be useful corner cases where typing isn t that common and a touch-screen display is of use. Developing a range of strange hardware and then seeing which ones get adopted is a good thing and an advantage of Ali Express and Temu. Useful Hardware for Developing These Things I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359 which has stylus support [14], and it s generally a great little laptop in every other way. There s a common failure case of that model where touch support for fingers breaks but the stylus still works which allows it to be used for testing touch screen functionality while making it cheap. The PineTime is a nice smart watch from Pine64 which is designed to be open [15]. I am quite happy with it but haven t done much with it yet (apart from wearing it every day and getting alerts etc from Android). At $50 when delivered to Australia it s significantly more expensive than most smart watches with similar features but still a lot cheaper than the high end ones. Also the Raspberry Pi Watch [16] is interesting too. The PinePhonePro is an OK phone made to open standards but it s hardware isn t as good as Android phones released in the same year [17]. I ve got some useful stuff done on mine, but the battery life is a major issue and the screen resolution is low. The Librem 5 phone from Purism has a better hardware design for security with switches to disable functionality [18], but it s even slower than the PinePhonePro. These are good devices for test and development but not ones that many people would be excited to use every day. Wwan hardware (for accessing the phone network) in M.2 form factor can be obtained for free if you have access to old/broken laptops. Such devices start at about $35 if you want to buy one. USB GPS devices also start at about $35 so probably not worth getting if you can get a wwan device that does GPS as well. What We Must Do Debian appears to have some voice input software in the pocketsphinx package but no documentation on how it s to be used. This would be a good thing to document, I spent 15 mins looking at it and couldn t get it going. To take advantage of the hardware features in phones we need software support and we ideally don t want free software to lag too far behind proprietary software which IMHO means the typical Android setup for phones/tablets. Support for changing screen resolution is already there as is support for touch screens. Support for adapting the GUI to changed screen size is something that needs to be done even today s hardware of connecting a small laptop to an external monitor doesn t have the ideal functionality for changing the UI. There also seem to be some limitations in touch screen support with multiple screens, I haven t investigated this properly yet, it definitely doesn t work in an expected manner in Ubuntu 22.04 and I haven t yet tested the combinations on Debian/Unstable. ML is becoming a big thing and it has some interesting use cases for small devices where a smart device can compensate for limited input options. There s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area and we are limited by the fact that we can t just rip off the work of other people for use as training data in the way that corporations do. Security is more important for devices that are at high risk of theft. The vast majority of free software installations are way behind Android in terms of security and we need to address that. I have some ideas for improvement but there is always a conflict between security and usability and while Android is usable for it s own special apps it s not usable in a I want to run applications that use any files from any other applicationsin any way I want sense. My post about Sandboxing Phone apps is relevant for people who are interested in this [19]. We also need to extend security models to cope with things like ok google type functionality which has the potential to be a bug and the emerging class of LLM based attacks. I will write more posts about these thing. Please write comments mentioning FOSS hardware and software projects that address these issues and also documentation for such things.

9 March 2024

Valhalla's Things: Elastic Neck Top Two: MOAR Ruffles

A woman wearing a white top with a wide neck with ruffles and puffy sleeves that are gathered at the cuff. The top is tucked in the trousers to gather the fullness at the waist.

After making my Elastic Neck Top I knew I wanted to make another one less constrained by the amount of available fabric. I had a big cut of white cotton voile, I bought some more swimsuit elastic, and I also had a spool of n 100 sewing cotton, but then I postponed the project for a while I was working on other things. Then FOSDEM 2024 arrived, I was going to remote it, and I was working on my Augusta Stays, but I knew that in the middle of FOSDEM I risked getting to the stage where I needed to leave the computer to try the stays on: not something really compatible with the frenetic pace of a FOSDEM weekend, even one spent at home. I needed a backup project¹, and this was perfect: I already had everything I needed, the pattern and instructions were already on my site (so I didn t need to take pictures while working), and it was mostly a lot of straight seams, perfect while watching conference videos. So, on the Friday before FOSDEM I cut all of the pieces, then spent three quarters of FOSDEM on the stays, and when I reached the point where I needed to stop for a fit test I started on the top. Like the first one, everything was sewn by hand, and one week after I had started everything was assembled, except for the casings for the elastic at the neck and cuffs, which required about 10 km of sewing, and even if it was just a running stitch it made me want to reconsider my lifestyle choices a few times: there was really no reason for me not to do just those seams by machine in a few minutes. Instead I kept sewing by hand whenever I had time for it, and on the next weekend it was ready. We had a rare day of sun during the weekend, so I wore my thermal underwear, some other layer, a scarf around my neck, and went outside with my SO to have a batch of pictures taken (those in the jeans posts, and others for a post I haven t written yet. Have I mentioned I have a backlog?). And then the top went into the wardrobe, and it will come out again when the weather will be a bit warmer. Or maybe it will be used under the Augusta Stays, since I don t have a 1700 chemise yet, but that requires actually finishing them. The pattern for this project was already online, of course, but I ve added a picture of the casing to the relevant section, and everything is as usual #FreeSoftWear.

yes, I could have worked on some knitting WIP, but lately I m more in a sewing mood.

25 February 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Fund

Review: The Fund, by Rob Copeland

Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-27694-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	310

I first became aware of Ray Dalio when either he or his publisher plastered advertisements for The Principles all over the San Francisco 4th and King Caltrain station. If I recall correctly, there were also constant radio commercials; it was a whole thing in 2017. My brain is very good at tuning out advertisements, so my only thought at the time was "some business guy wrote a self-help book." I think I vaguely assumed he was a CEO of some traditional business, since that's usually who writes heavily marketed books like this. I did not connect him with hedge funds or Bridgewater, which I have a bad habit of confusing with Blackwater. The Principles turns out to be more of a laundered cult manual than a self-help book. And therein lies a story. Rob Copeland is currently with The New York Times, but for many years he was the hedge fund reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He covered, among other things, Bridgewater Associates, the enormous hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio. The Fund is a biography of Ray Dalio and a history of Bridgewater from its founding as a vehicle for Dalio's advising business until 2022 when Dalio, after multiple false starts and title shuffles, finally retired from running the company. (Maybe. Based on the history recounted here, it wouldn't surprise me if he was back at the helm by the time you read this.) It is one of the wildest, creepiest, and most abusive business histories that I have ever read. It's probably worth mentioning, as Copeland does explicitly, that Ray Dalio and Bridgewater hate this book and claim it's a pack of lies. Copeland includes some of their denials (and many non-denials that sound as good as confirmations to me) in footnotes that I found increasingly amusing.

A lawyer for Dalio said he "treated all employees equally, giving people at all levels the same respect and extending them the same perks."

Uh-huh. Anyway, I personally know nothing about Bridgewater other than what I learned here and the occasional mention in Matt Levine's newsletter (which is where I got the recommendation for this book). I have no independent information whether anything Copeland describes here is true, but Copeland provides the typical extensive list of notes and sourcing one expects in a book like this, and Levine's comments indicated it's generally consistent with Bridgewater's industry reputation. I think this book is true, but since the clear implication is that the world's largest hedge fund was primarily a deranged cult whose employees mostly spied on and rated each other rather than doing any real investment work, I also have questions, not all of which Copeland answers to my satisfaction. But more on that later. The center of this book are the Principles. These were an ever-changing list of rules and maxims for how people should conduct themselves within Bridgewater. Per Copeland, although Dalio later published a book by that name, the version of the Principles that made it into the book was sanitized and significantly edited down from the version used inside the company. Dalio was constantly adding new ones and sometimes changing them, but the common theme was radical, confrontational "honesty": never being silent about problems, confronting people directly about anything that they did wrong, and telling people all of their faults so that they could "know themselves better." If this sounds like textbook abusive behavior, you have the right idea. This part Dalio admits to openly, describing Bridgewater as a firm that isn't for everyone but that achieves great results because of this culture. But the uncomfortably confrontational vibes are only the tip of the iceberg of dysfunction. Here are just a few of the ways this played out according to Copeland:

Dalio decided that everyone's opinions should be weighted by the accuracy of their previous decisions, to create a "meritocracy," and therefore hired people to build a social credit system in which people could use an app to constantly rate all of their co-workers. This almost immediately devolved into out-group bullying worthy of a high school, with employees hurriedly down-rating and ostracizing any co-worker that Dalio down-rated.
When an early version of the system uncovered two employees at Bridgewater with more credibility than Dalio, Dalio had the system rigged to ensure that he always had the highest ratings and was not affected by other people's ratings.
Dalio became so obsessed with the principle of confronting problems that he created a centralized log of problems at Bridgewater and required employees find and report a quota of ten or twenty new issues every week or have their bonus docked. He would then regularly pick some issue out of the issue log, no matter how petty, and treat it like a referendum on the worth of the person responsible for the issue.
Dalio's favorite way of dealing with a problem was to put someone on trial. This involved extensive investigations followed by a meeting where Dalio would berate the person and harshly catalog their flaws, often reducing them to tears or panic attacks, while smugly insisting that having an emotional reaction to criticism was a personality flaw. These meetings were then filmed and added to a library available to all Bridgewater employees, often edited to remove Dalio's personal abuse and to make the emotional reaction of the target look disproportionate. The ones Dalio liked the best were shown to all new employees as part of their training in the Principles.
One of the best ways to gain institutional power in Bridgewater was to become sycophantically obsessed with the Principles and to be an eager participant in Dalio's trials. The highest levels of Bridgewater featured constant jockeying for power, often by trying to catch rivals in violations of the Principles so that they would be put on trial.

In one of the common and all-too-disturbing connections between Wall Street finance and the United States' dysfunctional government, James Comey (yes, that James Comey) ran internal security for Bridgewater for three years, meaning that he was the one who pulled evidence from surveillance cameras for Dalio to use to confront employees during his trials. In case the cult vibes weren't strong enough already, Bridgewater developed its own idiosyncratic language worthy of Scientology. The trials were called "probings," firing someone was called "sorting" them, and rating them was called "dotting," among many other Bridgewater-specific terms. Needless to say, no one ever probed Dalio himself. You will also be completely unsurprised to learn that Copeland documents instances of sexual harassment and discrimination at Bridgewater, including some by Dalio himself, although that seems to be a relatively small part of the overall dysfunction. Dalio was happy to publicly humiliate anyone regardless of gender. If you're like me, at this point you're probably wondering how Bridgewater continued operating for so long in this environment. (Per Copeland, since Dalio's retirement in 2022, Bridgewater has drastically reduced the cult-like behaviors, deleted its archive of probings, and de-emphasized the Principles.) It was not actually a religious cult; it was a hedge fund that has to provide investment services to huge, sophisticated clients, and by all accounts it's a very successful one. Why did this bizarre nightmare of a workplace not interfere with Bridgewater's business? This, I think, is the weakest part of this book. Copeland makes a few gestures at answering this question, but none of them are very satisfying. First, it's clear from Copeland's account that almost none of the employees of Bridgewater had any control over Bridgewater's investments. Nearly everyone was working on other parts of the business (sales, investor relations) or on cult-related obsessions. Investment decisions (largely incorporated into algorithms) were made by a tiny core of people and often by Dalio himself. Bridgewater also appears to not trade frequently, unlike some other hedge funds, meaning that they probably stay clear of the more labor-intensive high-frequency parts of the business. Second, Bridgewater took off as a hedge fund just before the hedge fund boom in the 1990s. It transformed from Dalio's personal consulting business and investment newsletter to a hedge fund in 1990 (with an earlier investment from the World Bank in 1987), and the 1990s were a very good decade for hedge funds. Bridgewater, in part due to Dalio's connections and effective marketing via his newsletter, became one of the largest hedge funds in the world, which gave it a sort of institutional momentum. No one was questioned for putting money into Bridgewater even in years when it did poorly compared to its rivals. Third, Dalio used the tried and true method of getting free publicity from the financial press: constantly predict an upcoming downturn, and aggressively take credit whenever you were right. From nearly the start of his career, Dalio predicted economic downturns year after year. Bridgewater did very well in the 2000 to 2003 downturn, and again during the 2008 financial crisis. Dalio aggressively takes credit for predicting both of those downturns and positioning Bridgewater correctly going into them. This is correct; what he avoids mentioning is that he also predicted downturns in every other year, the majority of which never happened. These points together create a bit of an answer, but they don't feel like the whole picture and Copeland doesn't connect the pieces. It seems possible that Dalio may simply be good at investing; he reads obsessively and clearly enjoys thinking about markets, and being an abusive cult leader doesn't take up all of his time. It's also true that to some extent hedge funds are semi-free money machines, in that once you have a sufficient quantity of money and political connections you gain access to investment opportunities and mechanisms that are very likely to make money and that the typical investor simply cannot access. Dalio is clearly good at making personal connections, and invested a lot of effort into forming close ties with tricky clients such as pools of Chinese money. Perhaps the most compelling explanation isn't mentioned directly in this book but instead comes from Matt Levine. Bridgewater touts its algorithmic trading over humans making individual trades, and there is some reason to believe that consistently applying an algorithm without regard to human emotion is a solid trading strategy in at least some investment areas. Levine has asked in his newsletter, tongue firmly in cheek, whether the bizarre cult-like behavior and constant infighting is a strategy to distract all the humans and keep them from messing with the algorithm and thus making bad decisions. Copeland leaves this question unsettled. Instead, one comes away from this book with a clear vision of the most dysfunctional workplace I have ever heard of, and an endless litany of bizarre events each more astonishing than the last. If you like watching train wrecks, this is the book for you. The only drawback is that, unlike other entries in this genre such as Bad Blood or Billion Dollar Loser, Bridgewater is a wildly successful company, so you don't get the schadenfreude of seeing a house of cards collapse. You do, however, get a helpful mental model to apply to the next person who tries to talk to you about "radical honesty" and "idea meritocracy." The flaw in this book is that the existence of an organization like Bridgewater is pointing to systematic flaws in how our society works, which Copeland is largely uninterested in interrogating. "How could this have happened?" is a rather large question to leave unanswered. The sheer outrageousness of Dalio's behavior also gets a bit tiring by the end of the book, when you've seen the patterns and are hearing about the fourth variation. But this is still an astonishing book, and a worthy entry in the genre of capitalism disasters. Rating: 7 out of 10

25 January 2024

Joachim Breitner: GHC Steering Committee Retrospective

After seven years of service as member and secretary on the GHC Steering Committee, I have resigned from that role. So this is a good time to look back and retrace the formation of the GHC proposal process and committee. In my memory, I helped define and shape the proposal process, optimizing it for effectiveness and throughput, but memory can be misleading, and judging from the paper trail in my email archives, this was indeed mostly Ben Gamari s and Richard Eisenberg s achievement: Already in Summer of 2016, Ben Gamari set up the ghc-proposals Github repository with a sketch of a process and sent out a call for nominations on the GHC user s mailing list, which I replied to. The Simons picked the first set of members, and in the fall of 2016 we discussed the committee s by-laws and procedures. As so often, Richard was an influential shaping force here.

Three ingredients For example, it was him that suggested that for each proposal we have one committee member be the Shepherd , overseeing the discussion. I believe this was one ingredient for the process effectiveness: There is always one person in charge, and thus we avoid the delays incurred when any one of a non-singleton set of volunteers have to do the next step (and everyone hopes someone else does it). The next ingredient was that we do not usually require a vote among all members (again, not easy with volunteers with limited bandwidth and occasional phases of absence). Instead, the shepherd makes a recommendation (accept/reject), and if the other committee members do not complain, this silence is taken as consent, and we come to a decision. It seems this idea can also be traced back on Richard, who suggested that once a decision is requested, the shepherd [generates] consensus. If consensus is elusive, then we vote. At the end of the year we agreed and wrote down these rules, created the mailing list for our internal, but publicly archived committee discussions, and began accepting proposals, starting with Adam Gundry s `OverloadedRecordFields`. At that point, there was no secretary role yet, so how I did become one? It seems that in February 2017 I started to clean-up and refine the process documentation, fixing bugs in the process (like requiring authors to set Github labels when they don t even have permissions to do that). This in particular meant that someone from the committee had to manually handle submissions and so on, and by the aforementioned principle that at every step there ought to be exactly one person in change, the role of a secretary followed naturally. In the email in which I described that role I wrote:
Simon already shoved me towards picking up the secretary hat, to reduce load on Ben.
So when I merged the updated process documentation, I already listed myself secretary . It wasn t just Simon s shoving that put my into the role, though. I dug out my original self-nomination email to Ben, and among other things I wrote:
I also hope that there is going to be clear responsibilities and a clear workflow among the committee. E.g. someone (possibly rotating), maybe called the secretary, who is in charge of having an initial look at proposals and then assigning it to a member who shepherds the proposal.
So it is hardly a surprise that I became secretary, when it was dear to my heart to have a smooth continuous process here. I am rather content with the result: These three ingredients single secretary, per-proposal shepherds, silence-is-consent helped the committee to be effective throughout its existence, even as every once in a while individual members dropped out.

Ulterior motivation I must admit, however, there was an ulterior motivation behind me grabbing the secretary role: Yes, I did want the committee to succeed, and I did want that authors receive timely, good and decisive feedback on their proposals but I did not really want to have to do that part. I am, in fact, a lousy proposal reviewer. I am too generous when reading proposals, and more likely mentally fill gaps in a specification rather than spotting them. Always optimistically assuming that the authors surely know what they are doing, rather than critically assessing the impact, the implementation cost and the interaction with other language features. And, maybe more importantly: why should I know which changes are good and which are not so good in the long run? Clearly, the authors cared enough about a proposal to put it forward, so there is some need and I do believe that Haskell should stay an evolving and innovating language but how does this help me decide about this or that particular feature. I even, during the formation of the committee, explicitly asked that we write down some guidance on Vision and Guideline ; do we want to foster change or innovation, or be selective gatekeepers? Should we accept features that are proven to be useful, or should we accept features so that they can prove to be useful? This discussion, however, did not lead to a concrete result, and the assessment of proposals relied on the sum of each member s personal preference, expertise and gut feeling. I am not saying that this was a mistake: It is hard to come up with a general guideline here, and even harder to find one that does justice to each individual proposal. So the secret motivation for me to grab the secretary post was that I could contribute without having to judge proposals. Being secretary allowed me to assign most proposals to others to shepherd, and only once in a while myself took care of a proposal, when it seemed to be very straight-forward. Sneaky, ain t it?

7 Years later For years to come I happily played secretary: When an author finished their proposal and public discussion ebbed down they would ping me on GitHub, I would pick a suitable shepherd among the committee and ask them to judge the proposal. Eventually, the committee would come to a conclusion, usually by implicit consent, sometimes by voting, and I d merge the pull request and update the metadata thereon. Every few months I d summarize the current state of affairs to the committee (what happened since the last update, which proposals are currently on our plate), and once per year gathered the data for Simon Peyton Jones annually GHC Status Report. Sometimes some members needed a nudge or two to act. Some would eventually step down, and I d sent around a call for nominations and when the nominations came in, distributed them off-list among the committee and tallied the votes. Initially, that was exciting. For a long while it was a pleasant and rewarding routine. Eventually, it became a mere chore. I noticed that I didn t quite care so much anymore about some of the discussion, and there was a decent amount of naval-gazing, meta-discussions and some wrangling about claims of authority that was probably useful and necessary, but wasn t particularly fun. I also began to notice weaknesses in the processes that I helped shape: We could really use some more automation for showing proposal statuses, notifying people when they have to act, and nudging them when they don t. The whole silence-is-assent approach is good for throughput, but not necessary great for quality, and maybe the committee members need to be pushed more firmly to engage with each proposal. Like GHC itself, the committee processes deserve continuous refinement and refactoring, and since I could not muster the motivation to change my now well-trod secretarial ways, it was time for me to step down. Luckily, Adam Gundry volunteered to take over, and that makes me feel much less bad for quitting. Thanks for that! And although I am for my day job now enjoying a language that has many of the things out of the box that for Haskell are still only language extensions or even just future proposals (dependent types, `BlockArguments`, `do` notation with `( foo)` expressions and Unicode), I m still around, hosting the Haskell Interlude Podcast, writing on this blog and hanging out at ZuriHac etc.

19 January 2024

Russell Coker: 2.5Gbit Ethernet

I just decided to upgrade the core of my home network from 1Gbit to 2.5Gbit. I didn t really need to do this, it was only about 5 years ago that I upgrade from 100Mbit to 1Gbit. but it s cheap and seemed interesting. I decided to do it because a 2.5Gbit switch was listed as cheap on Ozbargain Computing [1], that was $40.94 delivered. If you are in Australia and like computers then Ozbargain is a site worth polling, every day there s interesting things at low prices. The seller of the switch is KeeplinkStore [2] who distinguished themselves by phoning me from China to inform me that I had ordered a switch with a UK plug for delivery to Australia and suggesting that I cancel the order and make a new order with an Australian plug. It wouldn t have been a big deal if I had received a UK plug as I ve got a collection of adaptors but it was still nice of them to make it convenient for me. The switch basically does what it s expected to do and has no fan so it s quiet. I got a single port 2.5Gbit PCIe card for $18.77 and a dual port card for $34.07. Those cards are a little expensive when compared to 1Gbit cards but very cheap when compared to the computers they are installed in. These cards use the Realtek RTL8125 chipset and work well. I got a USB-3 2.5Gbit device for $17.43. I deliberately didn t get USB-C because I still use laptops without USB-C and most of the laptops with USB-C only have a single USB-C port which is used for power. I don t plan to stop using my 100Mbit USB ethernet device because most of the time I don t need a lot of speed. But sometimes I do things like testing auto-install on laptops and then having something faster than Gigabit is good. This card worked at 1Gbit speed on a 1Gbit network when used with a system running Debian/Bookworm with kernel 6.1 and worked at 2.5Gbit speed when connected to my LicheePi RISC-V system running Linux 5.10, but it would only do 100Mbit on my laptop running Debian/Unstable with kernel 6.6 (Debian Bug #1061095) [3]. It s a little disappointing but not many people have such hardware so it probably doesn t get a lot of testing. For the moment I plan to just use a 1Gbit USB Ethernet device most of the time and if I really need the speed I ll just use an older kernel. I did some tests with wget and curl to see if I could get decent speeds. When using wget 1.21.3 on Debian/Bookworm I got transfer speeds of 103MB/s and 18.8s of system CPU time out of 23.6s of elapsed time. Curl on Debian/Bookworm did 203MB/s and took 10.7s of system CPU time out of 11.8s elapsed time. The difference is that curl was using 100KB read buffers and a mix of 12K and 4K write buffers while wget was using 8KB read buffers and 4KB write buffers. On Debian/Unstable wget 1.21.4 uses 64K read buffers and a mix of 4K and 60K write buffers and gets a speed of 208MB/s. As an experiment I changed the read buffer size for wget to 256K and that got the speed up to around 220MB/s but it was difficult to measure as the occasional packet loss slowed things down. The pattern of writing 4K and then writing the rest continued, it seemed related to fwrite() buffering. For anyone else who wants to experiment with the code, the wget code is simpler (due to less features) and the package builds a lot faster (due to fewer tests) so that s the one to work on. The client machine for these tests has a E5-2696 v3 CPU, this doesn t compare well to some of the recent AMD CPUs on single-core performance but is still a decently powerful system. Getting good performance at Gigabit speeds on an ARM or RISC-V system is probably going to be a lot harder than getting good performance at 2.5Gbit speeds on this system. In conclusion 2.5Gbit basically works apart from a problem with new kernels and a problem with the old version of wget. I expect that when Debian/Trixie is released (probably mid 2025) things will work well. For good transfer rates use wget version 1.21.4 or newer or use curl. As an aside I use a 1500byte MTU because I have some 100baseT systems on my LAN and the settings regarding TCP acceleration etc are all the defaults.

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