aard

joined 1 year ago
[–] aard@kyu.de 49 points 3 days ago (3 children)

The main thing rubbing me wrong is forcing to support the parents - parents decide to have a child, so they do owe the child support during its live. The child didn't have a choice in this, and therefore owes the parents nothing. Now if the parents were decent people there's a high chance the kids want to help out because of that - and that's a perfectly good thing to do. But there should not be a forced obligation by society.

[–] aard@kyu.de 2 points 5 days ago

I think only one is currently still working in the company - but they do own it via a bunch of "Stiftungen". IIRC that construct was selected back then to make sure that spoiled brats can't fuck it up eventually.

[–] aard@kyu.de 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

You're joking, but quite possibly he'd not even want to buy the one.

The owner family is very reclusive after a kidnapping in the 70s - but we know at least that the founders were living relatively frugal.

Ownership of Aldi is by a handful of "stiftungen" - and one of the more recent judicial squabbles in the family were of one side accusing the other trying to pull more money out of Aldi than necessary to live a non frugal livestyle.

Don't get me wrong - they're billonaires, though probably quite limited liquid assets. But based on their behaviour they have a good chance to survive the revolution.

[–] aard@kyu.de 8 points 6 days ago

Funny thing is that the only reason I've found *arrs a few years ago was Netflix deciding to be stupid, making me look at how I can manage my local library better nowadays.

[–] aard@kyu.de 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it's a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That's not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.

[–] aard@kyu.de 2 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I've been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I'm running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it's annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn't working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that'll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you're in a world of pain.

[–] aard@kyu.de 5 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it's a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than "1080p on a 14 inch display"). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I'd prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.

But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It's almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they're all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can't really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can't really think about battery life with intels space heaters.

It's especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.

[–] aard@kyu.de 4 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Windows 11 has pretty good x86 emulation, both 32 and 64bit - imo better than what macos does with rosetta. Windows 10 for arm is just a pretty broken tech preview, though.

[–] aard@kyu.de 8 points 6 days ago (7 children)

One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that's only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.

[–] aard@kyu.de 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At least she didn't mix it up with a real gun, like that german police officer.

[–] aard@kyu.de 10 points 2 weeks ago

Helsinki is getting out of the "burning stuff to make electricity" business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there's the trend to move away from burning stuff.

[–] aard@kyu.de 26 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

The problem is - is it just a mass storage device? Or is it maybe also a USB keyboard that will try to enter some payload? Or maybe it even contains a radio, and can communicate with an attacker nearby?

You can't tell from the outside which protocols a USB device implements.

You can fit all of that functionality into the space of a USB-A plug - so if it is a thumbdrive you have way more space to work with than you ever need.

At minimum restrict your computer to only loading mass storage drivers - but as you quite likely habe USB input devices it is just a lot easier to investigate such a device on something like a raspberry pi.

 

I recently had to add a Mac to my zoo of hardware I'm trying to do productive work on - which prompted me to clean up and document my environment variable importer, which had grown to platform specific functions with lots of code duplication.

On both Windows and MacOS I have properly configured shells with all relevant variables - so it makes sense to query them, instead of duplicating the logic how they create that configuration into Emacs.

On Linux that'd have worked too, but I also have the relevant variables in the systemd user session, and querying that is a tiny bit faster than launching a shell.

 

I'm currently in the process of taking over as maintainer for the emacs-keybindings addon for Firefox.

I've just published the first update in years, with changes including:

  • tested on Windows and Linux now
  • some functionality is now configurable: debug logging, custom new tab page, experimental features, modifier-less high level bindings
  • all keybindings are listed in the options settings page
  • M- keybindings are now also reachable via ESC
  • M-< and M-> was added for scrolling to top/bottom
  • introducing prefix key, currently only used for opening/closing of windows (C-u C-x C-f or C-u C-k)
  • search is introduced as experimental feature - currently it just highlights all matches
  • the extension now registers as browser action in preparation for additional features

Unfortunately a lot of things that used to work with the old XUL plugins few years back just don't work with the new APIs - and Firefox developers have been sitting on relevant bugs for 8 years or more without anything happening now - so this is probably close to the best we can have for now. In combination with setting editing keybindings either via Gnome settings or AHK it makes browsing almost bearable again.

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