First I saw that it's written in Perl. Then I realized that the last release was 11 years ago and that the repository domains are hardcoded in the one-file script.
The search APIs are separate from the repository URLs, and the different distros' APIs need to be parsed in different ways. And before you ask, the search APIs have to be separate from the repositories, if you don't want to waste disk, network, and time keeping hundreds of local index files up-to-date every week.
They can't just be "configured" by changing a URL. I guess maybe you could self-host the search page for some of the distros, and reuse the parser, but are people really doing that? Otherwise, you'd have to write new code to parse the results, at which point you might as well soft-fork the script anyway.
> Generally I advice against hard doing stuff that changes often and may need to be adjusted for different users or organizations.
YAGNI. And if your org does need it for some reason, you're probably better off running something specifically tailored for your own needs instead of whatever implementation makes it in.
The whole script's only 1300 lines. Would adding spending 150 lines on configuration and littering the user's dotfiles be worth it? Now what happens if the configuration's missing/corrupted? When you update the script, do you keep the old dotfile that might be using a deprecated API, or do you replace the old configuration and clobber any customization the user's done? Oops, there go another 1,000 lines, on edge cases, option flags, conf merging, warning messages... And good luck getting bug reporters to explain their configuration changes!
Also, this stuff doesn't "change often". The distros literally can't change it often, because doing so might break LTS stability. I know it's fun to point out perceived flaws in other people's work, but in this case, the URLs are tightly bound to the parsing logic, which is the right place to put them IMO.
The URL to search for packages in Ubuntu for example hasn't changed to my knowledge. Are you assuming it's only looking for packages in releases that were current at the time?
Data centres are actually prohibited from using consumer level GPUs via license restrictions. The GPUs they use are largely SXM (server connector) and if you did somehow get one of the PCIe variants (with enormous power and cooling needs) most don't even support gaming APIs.
Yeah, it used to be true that server GPUs at least somewhat resembled their gaming counterparts (i.e. Nvidia Tesla server components from 12+ years ago); they were still PCIe cards, just with server-optimized coolers, and fundamentally shared the same dies that the gaming and professional cards used.
That stopped being true many years ago though, and the divergence has only accelerated with the advent of AI datacenter usage. The form factor is now fundamentally different (SXM instead of PCIe); you can adapt an SXM card to PCIe with some effort [1], but that may not even be worthwhile because 1. the power and cooling requirements for the SXM cards are radically different than a desktop part and more importantly 2. the dies are no longer even close to being the same. IIRC, Blackwell AI chips straight up don't have rasterization hardware onboard at all; internally they look like a moderate number of general SMs attached to a huge number of tensor core. Modern AI GPUs are fundamentally optimized for, well, mat-mults, which is not at all what you want for gaming or really any non-AI application.
Why would it need to make money, it's just a registry of information and a small about page with a list of entries. It probably runs on sqlite on a single $5 VM. Or a single db.
It looks like DNS is just shared CloudDNS, and email is limited. From the FAQ:
How reliable is dot.bs DNS hosting?
dot.bs is backed by ClouDNS. ClouDNS serves over two billion DNS queries per day, so I can confidently say your DNS is in good hands.
Do I really get free email?
Yes! In order to make this possible, there are some limitations.
A maximum of 5 email accounts per domain (unlimited domains)
A maximum of 5 outgoing emails per hour, per account (to prevent spammers)
A maximum of 75 MB storage per account
If these limits are a problem for you, please reach out and we can figure something out.
A gross mischaracterization of the author's point (the word "type" doesn't even appear in the article). The author focuses on the cost of interpreted languages, which he describes as "memory hungry" and computationally expensive.
There are many young, economically disenfranchised Americans that see the military as a way out of poverty. The military understands this and positions recruitment centers in poorer neighborhoods.
I'm in the same position and understand your complaints about the lack of uniformity across applications in Linux DEs. But I use the Linux desktop as a daily driver because I absolutely despise the lack of customization in macOS, especially as it relates to "virtual workspaces" or "virtual desktops." In Linux, I can have multiple different desktops, each named intuitively, and each with its own set of applications. In macOS, I can't even _name_ the virtual desktops. What's more absurd is the "logic" around when an application has focus when it's minimized, and how its window behaves when you Cmd-Tab to it. Utterly exasperating that Apple, a company who has long prided itself on HCI, falls so far short of the mark in intuitive interface behavior.
”Intuitive” means very different things to different people.
Personally I don’t see anything intuitive about having named workspaces. In my desktop where I have a 42” screen I use pop shell with tiling and unnamed workspaces. On the MacBook I’ll just use fullscreen and exposé. Even though I’ve used the concept for decades I still do not find floating windows to be ”intuitive” except for dialog and similar transient UI.
Fixed it with the help of claude, it quickly helped me diagnose the issue and fix it. The drivers for the discrete nvidia graphics card had suspend disabled. Enabling it enabled automatic suspend when closing the lid.
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