along those lines, I saw a video where a light strobing pattern from quake was still used in a section half-life alyx (with much better lighting lol)

the fact the quake engine’s internals still live on in so many modern games is quite a feat

Half life was built on quake 1 code and the codebase was never abandoned but they kept improving and improving on it, essentially all valve games have something inherited from it from TF2 to Dota to Alyx.

goodness that’s a lot of ads

this is probably one of the most promising candidates for an init system aside from systemd, right? I know openrc is still having trouble with parallel startups as a result of its design which is almost a must at this point. s6 is in the works from what I hear, but not configurable via simple config files yet.

The best challenger to systemd in terms of feature parity is probably dinit: https://davmac.org/projects/dinit/

Have a look at Chimera Linux if you want to give it a try: https://chimera-linux.org/

runit, s6, and OpenRC don't have the downsides of systemd, but they also only cover a subset of its features

> s6 is in the works from what I hear,

s6 is just a process supervisor meant work alongside an init. That said, an init was developed exclusively for s6, and it's ready according to the author's website. You could in theory setup a full Linux system with it.

The author is currently working on a user-friendly UI/frontend for the system. But that's not an essential component.

> but not configurable via simple config files yet.

I don't know if that's the goal of the project at all. Config files defeat the entire purpose of its design.

Systemd isn't merely an init system though, so I always find these comparisons unfair.

They should focus on one simple and good alternative to the startup-functionality for non-systemd infected systems though. Void has one advantage: they have many clever people, a bit like how Arch used to be before they succumbed to systemd (today's arch is different from when Judd was in charge).

I made https://github.com/andrewbaxter/puteron/ ! It's more similar to systemd in that it has a dependency graph, but I think it's simpler to use and better aligned with typical use cases. I haven't used it as a full init system though, only on top of systemd (same as I've seen runit used).

dinit is, imo, the one I'd pick. It's focused but it has dependencies and the services are defined by a DSL rather than startup scripts.

Having said that, I haven't used runit and from the look of it, it's a big improvement over SystemV at the very least.

What setting is there to make the tabs look better?

it’s a bit baroque but I use strace personally

it’s the current meaning he’s reciting he’s just adding etymological context

got any tips on what to look for on how obama bumbled obamacare? not too familiar on the subject myself

Despite his public persona, I read recently Obama is actually quite aloof and didnt have the patience to charm the politicians in person.

Oh, yeah, Obama being aloof was why the white men who questioned his citizenship openly - who are now entirely complicit in or supportive of an unaccountable gestapo randomly kidnapping people from the streets wth no ID or due process based on their skin tone - weren't "charmed" by him.

Dog whistles are supposed to be subtle.

Edward Kennedy died. Everyone forgets that.

that isn’t the fatal flaw. the fatal flaw is campaigning and staking your entire political career on something and the delivering something sooooo subpar.

the sad thing is, history will remember him as first black President and that’s really about it. and most of us cried watching that speech from lincoln park.

our current president is causing most of us to cry daily but will be remembered as one of the most influential presidents in the history of this country… sad, very sad, but all true

presidents don't pass legislation, and the original Obamacare was too radical even for all the Dem senators, not to mention needing some GOPs to get 60 votes

Maybe, if Obama had been as ruthless as Trump and used blatant lies and targeted attacks on senators to make them so fearful of re-election that they would play along, he might have gotten it passed, though probably not even then. Plus, as much as I wish we'd had the original Obamacare, I'd rather have a watered down version with balance of powers, than a tyrannical president who cowers the legislative branch into submission.

> original Obamacare was too radical even for all the Dem senators

This statement alone is the craziest thing about our country (I don't disagree...). However, if you make something a centerpiece of your entire political life and then you do not deliver you have effectively failed. I am sure if Obama had a do-over he would either get this done right or punt and focus his tenure on something he could have actually delivered...

I understand your point. I’m pretty sure Obama thought he could at least get it through the Dem Congress; it is a sad statement on our country’s political elite that even the Dems couldn’t agree to it. But I disagree that he made it the centerpiece of his entire political career. I also think it was a monumental positive step forward even if not the change I wanted. He has no control over what future Congresses might do to it.

if not Obamacare what else is his legacy?

Unfortunately, the world is a complicated place and each one of these languages have their own benefits and tradeoffs that suit themselves to one particular language or another (ask an ML scientist to switch to raw C), leading to all of these languages having a valid place in the pantheon of softwares (except maybe for js). Since debian is a pragmatic OS, it needs to adapt to solve for the real problem of being generally usable, and thus supporting all of these languages. Rewriting Everything in one language would be a massive pain and likely a massive waste of time and supporting an OS with less reputation and stable footing like Redox would almost if not more counterproductive as rewriting everything in debian from scratch (it’s a bit hyperbolic to state the goal is to Rewrite Everything in rust), so supporting the gradual replacement of some mission critical components like the apt parser or whatever they’re talking about is likely more realistic. Although an OS definitely shouldn’t “move fast and break things” (especially not one like Debian) I don’t think it’s too ridiculous to drop support for architectures that can’t support a language that was released almost a decade ago. Having a proven language (I think it’s safe to say rust is proven by now, right?) that is much less prone to self-combustion on modification than C, yet maintains a directly compiled nature as well as being to interface relatively well with normal C libraries in some standard applications is a pretty good value-deal proposition in my opinion.

pretty sure the base minecraft rendering engine is still using opengl, and most of the improvement mods also just use opengl so exposing this extension to them is probably important to a game where its 50 billion simple cubes being rendered

I mean Khronos put that in for a reason. If the drivers didn't get explicit information about the application being run, they would do silly heuristics like quake3 to squeeze out performance.

That comment about how /dev/zero used to be used to allocate anonymous pages, anyone have more info? All I could find was a wikipedia article [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/zero

That's it, there isn't any more to know. When the ancient unixes first began to support anonymous maps, they were just hacked into existing code with "zero" as the file, because the only through-line in the unix family history is that the API must be as hideous as it needs to be to accommodate lazy system authors.

Wait, by "allocating anonymous pages" we just mean memory allocation from the kernel that's used for implementing e.g malloc, right? Did memory mapped files come before memory allocation so that it "made sense" to implement memory allocation as "mapping in /dev/zero"?

Or was some amount heap memory always just mapped into the process in early UNIX so that the need to map more pages only appeared as programs started to demand more heap memory than whatever the standard amount was?

In those days malloc would use sbrk to allocate memory. And yes, mmap was designed to memory map files. Using it to allocate anonymous pages came later.

Oh, I had never even heard of those syscalls before! Thanks, that makes sense.

it wouldn't be too hard to look at the source for mmap and zero, but since the topic of this article is the removal of the mmap 'virtual function' in the file, that would have been a pretty good place to throw a zero-page allocation