My fn2-# keys are the F# keys, it’s not too bad, even F11 and F12 are just the next two keys to the right of 0

So, you can get a mini keypad to go with your mini keyboard and that mini keypad can have programmable keys…

Or, you could just designate some keys on your 67% to be rotatably programmable.

My 60% keyboard has fn1 and fn2 keys, so I have done things like fn1-Esc = ` and fn2-Esc = ~ you can fn up your whole numeric row for whatever you usually need.

It all depends on how “forced” you want to be.

Generally, in Linux, if you’ve installed it, you have the power to uninstall it. Once your lockout gets put in effect, you can boot from USB, mount the hard drive, modify the files necessary to bypass your lockout, then reboot and proceed as if your lockout didn’t exist.

Given that perspective: wouldn’t a nag reminder popping over your screen that you actually pay attention to be better than “locking your account” with locks so easily picked?

I’m kind of over the recommendation system infinite library phase of my music listening. With 10,000+ songs in my library, I’m happy enough to hear an “old favorite” a couple of times a year, and by the time all those old favorites have played, 6+ months has gone by, so…

a recommendation system which does not depend on these systems, but the difficult part is to get the data to build it.

Acousticbrainz / Essentia can be the basis for that, or at least good enough for me to sort out the Metallica from the Enya and play the right mood at the right time from my collection of eclectica.

Locally stored .mp3 files for the win… all kinds of ways to legally obtain those. You have inspired me to try again to code up my ultimate robo-DJ… we’ll see how far it gets this time.

Best of luck with the YouTube interfaces - anything I have coded to them dies within a year or less due to them changing the rules.

On the flipside: awesome app, probably worth the effort to keep whacking the moles as they come up. Good job so far.

It’s actually quite a lot more than a bit more secure. Think of it as the difference between traversing no-mans land on a bicycle (current systems) vs in an armored personnel carrier with armor thick enough to stop EVERYTHING that the other side can throw at it. Sure, you could just open the door of the APC and take a hit, but if you don’t do that, you’re pretty safe.

I do not understand why these two things make their users so enthusiastic

Are you trying to think logically about that question? Because that would be a huge mistake.

flatpak, which is something which would really get to my nerves.

Yeah, not my favorite either. A BIG part of why I’m not loving the majority of the immutable systems I have investigated is because they all seem to heavily lean on tech like flatpak, snaps, etc. and there are valid logical reasons for that, but I’d really rather not go there…

Everything is possible. The point of immutability is the ability to restore to “factory fresh” state with a power cycle.

In theory, the data section is treated as data only, not executable. Software (games) can, and will, improperly store and execute code there, but at least they can be identified when they do and disabled/removed without breaking the underlying system.

easily solved by not giving them root access.

Root vs non-root is, in a nutshell, a tangled mess with millions of opportunities for “oops, didn’t think of that” situations: https://www.cve.org/downloads

Immutable keeps the legacy system confituration basically unchanged, but also restores it “from ROM” every time you power on. (not real ROM, but effectively.) In an immutable system, the attack surface is dramatically reduced, and much more diverse among systems than with a mutable OS.

Immutable means: every time you power it on, it’s the same.

So, if you get infected by a virus, power cycle and it’s like it never happened.

That, like everything you read on the internet, is a gross oversimplification, caveats apply, etc. etc. but for the most part, that’s what immutable means: the running system has no ability to persist changes (except in very specific, controlled, secure, easier to protect circumstances…)

It’s the kind of thing they should have developed to release-ready state 20 years ago - when hard drives were already absurdly large vs needs of the OS and data.

I believe it’s plug and play.

Don’t be so sure… I work for “megacorp” and about a year ago word came from on-high: “thou shalt not C (or C++, not that they know the difference) anymore. We are in mortal fear of embarassment that we allowed a mistake to be made that our all seeing oversight should have prevented by mandating the use of safe tools.”

Well, academic exercises for grades, I’d call Rust students.

Throw away programs people do for fun, I’d call Rust hobbyists.

Pretty much anyone else, doing it for money (a living: roof over head, food on table), or open source contribution - I think they qualify.

Except that C++ libraries often make the end result run slower, instead of the Python way where “native” Python runs at a glacial pace compared to its library calls.

What percentage of Rust programmers contribute to the Linux kernel?

I’ve worked at plenty of companies that no longer exist, and startups that “made it big,” and big companies that lumber along… how good their programming practices were, how well thier software performed, has just about zero correlation with how well they do in business.

As you point out: different tools are more/less appropriate for different applications. Rust has good overlap with C and C++ places, and in kernel land it’s subbing for C.

I’ve never tinkered in kernel space much - repaired a few OpenGL drivers because nobody else would step up and do it, but I usually stay in the higher abstraction levels. What do kernel people think of libraries like GLib?

The various linkers do make a difference, but all of them choke, eventually, when individual files get too massive.

100k loc without a reasonable architecture is… problematic.

I have run into problems with C++ linker/optimizers which will choke on big (50k loc) .cpp files which are auto-generated from definitions, they get slow like that, build times around 20 minutes for the worst of them. Keep the files more like 10k loc and down if you don’t want this kind of issue.

sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you’re happy with and that’s stable.

Or, you can modularize your architecture before you start implementation…

Do you even write requirements ahead of the code, bro?