Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the justification for systemd. The only real argument I’ve seen is that it standardizes the process, but that could’ve been done as a spec where you define a common config format, lifecycle, etc., and then keep the actual utilities decoupled from each other, but behaving in a uniform way.
Piranesi is one of the most unique books I’ve read, and I really love the writing style in it which really sucks you into the world.
I’m currently reading The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle and The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales. A couple of my favorite books are I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter and The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke.
I thought it was interesting conceptually even if light on details. In the west, most application for AI has been in the realm for content generation like making images, documents, writing code. Meanwhile, in China AI systems are used for stuff like monitoring traffic systems, maintaining high speed rail networks, and other types of dynamic systems management. I haven’t really heard much about AI being applied in this way in western countries, and it seems like a far more practical use to me.
My point is that systemd did not have to be built at all. It’s an abomination that goes directly against the original philosophy of Linux creating a monolithic monstrosity to replace individual and composable programs that used to be the way init works. Now, everything is tied to it and it’s become like a cancer in a linux system that’s inoperable. The whole system-id problem is just one example of why this is a terrible design.
for most desktop users, not persisting /etc/machine-id is usually fine, but there are some specific scenarios where it can cause issues. Systemd uses machine-id to tag log entries. If it changes, you might lose the ability to correlate logs across boot sessions in journalctl. This is mostly an annoyance for debugging rather than a functional problem. A few NixOS modules like services.openssh or certain mail servers use machine-id for generating default host keys or identifiers. Changing it might cause warnings on first boot after a change, but usually nothing breaks since they fall back to other identifiers.
Not really, China has been experimenting with a number of different approaches using analog neural circuits
LLMs are just one branch of a much wider field of AI research, and analog circuits that deal with flows instead of discrete values tend to be more efficient for modelling dynamic systems such as traffic flows.
The problem with machine-id specifically is that it’s become a standard way for the browser to identify itself. There obviously other ways you can be tracked, but this is a very low bar and a common way of sites tracking people.
yeah that’s not what the article actually says, but I can see how westerners living under oppressive regimes might start projecting
Systemd was designed long after a lot of these security practices and problems with tracking were well understood. There’s very little excuse for it doing a lot of the things it does. Systemd is literally re-architecting how Linux was meant to work originally, and for the worse. I get the impression you’re not actually familiar with the history of Linux or Unix philosophy in general.
Having to put everything into containers is really just a work around bad architecture that keeps being pushed in the Linux world. Containers are useful, and probably the only way to actually keep apps from having too much access to the system at this point, but I don’t see why bad architecture should be accepted and then have to be worked around.
Browsers aren’t just apps, they’re effectively platforms which run all kinds of apps you end up accessing online when you visit sites. Since the browser leaks the id to these apps, you’re effectively trusting the apps. Sure, you could run your browser in a VM or whatever, but that’s missing the point entirely. The real question is why your machine needs to have a unique identifier, and why the fuck it’s baked into functionality of systemd which is now replacing the traditional tool chain with a monolith.
And yes, I’m fully aware of other metadata that the browser leaks, and the fact that people are just starting to talk about that is also a problem. Running with Js disabled or putting a browser in a VM, is not really a solution for vast majority of people. The issue is that we have systems that are designed to enable tracking by default, and you have to jump through hoops to get around that. Telling people here are the hoops isn’t really helpful.
The browser itself is one of the biggest vectors of attacks here. Both Chrome and Firefox indirectly via libdbus, read your machine-id. Firefox shares browsing data and other unique info with ‘with partners, service providers, suppliers and contractors’ including Cloudflare and Google.
looks like somebody just decided they want to be on a list of targets for a nuclear strike
It’s an interesting social phenomenon how most people tend to gravitate towards whatever style happens to be dominant at the time. And it’s not that certain ones are inherently better than others as we see styles cycle over time.
seems like it
It’s really hard to take you seriously when you start making false equivalences like that.
you can really tell when they start projecting there 🤣
I’m not the one criticising China and Russia that they’re not doing enough, you are.
Yup, American empire is collapsing and we’re going to be living in a whole different world going forward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urglg3WimHA